Bible Commentaries
Daniel 7

Verse 2

DANIEL’S VISION

‘My vision by night.’

Daniel 7:2

I. Forty years after Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, the prophet beholds in vision the same series of kingdoms.—The king saw a graphic representation of their strength and splendour declining from gold to iron; the prophet beheld emblems of their rapacity, destructiveness, and hostility towards God and His people. Nothing could more graphically set forth the essential characteristics of Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece, and Rome, than the emergence of these four beasts from the Mediterranean. In the first, eagle’s wings are added to the lion, to indicate the rapidity of its conquests, while their removal, and the substitution of the man’s nature for the beast’s, indicate the milder and more rational policy on which the Babylonian Empire rested in its later years. The bear raised up more on one side, symbolises the preponderance of Medes over Persians; the leopard’s four heads signify the division of Alexander’s kingdom among his four generals; for the most part the fourth beast is identified by reliable commentators with Rome.

II. From disputed points of interpretation, we turn to that clear vision of the judgment of the Ancient of Days, Who bestows on the Son of Man kingdom and glory.—This prediction was referred to by our Lord in His answer to the solemn adjuration of Caiaphas in St. Matthew 26:64; and what a glimpse is afforded of the awful conflict which must go on between the saints of the Most High and the great world-powers which desire to wear them out! But as we have seen recently in China, the judgment sits, and the dominion of the persecutor has an end. We are now witnessing the judgment of God which is being executed on the nations of the earth. Let it not be forgotten that Great Britain is standing at that bar!

Illustrations

(1) ‘The very forces of man himself built up great empires, tyrannies under which human life, manhood, was a thing of no account: its blood was shed like water in ceaseless war; the labour of its countless multitudes was piled into pyramids and palaces for the glory of its rulers; there was no sacredness of human person, human life, human right. Go and see them within the walls of the Assyrian or Egyptian rooms at the British Museum, those mighty hunters of men, those iron war-lords, those fishers who took up men wholesale with their angle and caught them in their net, and gathered them in their drag: and therefore (so says the prophet) sacrificed to their net and worshipped their drag—and went on continually to slay the nations. Could words express more strongly the character of an age when the world-forces seemed to be not human thought, and conscience, and will, but the talons and teeth of beast-like empire-powers? And behind them were seen the figures of gods whom they glutted with the sacrifices of spoil and blood to keep even the powers above on their side as they trod down the unnumbered and unpitied lives of men.’

(2) ‘Different interpreters have put forward many different interpretatations. The more generally accepted in olden time was: Gold, the Babylonian empire; silver, the Medo-Persian empire; brass, the Grecian empire; iron, and iron and clay, the Roman empire. A view that has had more acceptance in later years gives the order as the Babylonian, the Median, the Persian, and the Grecian. But all this is quite apart from the great truth clearly taught in Daniel, of importance to us all, that, while the four world-powers (four is the symbolic world number) may have temporary success against God’s sway on earth, the power of God’s kingdom shall have final triumph ( Daniel 2:44-45). In confidence in this truth let us work and hope, thanking God and taking courage.’

Verse 10

JUDGMENT

‘The judgment was set, and the books were opened.’

Daniel 7:10

Judgments on particular nations are but types of the last judgment of all. The terrible visitation on Jerusalem, and the final coming of the Judge, are interwoven in the prophetic words of our Lord, as given by the Evangelists. The text may, therefore, be justly applied to the judgment of the last day. As the long Trinity season comes to an end, our thoughts begin to turn to the Advent of the Lord. We have—

I. The Judge.—Many versions read, ‘I beheld till thrones were placed, and the Ancient of Days did sit.’ There is thus an agreement with Revelation 20:4, ‘I saw thrones, and they sat upon them.’ (1) A Judge accompanied with assessors, ‘sitting upon thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel.’ Are these the ‘thousand thousands’ who ‘ministered to Him’? The saints and angels who shall judge the world? (2) A Judge with the prerogative of Godhead. ‘Ten thousand times ten thousand stood before Him.’ This is the numberless host of God ( Genesis 32:3; Deuteronomy 33:2; 1 Kings 22:19; 2 Kings 6:17). (3) A Judge Who shall deal out just judgment. The symbols of the white snow-like garment, of the hair white like wool, indicate and symbolise perfect purity. (4) A Judge who shall destroy His enemies. ‘A fiery stream issued and came forth from Him.’ Fire both purifies and destroys.

II. The Judged.—The context speaks of the judgment of the nations. This shall be a judgment of all men of all nations, of which our Lord informs us more perfectly in the Gospels.

III. The Judgment.—‘The books were opened.’ The books contained the transgressions and wickednesses which men had done. (1) The book of God’s remembrance. (2) The book of man’s remembrance. Memory is a strange storehouse. (On the ‘books’ see Exodus 32:32; Psalms 56:9; Psalms 68:29; Isaiah 4:3; Malachi 3:16; Revelation 3:5; Revelation 20:15.)

