Three Visions, One History

In the second year of his reign, Nebuchadnezzar — king of Babylon, ruler of the largest empire the world had yet seen, the man who had broken Egypt at Carchemish and was preparing to burn the Temple of Solomon to the ground — could not sleep. He had dreamed something, and the dream troubled him. He summoned his magicians and astrologers and Chaldean wise men, and he made of them a demand that ought to have been impossible: he wanted them not only to interpret the dream but to tell him what the dream was. To tell him what the dream was. As if the gods of Babylon kept the kings of Babylon informed.

The wise men refused. They could not do it. Nebuchadnezzar ordered them all executed. Daniel — a young Hebrew exile from Judah who had been brought to Babylon a few years earlier, trained in the king's court, and given a place among the king's counselors — heard the decree and asked the captain of the guard for an audience with the king. He went home, prayed with his three friends Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah, and in a night vision received both the dream and its meaning.

What Daniel saw, and what he then told the king, was the future of the world.

It was the first of three. Decades later Daniel himself would see two more — different symbols, different presentations, the same architecture. The statue. The four beasts. The ram and the goat. They identify, by name in two cases, four successive world empires that would rise and fall before the kingdom of God broke into history through a man who, in Daniel's day, no one had yet conceived of and who, six centuries after Daniel's day, would be crucified outside Jerusalem in the city the fourth empire ruled.

This article is about those three visions and what came of them. It is not an argument with critical historiography; it is a chronicle of fulfillment — what was foretold, what came to pass, where the architecture presently stands. The book of Daniel is one of the most ambitious texts in the prophetic literature, and the ambition rewards attention. Three pictures. One history. A kingdom at the end. The empires rise and fall on cue.

Daniel's first vision is given by way of Nebuchadnezzar's dream, and the dream itself is austere. The king saw an enormous statue. Its head was of fine gold. Its breast and arms were of silver. Its belly and thighs were of brass. Its legs were of iron. Its feet were of iron mixed with miry clay. While he watched, a stone was cut out of a mountain without hands; the stone struck the statue on its feet, and the entire figure — gold, silver, brass, iron, clay — was broken to pieces and became like chaff that the wind carries away. The stone, meanwhile, became a great mountain and filled the whole earth.

Daniel stood before the king and interpreted the metals. The first kingdom — the head of gold — he named without hesitation: Thou art this head of gold. Babylon was the king Daniel was addressing, and the king was the head. After Babylon would come three more kingdoms, each one lower in metal and harder in substance, each one yielding to the next, until a final phase of iron-mixed-with-clay strength-and-brittleness in the feet. Then the stone. Then the kingdom of God, which would never be destroyed.

Two things are immediately striking about the vision. The first is that the metals descend in value but increase in strength. Gold is the most precious and the softest. Silver is harder. Brass is harder still. Iron is hardest of all. Each kingdom would be in some sense less than the one before it — less unified, less glorious, less suited to be the head — but each would be in some other sense stronger, more conquering, more capable of subduing what came before. A kingdom less glorious than Babylon, but able to break Babylon; a kingdom less unified than Persia, but able to subdue Persia; a kingdom less coherent than Greece, but able to crush Greece. The trajectory is downward in dignity, upward in force.

The second is that the sequence does not end with a fifth empire. It ends with a stone. The stone is not described as a kingdom that grew up among the others and outlasted them; it is described as a stone cut out without hands, which struck the statue at its weakest point — the feet of iron and clay — and ground the whole figure to dust. The kingdom that comes after the four is not one more empire on the human scale. It is something else, something not assembled by armies, something not raised by human power. It is the kingdom that the four kingdoms have been clearing the stage for.

Decades pass. Belshazzar — son and co-regent of Nabonidus, the last king of Babylon — sits on the throne where Nebuchadnezzar once sat. Daniel is no longer a young man. He is in the first year of Belshazzar's reign when the second vision comes to him at night, this time not given to a Gentile king but to Daniel himself, and not in metals but in beasts.

