The four kingdoms in Daniel

The book of Daniel seems to be the source of many end-time interpretations. Let’s take a closer look at what this is all about, starting with the basics.

The four kingdoms

Chapters 2 and 7 of Daniel each give us a glimpse of four successive kingdoms — chapter 2 through the vision of a statue, chapter 7 through a set of beasts. Both chapters present the kingdoms as following one after another: chapter 2 does so explicitly, while chapter 7 shows it through the beasts conquering and replacing each other.

Chapter 2 gives us a clear starting point, since the first kingdom is Babel. Babel was destroyed by the Medo-Persian Empire. Many scholars count differently — Babel, Media, Persia, Greece — and end the series with the Greek king Antiochus IV.¹ This site counts Medo-Persia as one kingdom and Rome as the fourth, for reasons Daniel himself gives. Babel is given “to the Medes and Persians” (5:28), and the king rules by “the law of the Medes and Persians” (6:8). In chapter 8 a single ram with two horns stands for “the kings of Media and Persia”, followed by a goat that is Greece (8:20–21). History agrees: the two were already united before Babel fell. And the first readers of Daniel looked beyond Antiochus. Jesus still expects “the abomination that causes desolation” (Matt 24:15), and Revelation builds its beast, Rome in the first place, out of all four of Daniel’s.

The third kingdom is the Greek empire under Alexander the Great, who conquered the Medo-Persian Empire. After Alexander’s death this empire split into four, which were eventually absorbed into the fourth and final kingdom, Rome.

Chapter 7 paints the same picture through different imagery, beginning with Babel:

“And four great beasts came up out of the sea, different from one another. 4 The first was like a lion and had eagles’ wings. Then as I looked its wings were plucked off, and it was lifted up from the ground and made to stand on two feet like a man, and the mind of a man was given to it.”

Babel was symbolized by a lion in both statues and portraits, and Jeremiah likely draws on the same image when he describes the judgment of Edom in terms of a lion and eagle.

Next come the Persians:

“And behold, another beast, a second one, like a bear. It was raised up on one side. It had three ribs in its mouth between its teeth; and it was told, ‘Arise, devour much flesh.’”

The bear raised up on one side pictures the joint Median-Persian Empire, in which the Persian side was smaller at first but eventually took the lead. The three ribs, together with the command to “devour,” describe its three major conquests: Lydia (547 BC), Babel (539 BC), and Egypt (525 BC).

Then the Greeks:

“After this I looked, and behold, another, like a leopard, with four wings of a bird on its back. And the beast had four heads, and dominion was given to it.”

The leopard captures the rapid expansion of Alexander’s kingdom from Greece all the way to India in less than two decades. After his death, the kingdom split into four successor states — the four heads.

Finally, the Romans:

“After this I saw in the night visions, and behold, a fourth beast, terrifying and dreadful and exceedingly strong. It had great iron teeth; it devoured and broke in pieces and stamped what was left with its feet.”

Rome conquered the last of the Greek successor kingdoms and became the greatest empire yet, crushing everything with iron strength — the same iron that appears as the material of the fourth kingdom in chapter 2.

The end of the kingdoms

Both chapters end the same way: with a divine event. In chapter 2 it’s described as “a stone was cut out by no human hand, and it struck the image on its feet of iron and clay, and broke them in pieces" and “the stone that struck the image became a great mountain and filled the whole earth.”

This recalls the cornerstone identified elsewhere as Jesus Christ, who is the foundation of the Church. He was not made by “human hand,” and he became the ruler of the world, giving the church his authority to rule. Chapter 7 shows the same intervention from another angle: the Ancient of Days and the Son of Man overcome the kingdoms, and he sets up an eternal kingdom.

So who is this Son of Man? In Daniel’s own context he stands for the holy people of God: what is given to him is given to them.² But this finds its fulfillment in Jesus as true Israel, and it’s worth noting that Son of Man is the title he uses most for himself.

There is more

Chapters 2 and 7 clearly describe the same four kingdoms, ending in Rome at the time Jesus is born and conquers the empires on the cross. But a few details don’t quite fit that reading. Chapter 2 mentions further kingdoms represented by the feet of the statue. The stone in chapter 2 — Jesus’ first coming — didn’t destroy the whole statue at once, since Rome remained standing for more than 400 years afterward. The description of the fourth beast in chapter 7 doesn’t fully match Rome either: it’s called fearful and dreadful, different from all the beasts before it, and given ten horns, yet Rome wasn’t especially different from earlier empires in those respects, and the ten horns never map cleanly onto anything fixed in Roman history. And the scene of the Son of Man’s coming in chapter 7 reads like a final judgment, yet if this were simply Rome, not much would actually change once that judgment fell.

Each of these details has an answer, and together they show that the fourth kingdom is more than the Rome of the first century.

The feet of iron and clay. The statue does not get a fifth metal. The iron goes on, mixed and brittle. The fourth kingdom continues in a divided form: the same kind of power, in ever new states.

The stone that does not destroy at once. Daniel says the stone “became a great mountain and filled the whole earth”. It grows. The kingdom of God came with Jesus and has been growing since, while the statue is still standing. This is the “already and not yet” of the New Testament.

The fourth beast that is “different”. Daniel himself says that the first three beasts lose their rule but are given more time to live. The old empires live on inside the next one. Revelation draws this out: its beast has the lion's mouth, the bear's feet and the leopard's body all at once. So the fourth beast is not one empire among others. It is what stands behind all of them, and Rome was its face when John wrote.³

The judgment scene. In Daniel 7 the Son of Man comes to God and receives the kingdom. Jesus received it when he rose and went to the Father: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me”. The court has sat and the verdict has been given. Its last execution is still to come.

So what has changed since Jesus? Not that the world grows steadily better, and not that the church governs it. Wheat and weeds grow together until the harvest. What has changed is who holds the throne. Jesus rules, and his people share his rule in the way he rules: by serving, not by lording it over others, by witness and by endurance. Where the church has tried to rule in another way, with crusades, inquisitions and forced conversions, it has copied the beast.

Rome was the last of the four kingdoms to rule over the whole people of God. Since the new covenant God’s people are scattered across the earth, and no single empire holds them all.

There’s much more controversy surrounding the ten kings and the three horns — a subject Daniel himself inquires further about in chapter 7 — but that discussion belongs in the context of the book of Revelation, where we meet the evil trinity and the ten kings again.

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