Daniel 2, 7, and 11

Summary

Daniel contains four visions of world empires.  Chapter 2 is a statue of four metals, chapter 7 four beasts, chapter 8 a ram and a goat, and chapters 10–12 a long angelic speech about "the king of the north" and "the king of the south."  This article asks which kingdoms they describe, how closely each matches the history, and where the match stops.  When the book was written is argued in When Was the Book of Daniel Written?, and the seventy weeks of Daniel 9 in Daniel 9.  The tests cited by number are those of How to Test a Fulfilled Prophecy.

• Daniel 8 names its empires; chapters 2 and 7 do not. Gabriel says the two-horned ram is "the kings of Media and Persia" and the goat "the king of Greece." Its small horn is Antiochus IV Epiphanes, who desecrated the Jerusalem temple in 167 BC; conservative and critical commentators agree on that. The dispute is over the second, third and fourth kingdoms of chapters 2 and 7.
• Two schemes, and neither is tied to a date. Most critical scholars (Collins, Hartman and Di Lella, Goldingay) read Babylon, Media, Persia, Greece. The traditional reading (Jerome, Young, Baldwin, Archer, Miller) reads Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece, Rome. But the evangelicals Gurney and Walton hold a sixth-century date and still read Greece as the fourth kingdom, and Archer argues that even a second-century author predicted Rome.
• The text's own markers lean toward Greece. The Roman scheme's best evidence is the single ram for Media and Persia in 8:20, which Collins concedes "departs from the view of the four kingdoms standard throughout the book." The Greek scheme's best evidence is that the little horn of chapter 7 and the small horn of chapter 8 have the same career, that the book names no gentile power after Greece, and that a Babylonian king list published in 1954 records a co-king whom Antiochus IV had killed, which answers Young's objection that the evidence for such a king was "scanty."
• Daniel 11:2–35 matches the history closely. It makes 48 checkable claims, from four Persian kings and Alexander's broken empire to Berenice's marriage, the battle of Raphia, Cleopatra I's dowry, the Roman envoy who drew a circle round Antiochus IV in the sand, and the "abomination" of December 167 BC. Polybius, Appian, Livy, Diodorus, Babylonian tablets and 1 Maccabees confirm most of them, and no independent source contradicts any of them. The detail thickens toward one king: one verse for Persia, nineteen for Antiochus IV's eleven years.
• The match stops between December 167 and December 164 BC. Verses 36–39 fit Antiochus only loosely. Verses 40–45 describe a third conquest of Egypt and a death "between the seas toward the beautiful holy mountain." Antiochus made no such campaign. Polybius, Appian, 1 and 2 Maccabees and a Babylonian king list all place his death in Persia, and Babylon heard of it in November or December 164 BC. The chapter never mentions the rededication of the temple in December 164. Collins, Young, Archer, Baldwin and Goldingay all agree that verses 40–45 do not describe what Antiochus did.
• They disagree about whom the verses describe. Critics read a failed forecast about Antiochus. Jerome, Young, Archer and Miller read a future Antichrist, though they place the switch at different verses and the Hebrew marks none. Gurney reads Rome; Baldwin and Goldingay read prophecy that should not be scored as a literal forecast. Every reading except the first concedes that the verses are not a fulfilled prediction about Antiochus.
• Test 1 cuts both ways. The turning point is evidence, not an assumption that prophecy is impossible, and it is the same evidence that dates other ancient after-the-event prophecies. Against it stands a 2025 radiocarbon date for a Qumran copy of Daniel 10–11, argued in the dating article, which if right puts verses 21–29 on parchment before Antiochus IV reigned.
• Daniel 2 and 7 offer no checkable fulfilled prediction. On the Greek reading, chapter 7 expected God's kingdom to follow Antiochus IV's fall, and Hartman and Di Lella call that "a prediction not borne out by events." On the Roman reading, Rome ruling when Jesus was born is a hit, but Baldwin grants that Rome's rise "was already obvious" in the 160s BC, and no surviving reader identifies the fourth kingdom with Rome before Rome ruled Judea. 4 Ezra, about AD 100, says the Roman interpretation "was not expounded" to Daniel.

Verdict.  The visions describe Babylon, Media-Persia and Greece, and Daniel 11 follows the wars of the Ptolemies and Seleucids accurately down to Antiochus IV's persecution of 167–165 BC.  There the match stops:  the king's last campaign and death in 11:40–45 did not happen as described, and no reading makes those verses a fulfilled prediction.  Whether verses 21–35 were written before the events turns on one radiocarbon sample;  until that is settled, Daniel 2, 7 and 11 cannot be offered to a skeptic as fulfilled prophecy.

