to go down to the ground in front of someone as an act of reverence: to prostrate oneself before a god, an image, or a superior
This word belongs almost entirely to one story. Eleven of its twelve appearances stand in Daniel 3, the account of the giant gold statue on the plain of Dura, and the twelfth is in the scene just before it. What the word names is a body doing something rather than a heart feeling something: going all the way down in front of someone and staying there.
Most often it arrives right after the verb for falling down, so the picture comes in two beats: drop to the ground, then lie there in reverence. The royal decree commands both beats together, the officials repeat both when they report the three Jewish men, and the men themselves deny both when they answer the king. That pairing is why the whole story can hinge on this word: a plain full of people can be watched doing it, and three men can be seen not doing it.
Daniel also keeps this word carefully apart from the verb for rendering religious service (פְּלַח). Four times the two stand side by side, and the men refuse both: they will not serve the king's gods, and they will not go down before his statue. Service is the standing allegiance; this word is the single visible act that would announce it.
Three different things receive the act:
- the gold statue Nebuchadnezzar set up, which the whole empire is ordered to honor
- any god at all, in the king's closing praise of the men who refused him
- Daniel himself, when the king goes face down before the man who read his dream
Nuances
Whether Nebuchadnezzar's prostration before Daniel in Daniel 2:46, accompanied by a grain offering and incense, is extravagant court homage paid to a human dignitary or cultic honor directed at Daniel himself.
- contestedCourt homage of a kind a Babylonian or Persian court could pay to a human superior; the offering language is narrative hyperbole serving the point that the king has recognized the God who gave Daniel the dream.; John Goldingay, Daniel (Word Biblical Commentary 30), on Daniel 2:46
- contestedGenuine cultic honor rendered to Daniel, which the narrative reports without rebuke because in this scene the pagan king's act functions as an acknowledgement of Daniel's God.; John J. Collins, Daniel (Hermeneia), on Daniel 2:46; James A. Montgomery, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Book of Daniel (International Critical Commentary), on Daniel 2:46