Daniel8chapter 8

Daniel 8:1-2

the third year of the reign of king Belshazzar: The vision comes in the third year of Belshazzar, two years before the writing on the wall that ends his reign, and Daniel is carried in vision to Shushan by the river Ulai, a city he had likely never seen, which will become the winter capital of the Persian kings a lifetime after this vision is given. The bench marks the irony the text does not: God shows Daniel the empire's future seat before Persia has taken a single province from Babylon. The vision is Daniel's own, seen after the first vision of chapter seven, and he records it as an eyewitness, even unto me Daniel.

Daniel 8:3-4

The ram with two horns, one higher than the other and the higher coming up last, is read by the whole bench as Media and Persia joined, the last-rising horn the dominant partner, since Persia overtook the older Media within the union and gave the empire its lasting name in history. The ram pushes westward, northward, and southward, the very compass of Cyrus's conquests, and none could stand before him or deliver out of his hand until a fiercer beast comes from the west. Nothing in the text points the ram eastward, since no rival power lay in that direction to resist him.

Daniel 8:5-8

The he goat comes from the west and touches not the ground, the commentators reading the speed of Alexander's campaign into the picture itself, a conqueror who crossed from Greece to India in roughly a decade. The notable horn between his eyes is Alexander himself, and his fury against the ram pictures the destruction of the Persian empire, the two horns broken and the ram trampled with none to deliver it. When the great horn is broken at the height of his own strength, in plain history the sudden death of Alexander at thirty-two, four horns rise toward the four winds in his place, the four generals among whom the empire is divided, none of them his own sons.

Daniel 8:9-12

Out of one of the four horns comes a little horn that grows toward the south, the east, and the pleasant land, the land of Israel, and the bench identifies him with near unanimity as Antiochus the fourth, called Epiphanes by himself and Epimanes, the madman, by those he ruled. He magnifies himself even to the prince of the host, takes away the daily sacrifice, and casts down the place of the sanctuary, the desecration of the Jerusalem temple that provoked the Maccabean revolt. An host is given him against the sacrifice by reason of transgression, the text naming Israel's own unfaithfulness as the occasion even while the horn's cruelty is condemned in full.

Daniel 8:13-14

Two holy ones converse over Daniel's head, one asking how long the trampling of the sanctuary will last, and the answer comes as two thousand and three hundred evenings and mornings, after which the sanctuary shall be cleansed. The commentators divide over the count itself, some reading it as twenty-three hundred full days, near six and a half years, others as twenty-three hundred half-sacrifices, morning and evening, near eleven hundred and fifty days, and both figures are named with their holders rather than settled here. The tradition ties the cleansing to the Maccabean rededication of the temple, later kept as Hanukkah, though the exact reckoning of days remains a question among the bench itself.

Daniel 8:15-19

Daniel seeks the vision's meaning and one with the appearance of a man stands before him, then a voice between the banks of Ulai names him: Gabriel, make this man to understand. This is the first time any angel is named in Scripture, a distinction verified against the floor, Gabriel appearing again at 9:21 and then at Luke 1:19 and 1:26 to announce the births of John and Jesus. Daniel is addressed as son of man, a title the bench is careful to distinguish from the Son of man of chapter seven, here simply the messenger's address to a mortal, and Daniel falls on his face and is set upright to hear that the vision belongs to the time of the end.

Daniel 8:20-22

The angel now gives the interpretation the text itself states without ambiguity: the two-horned ram is the kings of Media and Persia, the rough goat is the king of Grecia, and the great horn between his eyes is the first king, Alexander by the bench's unanimous reading. When that horn is broken, four kingdoms rise out of the one nation, but not in his power, the successors ruling as heirs of his conquest rather than of his own line. The commentators note that Scripture here interprets its own symbol, leaving no room to dispute what the ram and the goat represent, whatever remains debated in the horn that follows.

Daniel 8:23-25

In the latter time of their kingdom a king of fierce countenance, understanding dark sentences, stands up, the bench again reading Antiochus continued from the little horn of verse nine, mighty in power that is not his own, prospering by craft and destroying many by a peace that hides his hand. He stands up against the Prince of princes, God himself by the reading the older writers give the title, yet he shall be broken without hand, the same phrase the stone of chapter two used of the kingdom that crushes the image, echoing 2:34 and 2:45. The commentators mark the phrase as the chapter's real conclusion: no human weapon ends this king, only the judgment of the one he defied.

Daniel 8:26-27

The vision of the evening and the morning is declared true, and Daniel is told to shut it up, for it belongs to many days yet to come, a sealing the commentators set beside Daniel's own sealed book at 12:4, the same prophet given visions kept for a later reading. Daniel's response is bodily rather than merely intellectual: he faints and is sick certain days, then rises to do the king's business, astonished at what he has seen. The chapter ends with an admission rare in prophecy, none understood it, the older writers noting that even the seer himself is left short of full comprehension of his own vision.