NOTES for Дан 6:18
What can and cannot a ruler do, even an absolute monarch, the head of a great power of his time? Reading some chapters from the Book of Daniel, it sometimes appears that he can do almost nothing. Or at least he cannot do the main thing: make the decision that in a concrete situation appears to him the only right one. So it is with Darius: he does not want Daniel's death. He would be glad to change the decision he had previously made and cancel the decree he himself had issued, but he is powerless to do this. The laws accepted in the Persian Empire were irrevocable, and even the king could do nothing about it.
It is hard today to say with certainty whether this was really so, or whether we have before us one of the many legends about the Persian Empire and its rulers. But in this case it is not important. However it may have been, the author of the book noticed one characteristic feature of the position of a ruler who stands at the head of any state living according to the laws of the untransformed world: he has no power over himself or over the situations in which he finds himself as ruler. The point here is not the sacred character of laws or authority, and not that, as the well-known saying has it, "the retinue makes the king."
Of course, one can speak in a certain sense and in certain epochs about the sacred character of laws, and the influence of a ruler's circle is a reality with which any ruler has to reckon. But both this and that, and much else that any ruler encounters, in the final analysis represent nothing other than what could be called the logic of power. Of course, much depends on the concrete person. And yet the authors of all biblical books are unanimous: there is no good power in the fallen world; there is only bad or very bad power. And not because all its representatives are necessarily and originally malicious, but because every state has always been and remains a machine, a mechanism that either functions according to its own laws or does not function at all. And the more complex and large-scale the mechanism, the more the evil in which, according to the Gospel, the world lies manifests itself in it.
For the author of the Books of Samuel, theocracy is better than monarchy, even an elective one, as it was in the days of Saul and David, not only because charismatic leaders guided by God then come to power, while in those same books real theocracy is described as an institution spiritually and politically ambiguous, but also, and perhaps even first of all, because it allows the formation of a state mechanism to be avoided.
Although, of course, in the fallen world even theocracy is no panacea. For both the prophets and the sages, the Torah is the best legislation of all possible, but even it will not make society ideal. It can make it only, in Plato's expression, "second after the best." And in an ordinary society, in a great empire, the ruler is sometimes left only to suffer pangs of conscience and the impossibility of helping the one whom he does not consider guilty at all. And only these pangs of conscience will he be able to present to God on the Day of Judgment as testimony of his best unrealized intentions.