He saw the four winds of the heaven striving upon the great sea, and four great beasts came up from the sea, diverse one from another. The first was like a lion with eagle's wings; as Daniel watched, the wings were plucked, the beast was lifted up from the earth and made to stand upon its feet like a man, and a man's heart was given to it. The second was like a bear, raised up on one side, with three ribs in its mouth between its teeth; they said to it, Arise, devour much flesh. The third was like a leopard, which had upon its back four wings of a bird, and the beast had four heads, and dominion was given to it. The fourth was dreadful and terrible, strong exceedingly, with great iron teeth; it devoured and brake in pieces, and stamped the residue with its feet; it was diverse from all the beasts that were before it, and it had ten horns.

While Daniel watched the ten horns, another little horn came up among them, before which three of the first horns were plucked up by the roots; in this horn were eyes like the eyes of a man, and a mouth speaking great things. And then the vision shifted. The Ancient of Days took his seat, his garment white as snow, the hair of his head like pure wool, his throne like a fiery flame, thousand thousands ministered to him and ten thousand times ten thousand stood before him. The judgment was set, and the books were opened.

The vision is the same vision Nebuchadnezzar had been given, told in a different register. Four kingdoms, four animals, the fourth one different and terrible, a final phase with multiple horns and a hostile figure, and then a kingdom received by one like the Son of Man — Daniel 7's counterpart to the stone cut without hands. The architecture is the same. The colors are deeper.

The matchings are visible at sight. The lion with eagle's wings, the king of beasts crowned by the king of birds, is Babylon — and the wings being plucked, the beast being made to stand like a man and given a man's heart, depicts what Daniel had already seen happen in his own lifetime: Nebuchadnezzar's seven-year madness in Daniel 4, when the most powerful man on earth had been brought low and made to graze in the fields like an ox until his reason returned. The bear raised on one side is the second kingdom, the silver, with one side higher than the other; the three ribs in its mouth are three great conquests. The leopard with four wings and four heads is the third kingdom, the brass — fast and four-headed, swift to conquer and quickly divided. The fourth beast, dreadful and terrible, with iron teeth, is the fourth kingdom of iron — but now we see what we did not see in Daniel 2: that this fourth kingdom has ten horns, and that among the ten a little horn arises with a mouth speaking great things.

Where the statue saw the sequence ending in a stone, the beasts see it ending in a courtroom. The little horn is judged. The fourth beast is slain, its body destroyed and given to the burning flame. And the Son of Man, coming with the clouds of heaven, receives the kingdom — not a kingdom assembled, not a kingdom conquered, but a kingdom given, by the Ancient of Days, to one whose dominion shall not pass away.

Two years after the night of the four beasts, in the third year of Belshazzar, Daniel has another vision. This one is shorter, more focused, and unique among the three: the angel Gabriel comes to interpret it, and Gabriel names the empires.

Daniel sees himself by the river Ulai in Shushan, the citadel of Persia in the province of Elam — and a ram is standing at the river. The ram has two horns, both high, but one higher than the other, and the higher came up last. The ram is pushing westward, northward, and southward; no beast can stand before it, none can deliver from its hand, and the ram does according to its will, and becomes great.

Then a he-goat comes from the west, on the face of the whole earth, and touches not the ground — flying, in effect, across the surface of the world. The goat has a notable horn between his eyes. He comes to the ram with two horns and runs at it in the fury of his power; he smites the ram, breaks both its horns, and there is no power in the ram to stand before the goat. He casts it down and tramples it, and there is none that can deliver the ram out of his hand.

The he-goat then becomes very great — but when he is strong, the great horn is broken, and in its place come up four notable horns toward the four winds of heaven.

