The Neo-Babylonian Empire was the empire of Daniel's captivity, and it is the only empire in the four-empire sequence that Daniel himself names directly. Standing before Nebuchadnezzar, Daniel interpreted the king's dream of the multi-metal statue and identified the first kingdom without ambiguity: "Thou art this head of gold."
In Daniel 7, the same empire appears as a lion with eagle's wings — the lion at the top of the food chain on land, the eagle at the top of the sky. The wings being plucked off and a man's heart being given to it likely depicts Nebuchadnezzar's seven years of madness in Daniel 4, when the most powerful man on earth was reduced to grazing in the fields like an ox until reason returned to him.
Daniel 8 names this empire explicitly. The ram with two horns is interpreted by the angel Gabriel in plain language: "The ram which thou sawest having two horns are the kings of Media and Persia." This is the load-bearing identification — once the ram is named, the corresponding silver of Daniel 2 and the bear of Daniel 7 are fixed by parallel.
Each symbol carries its detail. The two horns are Media and Persia, with the higher horn (Persia) coming up last — Cyrus the Persian subdued Media in 550 BC, before turning west. The bear "raised up on one side" carries the same picture: Persia became the dominant element. The three ribs in the bear's mouth are commonly identified as Persia's three great conquests — Lydia (546 BC), Babylon (539 BC), and Egypt (525 BC).
Like Medo-Persia, Greece is named explicitly in Daniel 8: "The rough goat is the king of Grecia: and the great horn that is between his eyes is the first king." The first king is Alexander. The goat ran "on the face of the whole earth, and touched not the ground" — an astonishing description of the speed of Alexander's campaign, which conquered the Persian Empire in only three years (334–331 BC).
The four wings and four heads of the Daniel 7 leopard, and the four horns of the Daniel 8 he-goat after the great horn was broken, all carry the same picture: at the height of his power, the king fell, and his empire was divided into four. Alexander died in Babylon in 323 BC at age thirty-two with no clear heir, and after a generation of succession wars his empire stabilized into four major successor kingdoms.
After the wars of the Diadochi, Alexander's empire stabilized — though never reunified — into four major successor kingdoms, each ruled by one of his generals or their heirs. The Bible refers to two of them repeatedly in Daniel 11, where they appear as the king of the north (the Seleucids, in Syria and Mesopotamia) and the king of the south (the Ptolemies, in Egypt). Their wars, which spanned more than a century and a half, are described in Daniel 11 with such specificity that some critics have insisted the chapter must have been written after the fact.
The Daniel 11 prophecy passes through these dynasties, reaches Antiochus IV Epiphanes — the Seleucid king who desecrated the Jerusalem Temple in 167 BC by erecting an altar to Zeus on the altar of burnt offering and sacrificing a pig there — and then continues. The Maccabean revolt that followed (167–164 BC) recovered and rededicated the Temple, the rededication preserved in the Festival of Hanukkah.
Lysimachus — Thrace and parts of Asia Minor (until 281 BC, killed at Corupedium; territory absorbed).
Seleucus — Syria, Mesopotamia, and the eastern reaches (until 63 BC, when Pompey annexed Syria for Rome). This is the "king of the north" of Daniel 11.
Ptolemy — Egypt (until 30 BC, when Cleopatra VII died and Octavian annexed Egypt as a Roman province). This is the "king of the south" of Daniel 11.
Daniel 8 does not depict Rome — that vision is concerned with Persia and Greece, the two kingdoms named explicitly by Gabriel. But Daniel 2 and Daniel 7 both depict a fourth kingdom that arises after Greece and is unlike the others. In Daniel 2 it is iron — strong, breaking and crushing what came before. In Daniel 7 it is dreadful, terrible, and strong exceedingly, with great iron teeth that devour, break in pieces, and stamp the residue with its feet.
