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243 execution. But then Daniel was brought before the king, and invoked the powers of the "God in heaven who reveals mys- teries." As the executioner of the others was told to halt, Daniel first guessed the dream and then solved its meaning. "In your vision," he told the king, "you saw a very large statue, exceedingly bright, terrifying in appearance, standing before thee." The statue's head was made of gold, its chest and arms of silver, its belly and thighs of bronze, the legs of iron, the feet part iron and part clay. Then a stone that no hand held appeared and smote the statue to pieces; the pieces turned to chaff that was carried by a wind into oblivion; and the stone turned into a great mountain. "This is the dream," Daniel said, and here is its meaning: The statue represents the great Babylon; the golden head is Nebuchadnezzar; after him there shall be three lesser kings; and in the end it will all be swept away like chaff, and a new king from elsewhere shall rise to greatness. Nebuchadnezzar then had a second dream. He called in the seers, including Daniel. In "visions as he lay in bed," the king said, he saw a tall tree that kept growing until it reached the heavens; it was a fruitful and shade-giving tree. Suddenly, In the vision, at the head of my bed, a Watcher, a Holy One, came down from heaven. He cried out aloud, saying: "Cut down the tree and lop off its branches, strip off its leaves and scatter its fruit, let the beasts flee its shade and the birds its branches; but leave in the ground its stump and roots." And Daniel told the king that the tree was he, Nebuchad- nezzar; and the vision was an oracle of things to come—the end of Nebuchadnezzar, doomed to lose his mind and roam the fields like windblown leaves and eat like the beasts. Tradi- tion holds that Nebuchadnezzar indeed went mad, dying seven years after that oracle dream (in 562 B.C.). As predicted, his three successors were short-lived kings, demised and killed in a series of rebellions. Into the breach stepped the High Priestess of the temple of Sin in Harran; Royal Dreams, Fateful Oracles