Daniel 2:10-13

10-13. The magicians in utter desperation now appeal to the king’s sense of justice and to the lack of precedent, “forasmuch as no king, be he never so great and powerful” (R.V., margin) had ever demanded such a “hard thing,” which was absolutely impossible excepting to the highest deities, which have no intercourse with man. The king is, or pretends to be, very furious at this insinuation of injustice, and their confession of inability to meet the fair test proposed (note Daniel 2:5) and sends forth his edict of death against the entire order of “wise men,” to which order Daniel and his friends belonged (Daniel 2:13). So Herodotus says Astyages crucified the Magi who had advised him unwisely, interpreting wrongly the portents (128) which could only mean, he thought, either that the magicians were impostors, that they were willfully deceiving him, or else that they had lost the favor of their gods, and in either case they ought to die.