Part 1: Which four kingdoms?

What the book itself names

Daniel names very few of its kingdoms.  In chapter 2 Daniel tells Nebuchadnezzar, "You are the head of gold."¹  In chapter 8 the angel Gabriel names both animals:  "The ram that you saw with the two horns stands for the kings of Media and Persia.  The male goat is the king of Greece, and the large horn between its eyes is the first king."¹  In chapter 10 the angel fights "the prince of Persia," and "the prince of Greece is coming."¹  Chapter 11 then runs from Persia to Greece and on to "the time of the end."  Rome appears once, as "ships of Kittim" that stop a king of the north in his tracks (11:30), and is never called a kingdom.

Two identifications are not in dispute.  The first kingdom is Babylon.  The "small horn" of chapter 8, which grows out of one of the four horns that replace Alexander, is Antiochus IV Epiphanes, the Seleucid king who desecrated the Jerusalem temple in 167 BC.  Jerome said so in the fifth century.²  E. J. Young, whose 1949 commentary is the standard conservative defence of a Roman fourth kingdom, builds his own argument on it:  "the horn of ch. 8 evidently stands for Antiochus Epiphanes."³  John Goldingay calls the identifications in chapter 8 "all but universally agreed."⁴

The dispute is over chapters 2 and 7, where the second, third and fourth kingdoms are not named.

The two schemes, in their defenders' words

John J. Collins, whose Hermeneia volume is the standard critical commentary, argues from the book's own horizon:  "Within the chronological restraints of the Book of Daniel, the fourth kingdom can be no later than that of Greece (despite the longstanding tradition that identified it with Rome, beginning with Josephus).  The latest gentile sovereignty acknowledged anywhere in the book is that of the “prince of Greece” at 10:20.  In the context of Daniel, the second and third kingdoms must be identified as Media and Persia."⁵  Louis Hartman and Alexander Di Lella, in the Anchor Bible, reach the same order from the reigns the book narrates:  "Because 6:1 and 6:29 make a clear distinction between the reigns of the Medes and Persians, it is quite legitimate to conclude that the Book of Daniel itself suggests a framework of four successive world-kingdoms in this order:  the Babylonians, Medes, Persians, and Greeks (or Macedonians)."⁶  They add that this framework is wrong as history:  "Outside the Book of Daniel there is no record of a Median kingdom between the Babylonian and Persian empires."⁶

Young summarises the Roman case in four points.  The little horns of chapters 7 and 8 are different figures.  The second kingdom is "Medo-Persia and not Media alone," so "the order must be Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece, Rome."  The nameless fourth beast and the goat of chapter 8 are drawn too differently to be the same empire.  And Daniel 2:44 places the kingdom of God in the time of the four:  "In the days of those kings the God of heaven will raise up an everlasting kingdom."¹  Young:  "As a matter of historical fact, Christ did not appear upon earth in the days of the Grecian empire, but when Rome was mistress of the world.  If then we are to regard these words (i.e., 2:44) as true prophecy, we are compelled to conclude that the fourth kingdom is Rome and not Greece."³  Gleason Archer rests the case on one verse, the writing on Belshazzar's wall:  "Nothing could be plainer from this verse (Dan. 5:28) than that the author of Daniel believed that imperial power passed directly from the Babylonian to the Medo-Persian as a federated empire-- not to the Median Empire first, then a few years later to the Persian Empire (as the Maccabean date hypothesis demands)."⁷

Two facts break the usual pairing of these schemes with the two dates.  First, the Greek scheme does not need a late date.  Robert Gurney, writing in the evangelical journal Themelios in 1977, defended a sixth-century Daniel and still concluded that "Daniel’s four kingdoms are an accurate, true-to-history description of the Babylonian, Median, Persian and Greek empires."⁸  John Walton, then at Moody Bible Institute, built on Gurney and found that the Roman consensus rests largely on "a scarcity of defensible alternatives."⁹  Joyce Baldwin, who holds the Roman view, notes that "various conservative Christians, including the Westminster divines, held the Greek view long before it became the hallmark of liberal orthodoxy."¹⁰  Second, the Roman scheme does not need an early date.  Archer argues that even a Maccabean author predicted Rome, so "successful predictive prophecy cannot be eliminated from Daniel even by a Maccabean date hypothesis!"⁷  The identity of the fourth kingdom therefore has to be argued from the text, not read off one's view of the date.

The text's own markers

The visions supply about a dozen details that bear on the question.  Each is listed below with the side it favours and the other side's answer.

