Heavenly Living in Hostage Times Daniel 8
Daniel 8
God Equips Us as Change Comes
Ammianus Marcellinus (10.1; fourth century A.D.), the Persian ruler carried the gold head of a ram when he marched before his army
The ram seemed invincible as it charged toward the west (lit., “toward the sea,” a reference to the Mediterranean Sea, which was west of Palestine), the north, and the south. Medo-Persia made most of its conquests in these directions. To the west it subdued Babylonia, Syria, Asia Minor, and made raids upon Greece; to the north—Armenia, Scythia, and the Caspian Sea region; to the south—Egypt and Ethiopia.
The land acquisitions of the Medo-Persians were not typically peaceful. They frequently resulted in war, death, destruction, pain, and misery. A raging ram is an appropriate symbol to represent their approach to surrounding nations.
Alexander will go on to conquer most of the populated world before he is thirty. His combination of strength, speed of conquest, and youth will stand out in history. Napoleon and George Patton are two of many military leaders who studied the strategies of Alexander in designing their own battle plans.
Coming “from the west” points to the position of Greece, which was to the west of Medo-Persia (and Palestine). “Crossing the whole earth” means that Alexander conquered the world of his day, and the goat speeding across the globe “without touching the ground” portrays the swiftness of Alexander’s conquests.
Alexander was one of the great military strategists of history. He was born in 356 B.C., the son of a great conqueror in his own right, Philip of Macedon. Philip had united Greece with Macedonia and was planning to attack Persia when he was murdered. Alexander, educated under the famed Aristotle, was only twenty in 336 B.C. when he succeeded his father as king. A year and a half later (334 B.C.), he launched his attack against the Persians. In that same year Alexander won the Battle of Granicus in Asia Minor, thereby bringing to an end the dominance of the Medo-Persian Empire. With his subsequent victories at Issus (333 B.C.) and Arbela (331 B.C.) the conquest of Medo-Persia was complete. Incredibly within only three years Alexander had conquered the entire Near East.
Alexander crossed the Hellespont in 334 B.C. He and his forces clashed with Darius III Codomannus and his forces in 333 at Issus. Alexander so demolished the Persian army that Darius fled, abandoning his wife, family, and baggage to the Greek forces. Before Alexander ventured further into the Persian territory he turned south to take Egypt quickly. Egypt was glad to exchange the Persian rule for that of Greece and offered no resistance to Alexander in 332. On the way, the cities along the Mediterranean fell before him.
Alexander conquered most of the known world of that day, thus making Greece the greatest nation on earth. Because of his incredible success the Greek king became proud. Achilles (the mightiest warrior on the Greek side in the Trojan War) was Alexander’s hero, and he believed that Achilles and the god Hercules were his ancestors. Whether out of pride or for political reasons or both, Alexander required the provinces to worship him as a god. Quite naturally the Greek troops resented such an order.
Alexander “carved out an empire of 1.5 million square miles,” but at the pinnacle of his career, having conquered much of the known world, the great conqueror died. On returning to Babylon from the east, he was taken with a severe fever (possibly malaria) and on June 13, 323 B.C. died at the age of thirty-two. Alexander spread the Greek language and culture all over the world, an act that prepared the world for the gospel by giving it a common speech, Koine Greek, the language of the New Testament.
When Alexander (the large horn) died, he left two sons, Alexander IV and Herakles, both of whom were murdered. After a period of infighting and struggle, the empire came to be partitioned among four Greek military leaders (“four prominent horns”), who are commonly designated as the Diadochi (“successors”). This division took place roughly according to the four directions (cf. 11:4, and see the discussion at 7:6). This fourfold division of the Greek Empire after Alexander “has been the almost constant interpretation of the four [kingdoms], with variations as to the names of the Diadochi.”20 Archer observes that some of these areas later gained their independence but correctly notes that “the initial division of Alexander’s empire was unquestionably fourfold.”
This little horn was Antiochus Epiphanes, the eighth ruler of the Seleucid line.
Again, history sheds light on this prophetic vision. One of the leaders who rises to power after Alexander the Great is a man named Antiochus Epiphanes. He has an intense dislike of the Jews, persecuting them, killing their high priest, and entering their temple to have pigs sacrificed to him because he believes he is the Messiah. In the ultimate insult, he corrupts and twists the entire religious system of the Jews so that it serves him.
“Threw some of the starry host down to the earth and trampled on them” signifies that Antiochus would persecute the Jewish saints in Palestine.
Trampled upon them” suggests severe persecution. Antiochus’s persecution of the Jews may be considered to have begun in 170 B.C. with the assassination of the high priest Onias III and terminated in 163 B.C. at his death (or even a few months earlier when the temple was rededicated in December 164 B.C.). During this period he executed thousands of Jews who resisted his unfair regulations. In 169 B.C., after a humiliating experience in Egypt when Antiochus was turned back by the Roman commander Popilius Laenas (see discussion at 11:30), the Syrian king plundered the temple in Jerusalem (taking its treasures, including the furniture that was adorned with precious metals) and committed “deeds of murder” (cf. 1 Macc 1:20–24; 2 Macc 5:1ff.). In 2 Macc 5:11–14 these “deeds of murder” are said to have included the slaughter of eighty thousand men, women, boys, girls, even infants by Antiochus’s soldiers during this attack upon Jerusalem. Many other ways in which Antiochus “trampled” upon the Jewish saints are recorded in 1 Maccabees (e.g., 1 Macc 1:29–32, 41–64). In December 167 B.C. Antiochus committed his crowning act of sacrilege against the Jewish religion by erecting an altar to Zeus in the temple precincts and offering swine on it
During the three horrible years specifically in view (167–164 B.C.), the Jewish people (“the host of the saints”) were “given over” to Antiochus (the little horn) in the sense that the Syrian-Greek tyrant controlled Palestine and was able to persecute its citizens. The “daily sacrifice” would be terminated by Antiochus (cf. v. 11).
Antiochus set up an altar (and possibly a statue) to Zeus in the temple (1 Macc 1:54), and Judas Maccabeus rededicated the temple on December 14, 164 B.C. (1 Macc 4:52). According to the three-year view, the beginning date would be sometime near the setting up of this altar to Zeus, and the termination date would be the rededication of the temple; 1,150 days before December 14, 164 B.C. would fall in September/ October (Tishri) 167 B.C., whereas the altar to Zeus was set up one month and fifteen days later in December 167. Either the date is to be taken as a close approximation or, as Archer suggests, the daily sacrifice may have been abolished even before the altar was erected, a suggestion that is plausible.