Gabriel arrives, and what he says next is the load-bearing identification in the whole architecture of Daniel's prophecy. He does not interpret allegorically. He does not say this animal represents an empire in general terms and leave the reader to guess. He names them:

Two empires named directly. Medo-Persia and Greece. The second and third kingdoms of the prior visions — the silver and brass of the statue, the bear and the leopard of the beasts — now stand identified by Gabriel's word, not by interpretation. The ram is Medo-Persia. The goat is Greece. The great horn is the first king of Greece. The four horns that replace him after he is broken are four kingdoms that will stand up out of his nation, but not in his power.

This is the locking moment. Once the ram is named, the silver is fixed: it is Medo-Persia. Once the goat is named, the brass is fixed: it is Greece. By sequence, the head of gold (which Daniel had already named) is Babylon, and the fourth kingdom — the iron, the dreadful beast — is whatever empire arises after Greece in time. Once two of the four kingdoms are explicitly named by an angel, the other two are fixed by their positions in the sequence.

The empires of Daniel are not a code that must be deciphered. They are a sequence with two of the four names supplied.

What followed Daniel's three visions, in real history, was their fulfillment. The four kingdoms appeared in the order the visions had foretold, with the dates and the conquests and the peculiar individual features that the symbols had carried, and they did so over a span of roughly six hundred years.

Babylon was first. Nebuchadnezzar II reigned forty-three years (605–562 BC) and built Babylon into the largest and most magnificent city of the ancient world. The Hanging Gardens, by tradition his, were one of the seven wonders. He defeated the Egyptians at Carchemish, took the eastern Mediterranean, deported the Jewish royal house in three waves (605, 597, 586 BC), and burned the Temple of Solomon in the summer of 586. His name appears on bricks and inscriptions across the ancient world. He was the head of gold not because gold was the proudest material but because the kingdom he ruled was the proudest configuration of human power yet assembled.

He also became the figure in whom the lion's wings being plucked were fulfilled in real time. In Daniel 4 — written, the book tells us, as a public proclamation from Nebuchadnezzar himself — the king walks on the roof of his palace, surveys the city he has built, and says, Is not this great Babylon, that I have built for the house of the kingdom by the might of my power, and for the honour of my majesty? And while the word is still in his mouth, a voice from heaven announces that the kingdom is departed from him. For seven years he loses his reason; he is driven from men, eats grass as oxen, his hair grows like eagles' feathers, and his nails like birds' claws. When the days are fulfilled, his reason returns, and he lifts up his eyes to heaven and blesses the Most High. The lion's wings are plucked. The beast is made to stand on its feet like a man. A man's heart is given to it.

His son Evil-Merodach succeeded him, then Neriglissar, then briefly Labashi-Marduk. The throne then passed to Nabonidus, who was not of Nebuchadnezzar's line, and who spent the bulk of his reign in Tema in Arabia, leaving his son Belshazzar as co-regent in Babylon. This is the configuration that explains, among other things, why Belshazzar in Daniel 5 promises Daniel the third place in the kingdom — the first two seats were Nabonidus's and his own.

The night Babylon fell is one of the most narratively dense moments in Scripture. Belshazzar is feasting with a thousand of his lords. He calls for the Temple vessels — the ones his grandfather had taken from Jerusalem half a century earlier — to drink wine from. While he and his courtiers are praising the gods of gold and silver and brass and iron and wood and stone, a hand appears and writes on the wall: MENE MENE TEKEL UPHARSIN. Daniel is summoned. He reads the verdict. God hath numbered thy kingdom, and finished it. Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting. Thy kingdom is divided, and given to the Medes and Persians.

The Nabonidus Chronicle, a clay tablet recovered from the ruins of Babylon and now in the British Museum, records the same night in the dry idiom of administrative cuneiform: Cyrus's general Gobryas entered Babylon without battle, in the month of Tishri, in the seventeenth year of Nabonidus. The Persian troops took the city. The head of gold passed to the breast of silver. The first of Daniel's empires fell.