The Roman scheme's strongest marker is the ram.  Chapter 8 draws Media and Persia as one animal with two horns, the longer coming up second.  Young states the point exactly:  "A distinction between Media and Persia is made, thus revealing the composite nature of the kingdom.  2) The underlying unity of the kingdom is shown by the fact that one animal represents it."³  Baldwin adds that Daniel 8:20 "expressly" names "the kings of Media and Persia," and that "The writer did not think of the ram as representing two empires (erroneously Median and Persian, as many insist), but one, for Media and Persia had become one kingdom."¹⁰  Collins concedes the force of it:  "The representation of Media and Persia as two horns of the same kingdom departs from the view of the four kingdoms standard throughout the book, which treats Media separately.  It lends some support to the view that an older vision is being adapted here."⁵  That reply saves the critical scheme only by splitting the book into sources, and it grants that chapter 8 on its face pairs Media and Persia.

The leopard is the second-best Roman marker.  If the third beast is Greece, its four heads match the four kingdoms that replace Alexander in 8:22, and Jerome read it that way, naming "Ptolemy, Seleucus, Philip ... and Antigonus."²  The Greek scheme has to make the four heads four Persian kings, which is possible but less natural.

The Greek scheme's strongest marker is the little horn.  The horn of chapter 7 and the horn of chapter 8 do the same things in the same order.  Each starts small and becomes great (7:8, 20;  8:9).  Each speaks against God and attacks "the holy ones" (7:21, 25;  8:10–11, 24–25).  Each interferes with appointed times or with the daily sacrifice for a limited period, "a time, times, and half a time" (7:25) and 2,300 evenings and mornings (8:14).  Each is ended by God, not by human hands (7:26;  8:25).  Goldingay, an evangelical, sets the two portraits side by side and concludes:  "The features of the two portraits are essentially similar."  He adds that the horn of chapter 8 "unequivocally denotes Antiochus IV Epiphanes."⁴  The Roman scheme must hold that the visionary saw two persecutors, centuries apart, with the same career, and that the angel explained only one of them.  That is possible, and Young argues it, but it is the more expensive reading.

The ten horns have new evidence.  On the Greek scheme the ten horns are Seleucid kings and the three uprooted horns are rivals Antiochus IV pushed aside to take the throne.  Collins proposes Seleucus IV and his two sons, Antiochus and Demetrius.⁵  Young's main objection was that the younger Antiochus was not known to be a king:  "It is, of course, maintained by some scholars that this murdered son had been a king.  ...  However, the evidence is scanty, and it is best not to be dogmatic."³  Five years after Young wrote, A. J. Sachs and D. J. Wiseman published a Babylonian king list, British Museum tablet BM 35603, which settles that point.  It records that in the year Antiochus IV took the throne, "An(tiochus IV) and An(tiochus), his son, [were] kings," and that in Seleucid year 142, 170 BC, "At the command of An(tiochus IV), the king, An(tiochus), the king, his son, was killed."¹¹  So at least one of the three was a crowned king, and Antiochus IV had him killed.  Seleucus IV was murdered by his minister Heliodorus, and Demetrius was a hostage in Rome, so Collins himself grants that Antiochus "could be charged only with the death of the younger Antiochus."⁵  Porphyry's older list, Ptolemy VI, Ptolemy VIII and Artaxias of Armenia, names three kings Antiochus did defeat in war.  Jerome's rebuttal was that "The first two of these kings died long before Antiochus was born."²  That is false:  both Ptolemies were Antiochus's nephews, and he fought Ptolemy VI in 170–169 BC.  Neither list is clean, but the Greek scheme can name its horns from records, and the Roman scheme places its ten kings in the future.

The Roman scheme's ten horns have no early history.  Jerome expected the ten to divide the Roman Empire "at the end of the world."²  S. R. Driver, the Oxford Hebraist, called it the "fatal objection" to the Roman view "that it does not agree with the history," because the Roman Empire passed away without ten kingdoms arising from it.¹²  The modern answer is a revived Roman Empire after a gap.  Walton, an evangelical, searched for that view before 1800 and reports:  "I have found no examples earlier than the nineteenth century."⁹  He judges that it "has every appearance of grasping at straws."⁹  Which future states the ten horns are is argued in Eschatology and Israel.

Darius the Mede ties the schemes to the history.  The Greek scheme reads the book's Median reign as a Median empire, and Hartman and Di Lella say plainly that no such empire followed Babylon.  The Roman scheme reads Darius as part of one Medo-Persian realm, which then needs Darius to be someone attested in the Persian conquest.  The candidates (Cyrus himself, the governor Gubaru, an otherwise unknown Cyaxares II) and the reason none has an inscription are set out in When Was the Book of Daniel Written?.  That article also notes D. J. Wiseman's own observation that the identity of Darius and the identity of the fourth kingdom stand or fall together.

