Feet of Clay

Thou, O king, sawest, and behold a great image. This great image, whose brightness was excellent, stood before thee; and the form thereof was terrible.
This image's head was of fine gold, his breast and his arms of silver, his belly and his thighs of brass,
His legs of iron, his feet part of iron and part of clay.

-- Daniel 2: 31-33 (KJV)

Reminiscent at turns of the dream-interpreting Joseph and of the visionary prophet Ezekiel, Daniel is a learned Jewish exile at the court of the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar. As we join the story, Nebuchadnezzar has been having strange and troubling dreams, which stymie his court astrologers and sorcerers -- not least because he refuses to tell them what actually goes on in the land of Nod. The enraged king orders that all his so-called wise men be torn into pieces.

But Daniel, taking pity on them and fearing for his own skin, resolves to crack Nebuchadnezzar's riddle. On cue, God sends Daniel a vision by night, which he relays to the king. Declaring that the dreams are images of "what shall come to pass" (2: 29), Daniel describes what Nebuchadnezzar saw: a towering figure with a golden head, a silver torso, a brass midsection, iron legs, and "feet part of iron and part of clay." Somehow, a stone cut from a mountain by no visible hand is hurled at the grotesque figure, which is shattered, and its fragments scattered by the wind. Thereupon the stone grew into a new mountain, so great that it "filled [covered] the whole earth" (verse 35).

Daniel then offers the stunned monarch his interpretation: by God's will, Nebuchadnezzar has become a "king of kings" over a vast territory, and Babylon is represented in the dream-figure's golden head. Each of the other metal sections, in descending order, represents a succeeding and weaker kingdom -- after Babylon, scholars surmise, the Median, Persian, and Macedonian empires. The fourth kingdom, represented as iron legs, will break the whole world into pieces and subdue it -- not too far from what Alexander the Great actually did.

But this last kingdom will eventually be divided, as the figure's feet are into iron and clay, partly strong and partly weak, constitutionally unstable. (The Macedonian empire did come apart at the seams, and Daniel may be thinking in particular of its Egyptian and Syrian components.) It is in the era of this divided kingdom, Daniel predicts, that God shall "set up a kingdom, which shall never be destroyed," though it will itself shatter all other kingdoms (verse 44). This is the great stone in the dream, which grows into a worldwide mountain, and which represents an impending utopia.

Daniel's virtuoso exposition earns him a high government position, and it earned the phrase "feet of clay" an enduring place in English. Of course, our catchphrase distorts Daniel's text, where the colossus has feet "part of iron and part of clay," though it does preserve the basic meaning, namely "apparently strong in substance but weak in foundation." The phrase is most often applied to a seemingly admirable person with a crippling character flaw or moral weakness. "Feet of clay" in this metaphorical sense was first used by Lord Byron in his "Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte" (1814), and it was picked up by a string of notable literary figures. Call the Oxford English Dictionary if you ever find a reference to "feet of iron."

 
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Michael Macrone is Associate Site Producer of GraceCom and the author of nine books on language, literature, and ideas, including the best-selling Brush Up Your Shakespeare!