Cyrus the Great is one of the most remarkable figures in the ancient world, and the Bible introduces him in a way that nothing else in ancient literature does: it names him by name, two hundred years before he is born. Isaiah, writing in the mid-eighth century BC, declares in the LORD's voice: That saith of Cyrus, He is my shepherd, and shall perform all my pleasure: even saying to Jerusalem, Thou shalt be built; and to the temple, Thy foundation shall be laid (Isaiah 44:28). The next chapter opens: Thus saith the LORD to his anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I have holden, to subdue nations before him… I will go before thee.

The man Isaiah names came to power in Persia, subdued Media in 550 BC, defeated Lydia under Croesus in 546 BC, took Babylon in 539 BC, and within his first year as king of Babylon issued the decree permitting the Jewish exiles to return to Judah and rebuild the Temple. The Cyrus Cylinder — a baked clay barrel inscribed in Babylonian cuneiform, recovered at Babylon in 1879 and now in the British Museum — records the broader policy in Cyrus's own voice. He presents himself as chosen by Marduk to restore proper worship in Babylon. He returns displaced peoples to their homelands. He restores the cult statues that the previous king, Nabonidus, had removed from their temples and concentrated in Babylon during his long absence in Tema.

Ezra 1 records the specific application of the same policy to the Jews — with one telling adaptation. Israel's worship was aniconic by covenant. There were no cult statues for Cyrus to restore. What there were instead were the gold and silver vessels of the Jerusalem Temple, which Nebuchadnezzar had taken half a century earlier and which were still in the Babylonian treasury. Cyrus returned them by name and inventory — five thousand four hundred items, counted out to Sheshbazzar the prince of Judah (Ezra 1:7–11). The broader decree restored gods to nations; the Jewish version of the same decree restored the vessels and authorized the rebuilding of the house in which the LORD whose name was on those vessels had once been worshipped. The same policy, the same king, the same year, adapted to the particular shape of Israel's worship. The exile ended.

The ram with two horns appears, in the vision and in history together. One horn was Media; the other was Persia; the Persian horn came up last but rose higher. The bear raised up on one side carried the same picture: Persia became the dominant element. The three ribs in the bear's mouth are the three great conquests of the empire — Lydia, Babylon, and Egypt (which Cambyses took in 525 BC). The ram pushed westward (Lydia and the Greek coast), northward (Scythia), and southward (Egypt); no beast could stand before it. The empire became the largest the world had ever seen, stretching from the Indus in the east to the Aegean in the west, from Aswan in the south to the steppes north of the Caspian.

Within that empire the Hebrew Scriptures find some of their richest territory. Esther's husband Ahasuerus is Xerxes I (486–465 BC). Nehemiah's master Artaxerxes I (465–424 BC) issues, in his twentieth year, the decree to rebuild Jerusalem's walls — the decree that begins the seventy weeks of Daniel 9, and that ends, four hundred eighty-three prophetic years later, at the cross. Daniel himself outlived Babylon and served under Darius the Mede (the first year of whose reign occasioned the lions' den incident in Daniel 6) and under Cyrus the Persian.

The empire of the silver breast endured for two centuries. It produced administrative innovations that would outlast it — the royal road, the satrapy system, the imperial Aramaic that became the lingua franca of the Near East and is the language of half of Daniel itself. But the silver was inferior to the gold, as Daniel had said, and a higher horn was coming up in the west. The goat that came from the west, on the face of the whole earth, would touch not the ground.

Alexander III of Macedon became king at the age of twenty in 336 BC, after the assassination of his father Philip II. Within two years he had subdued the Greek city-states. Within four years he had crossed the Hellespont, defeated Darius III at the Granicus and then at Issus, taken Tyre after a seven-month siege, and entered Egypt without resistance. Within six years, at Gaugamela in 331 BC, he had broken the Persian army in the field and become the master of the empire that had ruled the world for two centuries. By his thirtieth year he had marched his army to the Indus, considered an invasion of India, and turned back only because his troops would go no further.

