Plain of Dura

Plain of Dura is the open ground in the province of Babylon where King Nebuchadnezzar II set up an image of gold sixty cubits high and six cubits broad, roughly 27 metres by 2.7 metres (Daniel 3:1). The name occurs only in that verse. The Aramaic form Dura is generally traced to the Akkadian word duru, "wall" or "walled enclosure", a common element in Mesopotamian place names, and the Old Greek (Septuagint) version rendered it with a word meaning an enclosed area, while Theodotion's Greek version transliterated it as Deeira. The plain is the stage for the account of the fiery furnace rather than a town in its own right, and no ancient source outside Daniel refers to this plain by that name.

Biblical Account

Nebuchadnezzar summoned the satraps, prefects, governors, counselors, treasurers, justices, magistrates and every provincial official to the dedication of the image, and they stood before it on the plain (Daniel 3:2-3). A herald commanded all peoples, nations and languages to fall down and worship when the horn, pipe, lyre, trigon, harp and bagpipe sounded, on pain of being thrown into a burning fiery furnace (Daniel 3:4-6). Certain Chaldeans then accused Shadrach, Meshach (Mishael) and Abednego, whom the king had set over the affairs of the province of Babylon, of refusing to serve his gods or worship the image (Daniel 3:8-12). Their answer to the king, their deliverance from the furnace and their promotion in the province fill the rest of the chapter (Daniel 3:16-30). The chapter gives no year; the events fall somewhere within Nebuchadnezzar's reign, 605 to 562 BC.

Geography and Identification

The text places the plain "in the province of Babylon" (Daniel 3:1), which sets it in the Babylonian homeland rather than in a distant dependency. Beyond that the location is uncertain, and the identification is debated among biblical archaeologists and commentators. Three lines of proposal have been made. The first, and the most often repeated, comes from the French Assyriologist Jules Oppert, who during the French expedition to Mesopotamia in the early 1850s recorded a small stream called the Dura joining the Euphrates some 6 or 7 miles below Babylon, and a group of mounds named Tulul Dura ("mounds of Dura") about 12 miles south southeast of modern Hillah. One of these mounds, el Mokhattat, is a square mass of unbaked brick, reported as about 14 metres (45 feet) on each side and 6 metres (20 feet) high, which Oppert took to be the pedestal of the golden image itself. Nothing beyond the name and the platform ties the mound to Nebuchadnezzar's dedication, so the claim about the image's base is speculative even if the general district is possible. A second proposal reads Dura not as a separate locality but as the duru, the great outer rampart, of Babylon itself, so that the "plain of Dura" would be flat ground enclosed by or lying beside the city wall; on this view the assembled officials stood close to the capital. A third line looks to towns of similar name elsewhere in Babylonia: Theodotion's Greek version wrote Deeira, apparently identifying the plain with the Babylonian town Der (also written Deru or Dur ili) toward the Elamite frontier, and a town Duru near Erech has also been suggested; both lie well away from Babylon, and commentators generally set them aside because the text keeps the scene within the province of Babylon. Places named Dura near Carchemish and near Apollonia beyond the Tigris, mentioned by the Greek historian Polybius, are ruled out as lying outside the province of Babylon or too far from the capital.

Archaeology

The sources consulted here report no excavation of Tulul Dura beyond Oppert's survey, and the pedestal claim remains unverified. What the archaeology of Babylon does supply is context: Nebuchadnezzar's stamped bricks, building inscriptions and excavated palace and processional way show a king who built and dedicated monuments on a large scale, which is the setting the dedication in Daniel 3 assumes.

Theological Significance

The plain is the setting in which royal power demanded worship and three exiles from Judah refused it in the open, before every rank of the Babylonian administration (Daniel 3:12). Their answer, that God is able to deliver but that they would not serve the image even if he did not (Daniel 3:17-18), and the king's own confession afterward that no other god can rescue in this way (Daniel 3:29), give the otherwise unremarkable plain its lasting importance.