The book of Daniel
The book of Daniel seems to have two sides: the first six chapters read like a great example of faith, while the other six are full of strange visions that have become the seedbed for a lot of strange theology. But the two halves are not as disconnected as they first appear.
A quick walk through
Let’s walk through it chapter by chapter.
Dan.1 describes Daniel and three “friends” arriving in Babel (it’s not clear whether they were friends before or simply became friends once they got there) and having to maintain their faith in an environment hostile to it.
Dan.2 gives Daniel’s interpretation of a dream the Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar, had: a statue representing a series of kingdoms, destroyed by a mysterious stone. We’ll come back to that.
Dan.3: the Babylonian king decides to build such a statue and forces everyone to worship it. Daniel’s three friends stay faithful and come through it.
Dan.4 is another dream interpretation, this one describing how the king’s pride humbles him into a beast, until he recognizes God as ruler of the whole world.
Dan.5: Nebuchadnezzar’s successor throws a feast and, in his pride, drinks from the goblets taken from the Jewish temple. A hand writes his judgment on the wall; that same night he is killed and his kingdom passes to the Persians. Like chapter 4, this is a story about pride and humiliation.
Dan.6: as in chapter 3, Daniel stays faithful, is sentenced to death — this time in the lions’ den — is protected by heaven, and is promoted in the new kingdom.
Dan.7 is the first of the “weird” chapters. Don’t worry, we’ll get to them properly. As in chapter 2, four beasts represent four successive kingdoms.
The chiasm
You may have noticed a chiasm here, linking chapters 2 and 7, 3 and 6, and 4 and 5 — each pair sharing a theme but with a deliberate twist. It is not only a matter of themes: chapters 2–7 are also exactly the Aramaic part of the book, which is written in Hebrew before and after.1
Chapters 2 and 7 both describe four kingdoms, but chapter 2 presents them in decreasing value, following one another until a mysterious stone destroys them all, while chapter 7 shows them as beasts that destroy each other, get subdued by the God of heaven, and are defined by their hostility toward God’s people.
Chapters 3 and 6 both describe a rescue from persecution, but the source of the threat is reversed: in chapter 3 it’s the ruler himself, forcing officials to worship idols, while in chapter 6 it’s the officials who trick the king into a decree that makes Daniel’s faith a crime. The two chapters even end differently — chapter 6 leaves the king vindicated as a good king, while chapter 3 sets up the former king’s humiliation in the chapter that follows.
Chapters 4 and 5 both turn on pride and humiliation, but with opposite outcomes. In chapter 4 the king is humbled all the way down to living like a beast because of his pride, yet he is restored once he gives glory to God. In chapter 5 the king is given the same warning but responds only by promoting Daniel — and he and his kingdom are destroyed that same night.
The pattern suggests these six chapters form the center of the book, with chapter 1 as introduction and chapters 8–12 as appendix. The pairing of chapters 2 and 7 in particular seems to carry special weight for how the rest of the book should be read.
The walk through continued
Dan.8 describes in broad strokes the fall of the Persian Empire to Alexander the Great, which ultimately leads to the reign of Antiochus IV Epiphanes — the Jewish experience of an Antichrist figure2 — and from there to the Maccabean War and Israel’s political independence. The 2300 mornings and evenings probably span the time from the desecration of the Temple by Antiochus on December 6, 167 BC to the fortification of the Temple Mount following the Temple’s rededication on January 31, 163 BC (or December 4, 164 BC, depending on how the dates are reckoned).
Dan.9 records Daniel’s prayer at the end of the seventy years of exile, and the answer he receives — the seventy weeks — and the mystery behind it: the complete deliverance of Israel, and with it the New Covenant, from all evil. We’ll study this chapter in more detail elsewhere.
Dan.10 prepares the ground for the final vision that comes in chapters 11 and 12.
Dan 11:1–35 is a section where commentators largely agree, because its connection to the history books is too strong to deny: it traces the time from the Persian kings of Daniel’s own day to the Jewish Antichrist figure, Antiochus IV. Epiphanes
Dan 11:36–45 seems to follow smoothly from the previous section, but it actually has no clear connection to historical events.3 Instead, it describes the powers and potentials behind this kind of king and kingship in general, similar to how Tyre is used elsewhere as a type rather than a strict historical reference.
Dan.12 closes the book with encouragement for the saints to persevere through all of this.
What’s the point?
Several dimensions of the story overlap here. There’s the story of Daniel and his friends’ faith and deliverance, which mirrors the larger story of Israel and the deliverance of their heirs. There’s the story of secular powers and their downfall — whether that’s the overthrow of the Babylonian king and his empire (the head of gold), the fall of all earthly kingdoms under God (chapters 2 and 7), or the more specific deliverance from the Antichrist figure Antiochus IV Epiphanes through the Maccabean War, which nonetheless leads to later subjugation under Rome. And beneath all of that runs the divine deliverance of the whole world and its empires, accomplished in God's mysterious way and lasting forever.
Together, these threads show how much weight rests on each person’s faith within the eternal destiny of the world. God works through the small, often hidden acts of individuals and, through them, brings forth a kingdom that cannot be beaten.
The chiasm of chapters 2–7 is A. Lenglet, “La structure littéraire de Daniel 2–7”, Biblica 53 (1972), 169–190; Goldingay, Daniel (WBC 30 rev.), p. 575, follows it and sets it beside the language boundary: Hebrew in 1–2:4a, Aramaic in 2:4b–7:28, Hebrew again in 8–12. The two divisions deliberately do not coincide, which is what puts chapter 7 at the centre of the book — it belongs to the first half by language and to the second by form. ↩︎
Beale, p. 566, puts it in Revelation’s own terms: the three and a half years in which Antiochus trampled the temple are the pattern behind the trampling of the outer court in Rev 11:2. Goldingay, Daniel (WBC 30 rev.), pp. 372–374, sets out how closely the small horn of Daniel 7 and 8 matches him. ↩︎
This is not only our reading. Goldingay, Daniel (WBC 30 rev.), p. 545, marks verse 40 as the turn “from quasi-prediction based on historical facts to actual prediction based on the Scriptures and on the pattern of earlier events”, and says plainly that the portrayal “does not correspond to actual events in the 160s” — not because the passage failed, but because “it is not the nature of biblical prophecy to give a literal account of events before they take place”. He reads the closing scenes as drawn from earlier Scripture: Nebuchadnezzar’s invasion, the prophecies of Egypt’s fall, the last battle at the centre of the world. Critical readers who take 11:40–45 as a prediction about Antiochus that did not come true as written are describing the same mismatch and explaining it differently. ↩︎