He was the great horn between the goat's eyes, the first king of Grecia by Gabriel's word. The image Daniel had been given was uncannily appropriate. The goat from the west came on the face of the whole earth, and touched not the ground — and Alexander's army moved with a speed that astonished ancient observers and that still astonishes modern military historians. From the Hellespont to the Indus is approximately three thousand miles. He covered it in twelve years.

He smote the ram, broke both its horns — Media and Persia — and there was no power in the ram to stand before him. He cast the ram down, trampled it, and there was none that could deliver. Persia had been the greatest empire on earth; in three pitched battles it ceased to exist.

And then the great horn was broken.

Alexander returned to Babylon in 323 BC, fell ill — by some accounts of fever, by others of poison — and died at the age of thirty-two. He left no clear heir. His half-brother Philip III was an intellectual incompetent; his unborn son by Roxane was an infant. When his generals asked the dying king to whom he left the kingdom, he is reported to have said to the strongest. The kingdom was not given to his posterity, exactly as Daniel had foretold: and his kingdom shall be broken, and shall be divided toward the four winds of heaven; and not to his posterity (Daniel 11:4).

The forty-year struggle that followed — the Wars of the Diadochi — eventually stabilized the empire of Alexander into four major successor kingdoms, with each of the four under one of his former generals or their descendants. The goat's great horn had been broken; in its place, four notable horns toward the four winds of heaven.

The four successor kingdoms appear in history under the names of the generals who held them. Cassander took Macedonia and Greece. Lysimachus took Thrace and parts of western Asia Minor. Seleucus took Syria, Mesopotamia, Persia, and the eastern reaches. Ptolemy took Egypt. Four kingdoms. Four winds. Not in the power of the first king, but standing up out of his nation.

What follows in Daniel 11 is one of the most detailed prophecies in the Bible — a forty-five-verse chronicle of the wars between the king of the south and the king of the north, which is to say, between the Ptolemaic dynasty in Egypt and the Seleucid dynasty in Syria. The two kingdoms abutted in Palestine, which became the contested ground between them for nearly two centuries. Daniel 11 follows their kings through five generations: the marriages and the betrayals, the campaigns and the counter-campaigns, the alliances arranged and broken, the daughters given in marriage who poison their husbands or are poisoned, the fleets that sail and the armies that march and the cities that fall.

The level of specificity is the kind of thing one ordinarily encounters only in retrospective history. Daniel 11:6 describes a daughter of the king of the south being given to the king of the north to make an agreement — and tells us, in advance, that the agreement will fail, that the daughter will not retain her position, that she and the king who gave her and the one she came to will all perish. This is Berenice, daughter of Ptolemy II, given in marriage to Antiochus II in 252 BC, all of whom were dead within three years exactly as the prophecy specifies. Daniel 11:10–19 describes the wars of Antiochus III, his initial successes against the Ptolemies, his defeat at Raphia in 217 BC, his eventual recovery, his alliance with the Aetolians against Rome, his defeat by Lucius Scipio at Magnesia in 190 BC, and his death — exactly the sequence Antiochus III's reign actually followed.

The prophecy reaches its sharpest point in Daniel 11:21–35, which describes a contemptible king who arises out of the Seleucid line — a vile person, to whom they shall not give the honour of the kingdom: but he shall come in peaceably, and obtain the kingdom by flatteries. This is Antiochus IV Epiphanes, who seized the Seleucid throne in 175 BC by murdering his nephew and outmaneuvering his rivals. Daniel 11 describes his invasions of Egypt, his confrontation with a fleet from the western coastland — historically, Roman ambassadors led by Gaius Popillius Laenas, who famously drew a circle in the sand around Antiochus and demanded an answer before the king stepped out of it — and then his return to Jerusalem in wrath against the holy covenant.

