a satrap: the ruler the Persian king set over one of the empire's great regions, ranked above its governors and answerable to the king himself
The word is not native Aramaic at all. It is a Persian title taken over whole while the Persian Empire ruled, and behind it stands a phrase meaning something like "protector of the realm." A satrap held one of the empire's great regions on the king's behalf. The title is never used of an Israelite office, and it drops out of Jewish Aramaic writing entirely once the empire falls, which shows how tightly it belonged to that one world.
In Daniel the word always appears in the plural, and it always arrives at the head of a ranked list of offices:
- the satraps, set over whole regions of the empire
- the prefects (סְגַן) and the governors (פֶּחָה) under them
- the counselors, treasurers, judges and magistrates who staffed the courts
Daniel 6 adds a rank above them as well: three chief ministers (סָרֵךְ) to whom the satraps had to give account, so that the king should lose nothing.
What these men actually do surfaces in the scenes rather than in the word itself. They are summoned from across the provinces to the dedication of the golden image and stand before it; they crowd around afterward to see that the fire has not touched the three men who refused to bow. Under Darius they run the provinces, resent the foreigner promoted over them, hunt for a charge against him, and press the king into the decree that puts Daniel in the lions' pit. The title carries only the standing; the story supplies the character.
The same borrowed word runs through Ezra and Esther in its Hebrew spelling (אֲחַשְׁדַּרְפַּן), where satraps receive the king's written orders for a hundred and twenty seven provinces.
What the figure of a hundred and twenty satraps in this verse describes, given that the classical sources count roughly twenty to thirty great provinces in the Persian Empire.
- majorityThe number is schematic, a round figure chosen for the story rather than an administrative count, and it matches no attested arrangement of the Persian Empire; the Old Greek version of the chapter knows a simpler story with only Daniel's two rivals in view, which suggests the hundred and twenty are a later expansion.; John J. Collins, Daniel, Hermeneia (Fortress, 1993), 263-266; Louis F. Hartman and Alexander A. Di Lella, The Book of Daniel, Anchor Bible 23 (Doubleday, 1978), 197-198; Carol A. Newsom with Brennan W. Breed, Daniel: A Commentary, OTL (Westminster John Knox, 2014), 185-189
- minorityThe title was applied at several levels of the Persian administration and provincial subdivisions shifted over time, so a count of a hundred and twenty lower officials under a ruler set over Babylonia alone belongs to a different administrative tier than the twenty great satrapies of the classical historians and need not conflict with them.; John C. Whitcomb, Darius the Mede (Eerdmans, 1959); Stephen R. Miller, Daniel, NAC (Broadman and Holman, 1994); Bruno Jacobs, "Achaemenid Satrapies," in Encyclopaedia Iranica (2006)
Disputed
What the presence of Persian administrative titles such as this one in Daniel implies about when the book was written, since the word is put in the mouth of a Babylonian king who ruled before Persia existed as an empire.
- majorityThe stacked titles are a stereotyped literary inventory drawn from Persian administrative vocabulary, not a roster of Nebuchadnezzar's Babylonian officials, who would have carried Akkadian titles; the loanwords are compatible with a sixth-century date but do not require it, since borrowing on this scale takes time, and together with the rest of the evidence they point to a book that reached its final form much later.; James A. Montgomery, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Book of Daniel, ICC (T&T Clark, 1927), 197-202; John J. Collins, Daniel, Hermeneia (Fortress, 1993), 17-19, 180-186; Louis F. Hartman and Alexander A. Di Lella, The Book of Daniel, Anchor Bible 23 (Doubleday, 1978), 159, 196-198; Carol A. Newsom with Brennan W. Breed, Daniel: A Commentary, OTL (Westminster John Knox, 2014), 20-26, 105-115
- minorityThe Persian words in Daniel are all in their older Persian forms, with none of the later forms that came into use from about 300 BCE onward, and they are no more numerous than in Aramaic documents of the fifth century; that fits a writer of the Persian period, and a man who lived on into Persian rule would naturally use the administrative vocabulary his readers knew.; K. A. Kitchen, "The Aramaic of Daniel," in D. J. Wiseman, ed., Notes on Some Problems in the Book of Daniel (Tyndale, 1965), 31-79; Edward J. Young, The Prophecy of Daniel (Eerdmans, 1949); Andrew E. Steinmann, Daniel, Concordia Commentary (Concordia, 2008)