Verses 12-14

THE SIGN OF THE SON OF MAN

‘As concerning the rest of the beasts, they had their dominion taken away: yet their lives were prolonged for a season and time. I saw in the night visions, and, behold, one like the Son of Man came with the clouds of heaven, and came to the Ancient of Days, and they brought Him near before Him. And there was given Him dominion, and glory, and a kingdom, that all people, nations, and languages, should serve Him: His dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and His kingdom that which shall not be destroyed.’

Daniel 7:12-14

We find ourselves here in a part of the Bible which is to most of us unfamiliar and puzzling: the visions of the Book of Daniel. They are like transformation scenes—grand, cloudy, highly coloured: they are like allegories with a forgotten key. Here and there the Christian reader catches a glimpse of something familiar, words that suit our Lord, or some type of Him, a picture like the Day of Judgment. Why they are there he does not know, or what they have to do with the rest of the passage. The rest is all dim.

I confine myself to one or two quite simple points.

I. The first is that what we have here is ‘history in vision.’—Upon the stage of history a succession of visionary empires rise, rule, prevail by the might that is in them, and then fall and give place to others. We will not ask now precisely what empires, whether in the times of Daniel, or later; whether their order exactly corresponds to actual fact. We cannot tell how the visions came before the seer’s mind—the lion with eagle’s wings; the bear; the leopard with wings of a fowl; the beast terrible above the rest, and more terrible than any beasts of the earth, with iron teeth, and ten horns. Did he see them in trance before his eyes? or did he devise this language of figure to express what was given to him to understand about the world history before or after or around him? Profitless questions for us which we cannot answer, and the answering of which would give us no added truth.

But pass on from this first to the second point.

II. These great powers, of which the beasts are symbols, these colossal forces are in the hand of God.—At the end of their appointed time there is a judgment. There is no mistaking the picture. ‘I beheld till thrones were placed, and one that was an Ancient of Days did sit; His raiment was white as snow, and the hair of His head like pure wool: His throne was fiery flames, and the wheels thereof burning fire. A fiery stream issued and came forth from before Him: thousand thousands ministered unto Him and ten thousand times ten thousand stood before Him: the judgment was set, and the books were opened’ ( Daniel 7:9-10).

It is not the Day of Judgment, but it is a day of the kind. We have still before us history in vision, and this scene of the great assize, the awful tribunal, figures the force in history which men forget, or to which they are blind, the force of the sure, slow, certain, almighty justice and providence of God.

III. And then we come to the third point, and still we have history in vision. After the beasts, the man.—‘Behold there came with the clouds of heaven one like unto a Son of Man, and He came even unto the Ancient of Days, and they brought Him near before Him’ ( Daniel 7:13). The stage is cleared of them to make room for Him. The force of the future, stronger than all the forces figured by the beasts, is the force figured as a man: the force of manhood. It prevails, and it prevails finally: there is nothing visible, nothing possible beyond it: there is the finish, and sum, and goal, and climax of history.

This becomes yet more clear when we ask who is this figure of Man, a Son of Man. To whom does it refer? Now, of course, there flashes up to us at once the thought of One Who took as title, which He for ever bears, the name of the Son of Man, Jesus our Lord. No doubt this was the thought in the mind of King James’ translators when they wrote ‘One like unto the Son of Man.’ But this is not really right. The Son of Man was not yet known, so that the prophet should have been able to compare to Him the figure in his vision. It is going too fast. The Old Testament points in this, as in many passages, to Christ, and brings us towards Him. But it does not yet speak the language of the Gospels. The Christian translators have sometimes unconsciously read into its words plainer Gospel meaning than they had. We shall find that the Old Testament helps us more if we travel with it at its own pace.

So here the Revised Version, which is more accurate, gives us ‘ one like unto a son of man.’ It is not the name of an individual: it simply marks the figure as one who, unlike the other figures, is not a beast, but a man. That is the point, and that is the lesson.

The force of manhood is the world’s master force.

Bishop Talbot.

Illustrations

(1) ‘Each man has his own fight with the beast within him, in its own shape or shapes. What we have all to do is to keep before us the sign of a son of man; manhood in its best strength, simplicity, uprightness, self-restraint; manliness in the finest sense of the word; and womanhood, which is at once manhood’s other half and other side, in its purity, modesty, gentleness, its quick intuitions and warm feelings, its power to minister and to bear: all that makes true womanliness. Think of these, and then think of what men and women too often make of their own lives, and of each other. Is there not much to alter altogether, to purify, and change? Is there not much truly beast-like still to be put away; much of which it is not well even to speak?’

(2) ‘Of what sort should human life be? Evidently a life in which everything combines and is ordered to bring manhood to its best. There must be through and through respect for every grain and item of human life: in every man, woman, and child manhood must be sacred in their own eyes and in the eyes of others. There must be room for human life in all to grow freely, healthily, naturally; the standard of human development will be the standard by which everything is tried: “Does it make human life happier, better, fuller, larger, truer, stronger?” The common life of men must be governed by laws which require mutual duty and respect of all alike, of weak and strong, poor and rich. The great forces must be the forces of character, of reason, of conscience. And at the heart of all there must be at work that which teaches man how to grow more truly human through the higher things in him prevailing ever more over the lower.’

