bronze: the hard reddish metal, copper or the copper and tin mixture cast from it
This is the ordinary Aramaic word for bronze, and for the copper that bronze is made from. Ancient writers did not always keep the two apart, and the word covers both: the reddish base metal, and the harder mixture of copper and tin that fittings, bands, and cast objects were made of. It is the same word as the Hebrew term for bronze (נְחֹשֶׁת), and every one of its appearances falls inside the Aramaic chapters of Daniel.
Most of them come in a running list of materials ranked from most valuable to least: gold, then silver, then bronze, then iron, and last of all baked clay. Bronze sits third. It is the belly and thighs of the huge statue in the king's dream, and it is one of the metals shattered when a stone strikes that statue and brings it down. The same metal turns up in three other settings in the book:
- A band of iron and bronze left around the stump of the felled tree.
- The claws of the fourth beast, tearing whatever its iron teeth do not crush.
- The lifeless materials Babylon's rulers toasted as gods: gold, silver, bronze, iron, wood, and stone.
Once the word stands for a whole empire rather than for metal you could hold. A third kingdom, the interpretation says, will be "of bronze" and will rule the whole earth. Even there the picture works because of what bronze actually is, a strong and useful metal that is still worth less than the silver and gold named ahead of it. The word never stops meaning the metal; Daniel simply builds his images out of it, the way he does with iron (פַּרְזֶל) and clay.