In December of 167 BC, Antiochus IV erected an altar to Olympian Zeus on the altar of burnt offering in the Temple at Jerusalem, sacrificed a pig on it, and outlawed the observance of the Sabbath and the practice of circumcision under pain of death. This is the abomination of desolation Daniel had foretold three and a half centuries earlier. It triggered the Maccabean revolt under the priest Mattathias and his sons, three years of guerrilla warfare against the Seleucid army, and the recovery and rededication of the Temple in December of 164 BC — the festival of Hanukkah, still observed.

The four horns of the broken great horn played out in real history as the Wars of the Diadochi and their successors, and the most specific prophecy in the entire Bible — Daniel 11 — described their wars in detail centuries in advance.

By the time Antiochus IV died on his last campaign in Persia, in 164 BC, a new power was rising in the western Mediterranean that none of Daniel's prior contemporaries had thought worth noticing. Rome had defeated Carthage in three wars across the third and second centuries. Rome had broken the Macedonian kingdom of the Antigonids — Cassander's successors — at Pydna in 168 BC, the same year that began to dissolve the four-horn configuration. Rome had broken the Seleucid kingdom of Antiochus III at Magnesia, and had humiliated Antiochus IV himself in the celebrated circle in the sand. By 146 BC, Rome had razed Carthage and sacked Corinth. By 133 BC, the king of Pergamum had bequeathed his kingdom to Rome in his will. By 63 BC, Pompey had annexed the Seleucid territories outright and had marched his legions into Jerusalem and entered the Holy of Holies.

Rome was the fourth kingdom. It came after Greece. It crushed the Greek successor states one after another. It was strong as iron, and as iron breaks in pieces and subdues all things, so this kingdom would break and crush. Daniel 7 had said the same thing in a more visceral idiom: a fourth beast, dreadful and terrible, with great iron teeth, devouring and breaking in pieces and stamping the residue with its feet. It was diverse from all the beasts that were before it.

The diversity of Rome is worth pausing on. Babylon, Persia, and Greece were each a single nation or a small confederation, ruled by a king from a single dynasty (with the post-Alexandrian fragmentation being the obvious exception). Rome was none of these things. It was, at its emergence into Daniel-relevant territory, a republic — governed by a senate, by elected magistrates, by complex constitutional machinery. It became an empire, but the empire retained a structure of provincial administration, legal codes, and citizenship that no prior empire had matched. The iron of Rome was different from the gold of Babylon or the silver of Medo-Persia or the brass of Greece. It was harder. It was more impersonal. It was diverse.

Under Rome, in the months and years that mattered for Daniel's seventy weeks, the events the prophets had foretold took place. Augustus issued the decree that brought a young couple from Galilee to Bethlehem (Luke 2). Tiberius reigned when Christ was crucified. Rome destroyed the Temple in 70 AD under Titus, fulfilling what Christ himself had said one stone would not be left on another (Matthew 24:2). Rome scattered the Jewish nation across the world after Bar Kokhba's revolt in 135 AD. Rome's roads carried the apostolic message from Jerusalem to Antioch to Ephesus to Corinth to Rome itself. Rome's law tried Paul. Rome's executioner martyred him.

The fourth empire was the empire of the cross. And of the four empires Daniel had seen, only one of them ended in something other than being conquered. Rome was not subdued by a fifth empire of comparable scale. Rome broke into pieces.

The empire of iron was at the height of its power. Tiberius reigned in Rome. Pontius Pilate was prefect of Judea. Caiaphas was high priest in Jerusalem. The civil and religious authorities of the fourth kingdom and the people of the covenant were jointly in the seats of judgment when a Galilean rabbi was brought before the Sanhedrin late at night, accused of blasphemy and sedition.

The trial in Mark's account is brief and decisive. Witnesses are produced; their testimony does not agree. The high priest stands up and asks the prisoner the question that, on the answer, will determine everything. Art thou the Christ, the Son of the Blessed?

The prisoner answers in two parts. First, three syllables in the Greek — egō eimi, I am — the words of the burning bush. Then he completes the answer with a citation that the high priest, of all people, will not miss.