Verse 17

THE HUMAN COMEDY

‘These great beasts, which are four … kings.’

Daniel 7:17

‘The age of the quadruped is to go out, the age of brain and heart is to come in,’ wrote Emerson. Is not that the pith of Daniel’s vision?

‘And thus the land of Camelford was waste,

Thick with wet woods and many a beast within,

And none, or few, to scare or chase the beast;

So that wild dog and wolf and boar and bear

Came night and day and rooted in the garden of the king,

’Till Arthur came and slew the beast.’

That was Tennyson in his profoundly allegorical poem the ‘Idylls of the King.’ But Daniel had anticipated him by more than two millenniums. In an age dark as an Egyptian night with trouble personal and national, he saw the history of the destiny of the world; he saw that at bottom all the tumult of time was the struggle between the Beast and the Man, animalism and humanity striving for possession of the world. He foresaw that Man was predestined to triumph over the Beast, and to cheer all fainting souls he sang this idyll of the king. After the fearful vision of the beasts, hurtful, untameable, terrible, came a beautiful vision of another world, and in a thick concourse of superhuman beings came at length one like unto a son of man, that was a real man. Not the half-animal man born from below, but man completely born from above—coming with the clouds of heaven, still a true man—neither beast nor angel. And to the man is given the dominion of the beast-ridden earth. The kingdom of the world in which the winged lion, the bear, the many-headed leopard, and the nameless terror with teeth of iron contend for mastery, is given by Him who sits on the throne of fire to—a man.

I. Man’s earliest struggle was with animal forces.—What an eminent stride from the day when man waged daily battle and set a nightly watch against the beasts of the earth, to the day when the hind could yoke the willing ox to the plough and harness the horse to the car; when the milkmaids with merry morning songs troop forth to the field unafraid to collect the white tribute from the full udders of the lowing herd; when the child could play with the purring cat, and the boy call to his dog as to a friend that never betrayed. To have thus domesticated, civilised, semi-humanised so many creatures was not the least of the achievements of man.

II. But man had not yet succeeded in taming himself, and no wild thing of the woods was half so wild, so insatiable, so cruel as man could be. In him the animal instincts were intensified by all the passion of an immortal nature, and the animal powers were multiplied a thousandfold by human intelligence. When Buffon, the naturalist, produced his great work on Natural History, revealing the marvellous variety of species in the animal world, the idea flashed on Balzac’s great mind that all history was a struggle between animalism and humanity. What were the misers, the voluptuaries, the voracious men of commerce, the selfish politicians, the heartless women of fashion, but specimens of animalised humanity—creatures in whom the powers of the human mind and soul are degraded to the service of the purely animal instincts of acquisitiveness, sensuality, and display, or in St. Paul’s fearful phrase ‘carnal minds’—souls run to flesh. Could we view life from that other world, see it in God’s light, we should need no further commentary on Daniel’s words. ‘Think for a moment of a man entering on a profession. He is perhaps endowed with splendid natural gifts, which he has raised to their highest power by education and made lustrous by wide culture. But if his sole aim be self-advancement, if he be motived only by goldbags or desire for fame, what is such an one seen from above but a winged lion? A magnificently endowed animal, whose forest is the city of London, and whose prey is men. Then of commerce. If a man put no limit to competition, if his effort to succeed becomes a passion for making money for its own sake—a passion which impels him to hew down others without ruth or pity,—was not such a man like the bear with the rib of some victim still in his mouth?’ Imperialism is a fine mouth-filling word, but what is it? The desire to realise the Greater Britain—the essential unity of English-speaking men—the passion to conserve and strengthen the virtues characteristic of the English nation,—to fulfil the mission laid up by the will of God to be everywhere true to her own best traditions as the home of liberty! Then God bless Imperialism! But Sir Edward Russell says that when he asked Mr. Rudyard Kipling whether a certain colonial personage had any moral ideals, the reply was, ‘Tut! Tut! it is enough that he is building up an empire.’ It is not enough. Imperialism regardless of moral consideration is seamanship regardless of navigation,—a folly and a crime. Daniel’s Beast with the iron teeth that devoured and broke in pieces and stamped the residue with his feet, and was slain. This Beast is one of the perils of the world to-day. ‘We do not want—we dread—an Imperialism arising out of the sea. We want the Imperialism that comes with the clouds of heaven. We must hold this blood sacred. There must be no weakness or hesitancy. This war must not be stopped, but ended. Victory must be a victory for all, not the triumph of a party, or even of a people, but of humanity—the coming again of Jesus Christ, whose watchword is “Glory to God in the highest, peace on earth, goodwill towards men!” ’