Rome did exactly this. It absorbed the four Greek successor kingdoms one by one — Macedonia in 168 BC, Pergamum in 133 BC, Syria in 63 BC, Egypt in 30 BC. It rolled over the Hasmonean state when Pompey took Jerusalem in 63 BC and entered the Holy of Holies. It governed Judea through the procuratorial system in the time of Christ. It destroyed the Second Temple in 70 AD, scattered the Jewish nation in 135 AD after the Bar Kokhba revolt, and dominated the Mediterranean world for centuries.
It is also during Rome — and only during Rome — that the great act of the chronological chain takes place. The seventy weeks of Daniel 9 run from the decree to Nehemiah (445 BC, late Persian period) to the cutting off of Messiah (32 AD, Roman period). Rome was the empire of the cross.
The fourth kingdom in Daniel does not give way to a fifth kingdom in time. Instead, it enters a final phase in which the iron remains but is mixed with clay — strength alongside brittleness, partly strong, partly broken, "they shall not cleave one to another, even as iron is not mixed with miry clay." Daniel 7 describes the same phase with different imagery: the dreadful beast develops ten horns, and among them a little horn arises which speaks great things against the Most High, wears out the saints, and thinks to change times and laws, for a time, and times, and the dividing of time.
Christian interpreters have offered three main readings of what this phase corresponds to historically. None is settled, and this page does not aim to choose between them; the strength of the prophecy lies in what Daniel does say, not in any one school's identification of when or where.
It is divided. The feet are not iron alone; they are iron and clay together, partly strong, partly broken. The unity of the iron is gone.
It contains a hostile figure. A little horn (Dan 7:8, 20–25) speaks against the Most High, wears out the saints, and rules for "a time and times and the dividing of time" — 3½ prophetic years (cf. Rev 12:14). Three of the ten horns are plucked up before him.
It is ended by the stone. The image is not weathered away by erosion. It is struck on the feet by a stone cut out without hands, which breaks the entire statue to pieces and grinds it to chaff (Dan 2:34–35).
The succession of empires does not end in Daniel with the fall of Rome or with a final divided form. It ends with a kingdom unlike any of them — one not raised by human conquest, not assembled by armies, not bounded by the rise and fall of civilizations. In Daniel 2, this kingdom appears as a stone cut out of a mountain without hands, which strikes the image on its feet and shatters it. The stone then becomes a great mountain and fills the whole earth. In Daniel 7, the same kingdom appears as one like the Son of Man, coming with the clouds of heaven, given dominion and glory and a kingdom that shall not pass away.
The Son of Man — the title Christ used for himself more than any other in the Gospels — is a direct citation of Daniel 7. When Christ stood before the Sanhedrin and was asked whether he was the Messiah, he answered with the words of this vision: "Ye shall see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven" (Mark 14:62). The high priest tore his clothes and called it blasphemy. He understood exactly which prophecy was being claimed.
"In the days of these kings shall the God of heaven set up a kingdom, which shall never be destroyed." The kingdom was inaugurated at Christ's first coming — in the days of the fourth empire, Rome — and it will be consummated at his return. The stone is already in flight.
Daniel's three vision-systems — the statue, the four beasts, the ram and goat — are not three different prophecies but one prophecy delivered three times, each time in a different symbolic register. Daniel 2 is given to a Gentile king (Nebuchadnezzar) and uses the imagery of metals, which any ancient hearer would have understood: gold above, lower metals below, weakness at the foundation. Daniel 7 is given to Daniel himself and uses the imagery of beasts, drawing on the deep biblical association between beasts and Gentile nations. Daniel 8 is given to Daniel later and is the most specific — the angel Gabriel names two of the empires directly.
The convergence of the three is what locks the identifications. The ram is Medo-Persia by Gabriel's own word; therefore the silver and the bear are also Medo-Persia. The he-goat is Greece by Gabriel's own word; therefore the brass and the leopard are also Greece. From those two anchors, the head of gold (which Daniel himself names as Babylon) and the legs of iron (which arise after Greece) are fixed by sequence. Daniel saw the same future three times in three different ways, and the three pictures hold together as one.