Daniel

Daniel blesses the God who “removeth kings, and setteth up kings” (2:21), and the court accounts show him doing it. Nebuchadnezzar is told that “the God of heaven hath given thee a kingdom” (2:37), yet he boasts of “great Babylon, that I have built” (4:30). He is driven from men “till thou know that the most High ruleth in the kingdom of men” (4:25), and when his understanding returns he confesses that “none can stay his hand” (4:35). Daniel then tells Belshazzar, “thou his son, O Belshazzar, hast not humbled thine heart, though thou knewest all this” (5:22). The writing gives the verdict, “Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting” (5:27), and that night the kingdom passes to Darius the Median.

The charge against the three Jews is that “they serve not thy gods” (3:12), and their answer turns on the same word: “our God whom we serve is able to deliver us,” and “if not, be it known unto thee, O king, that we will not serve thy gods” (3:17–18). Their obedience does not wait on the outcome. The king then blesses the God whose servants “yielded their bodies, that they might not serve nor worship any god, except their own God” (3:28), and Darius speaks to Daniel of “Thy God whom thou servest continually” (6:16). In chapter 7 the same word is used of the Son of man: “all people, nations, and languages, should serve him” (7:14). The kings who demanded worship give way to the one to whom it is due.

Nebuchadnezzar’s image and Daniel’s four beasts show four kingdoms in turn (2:37–40; 7:17), and both end in a kingdom not raised by men: the stone “cut out without hands” (2:34), and the dominion given to the Son of man and to “the saints of the most High” (7:18). The text names the first, “Thou art this head of gold” (2:38), and later names Media and Persia and Grecia (8:20–21), but it does not name the fourth. Jerome read it as Rome: The fourth empire is the Roman Empire. Ephrem read the fourth beast as the kingdom of the Greeks, This is Alexander, king of the Greeks, and its little horn as Antiochus, the persecutor of the Jews. Either way the end is the same: the kingdom the God of heaven sets up “shall never be destroyed” (2:44).

Daniel prays over Jeremiah’s seventy years (9:2), and Gabriel answers with a longer reckoning: “Seventy weeks are determined upon thy people and upon thy holy city” (9:24). Sixty-nine of the weeks run “unto the Messiah the Prince” (9:25), and after them “shall Messiah be cut off, but not for himself” (9:26). The last week has been read in two ways. Julius Africanus held that Christ appeared to the world at the end of seventy weeks, and Bede that Christ was crucified in that week, in whose midst the sacrifice and oblation cease (9:27). Others set the seventieth week apart, at the close of the age: Jerome reports that Hippolytus places the final week at the end of the world, with the sacrifice taken away under Antichrist. Both readings count the weeks to the Messiah.