The high priest tears his clothes — the symbolic gesture of grief at hearing blasphemy — and says, What need we any further witnesses? Ye have heard the blasphemy. The Sanhedrin condemns Jesus to death.

Notice what just happened. The high priest of Israel, the most senior religious authority in the world's most prophetically literate nation, recognized at once which prophecy was being claimed. The phrase Son of man… coming in the clouds of heaven is not generic. It is verbatim Daniel 7:13–14. There is exactly one figure in the Hebrew Scriptures who comes with the clouds of heaven to the Ancient of Days and receives an everlasting dominion — and Christ, standing in fetters before the court that holds his life, claimed to be that figure. Caiaphas understood it instantly. The condemnation was for blasphemy because the claim was unmistakable. Either Christ was who he said, or the words deserved death. There was no third reading.

The vision of Daniel 7 was being cited inside the empire it had predicted. The Son of Man was standing in the dock of the fourth kingdom, telling the high priest of the second kingdom's most prophetically literate people that the vision was about him.

Within a generation, the Temple from which Caiaphas served was rubble. Within three centuries, the empire that crucified Christ had declared Christianity its religion. Within five, the iron had broken into pieces. The kingdoms had risen and fallen on cue, and the fourth had also yielded — not to a fifth empire on the human scale, but to something else. The stone had been cut without hands. The Son of Man had been given dominion.

The empire sequence Daniel saw is, in a real sense, complete. Babylon rose and fell. Medo-Persia rose and fell. Greece rose and broke into four. Rome rose, ruled the world Christ entered, presided over his crucifixion, and broke into pieces. The four kingdoms of the statue have all appeared. The four beasts have all come up out of the sea. The named animals — the ram and the goat — have performed their parts and exited.

What remains in Daniel's vision is the final phase: the feet of iron and clay; the ten horns on the fourth beast; the little horn that comes up among them and speaks great things against the Most High; the time and times and dividing of time during which the saints are given into his hand. Christian interpreters have read these images in different ways across two thousand years, and this article will not adjudicate between them. What Daniel says is what Daniel says, and what Daniel says is that the fourth kingdom enters a final form — iron alongside clay, partly strong and partly broken, ten configurations and a hostile figure rising among them — and that the stone, cut out without hands, strikes the image at its feet.

The kingdom set up by the God of heaven was set up in the days of these kings. The days of these kings began when Christ stood before Caiaphas and identified himself as the Son of Man. The kingdom has been advancing since. It has not yet filled the whole earth. The statue still stands, in its feet, on its mixture of iron and clay. The stone is in flight.

It is worth taking, at the close, a step back from the prophetic detail and noticing what Daniel actually accomplished. A Hebrew exile in the heart of Babylon, sometime in the sixth century BC, set down a sequence of empires that began with his own captors and proceeded through the next six centuries with the kings named in two cases, the manner of their conquests described, and the peculiar individual features — Nebuchadnezzar's madness, Cyrus's name, Alexander's youth and speed and broken kingdom, the Diadochi's four kingdoms, the Ptolemy-Seleucid wars in fine-grained detail, Antiochus IV's desecration, Rome's iron unlike its predecessors — set down in a text the believing community has been reading for two and a half thousand years. The sequence happened. The conquests happened. The peculiarities happened. The Son of Man arrived in the empire of iron and was condemned by a high priest who understood at once which prophecy was being claimed.

The book of Daniel is sometimes treated as a difficult book, dense with apocalyptic symbolism and exegetical disputes. It is also, at its core, a remarkably plain book. It says four empires will come and go, names two of them outright, gives the manner of their conquests, foretells the death of a Messianic figure in the fourth, and predicts a kingdom — set up in the days of those kings — that will not be destroyed. Six hundred years of subsequent history did what the book said. The remaining piece is the consummation.

The stone has been cut. It is moving toward the feet. The mountain it will become is already filling the earth in some sense — the Church on every continent, in every language, after twenty centuries — but the image still stands. The stone has not yet struck.

It will.