Where the markers point

The markers do not tie.  The Roman scheme has one strong internal marker, the single ram of 8:20, and one good one, the four heads.  The Greek scheme has the little horn, whose two portraits match too closely to be chance, the book's silence about any power after Greece, a named sequence of reigns from Babylon to a Mede to Cyrus, and a ten-horn list that now includes a king Antiochus IV is recorded as killing.  On the text alone the fourth kingdom of chapter 7 is more likely Greece.  That is a judgement about what the author meant, not about when he wrote:  Gurney and Walton reach it while holding a sixth-century date.  It has a cost for the critical side as well.  If chapter 7's fourth kingdom is Greece, then chapter 7 predicted that God's kingdom would follow the fall of the little horn, and Part 3 shows that prediction did not come true in the way the chapter describes.

Part 2: Daniel 11, verse by verse

The match

Daniel 11 is an angel's account, dated to "the third year of King Cyrus of Persia" (10:1), of "what will happen to your people in future days" (10:14).¹  Its two main characters are "the king of the south" and "the king of the north."  The oldest translation, the Old Greek of the second century BC, already renders "the king of the south" as "the king of Egypt" and the "ships of Kittim" as "the Romans."¹³  The table sets each verse group beside the event it is usually matched to and the ancient source that reports that event independently.  The last column rates how specific the verse is:  high where it names a turn of events that could easily have gone otherwise, medium where the fit is clear but the details are few, low where many rulers would fit.

The independent witnesses are of three kinds.  Greek and Roman historians, above all Polybius, a contemporary of Antiochus IV who wrote within a generation of his death.  Babylonian scribes, who had no interest in Jerusalem:  their king list gives Antiochus III's death in Elam, the co-reign and killing of the boy Antiochus, and Antiochus IV's death, and a contemporary astronomical diary reports in the summer of 169 BC that "Antiochus marched victoriously through the cities of Meluhha," an old Babylonian name that the online edition of the diaries glosses as Egypt.²⁵  And Jewish histories, 1 and 2 Maccabees, written later and not independent of each other on every point.

Counted verse by verse, verses 2–35 make 48 concrete claims that an event could have falsified.²⁶  None is contradicted by the sources.  Most are confirmed.  A few are not attested anywhere, such as the violent Judeans of 11:14 and the army "swept away" in 11:26;  a few have more than one candidate, such as the "covenant leader" of 11:22;  and for 11:17 Appian gives a different motive for the marriage, "to keep him quiet during the war with the Romans."¹⁶  The density of detail is uneven in a telling way.  Computing years per verse from the dates in the table, verse 2 spends one verse on fifty-six years of Persian rule and then passes over the next 144 years, the kings that Jerome notes the author skips before he "passes right on to Alexander";  verses 3–20 give about nine years to a verse;  verses 21–39 give the eleven-year reign of Antiochus IV nineteen verses, about seven months each.²⁷  A revelation dated to Cyrus's third year has no obvious reason to be thinnest about Persia and thickest about one Seleucid king three and a half centuries later.

Where the match stops

Verses 36–39 fit Antiochus loosely.  The king who "will exalt and magnify himself above every deity" matches a ruler whose coins carried the title "God Manifest."  Collins notes that "Antiochus IV was the first Hellenistic king to introduce divine epithets such as “God Manifest” on his coins," and adds that "The significance of these titles should not be exaggerated."⁵  "A god his fathers did not acknowledge" fits the imposition of Zeus Olympius, or the Syrian Baal Shamem, on the Jerusalem temple, though Collins grants that "It can hardly be said that earlier Seleucids did not know Zeus Olympius."⁵  Baldwin, the conservative commentator, gives the honest summary:  "while it is true that Antiochus IV fulfils in a general way the description given in these verses, there are discrepancies when it comes to detail regarding his religious practice."¹⁰  Polybius says the opposite of 11:37 read literally:  "in the honours he paid to the gods he far surpassed all his predecessors."¹⁹

Verses 40–45 fit nothing Antiochus did.  The commentators of every school agree on this, and say so in nearly the same words.

• Collins: "Porphyry’s claim that Antiochus launched another campaign against Philometor in the eleventh year of his reign is unsupported. Instead Antiochus led a campaign to the east in 165 and remained there for the last year and a half of his life."⁵
• Young: "This statement cannot possibly apply to Antiochus, since he died at Tabae in Persia."³
• Archer: "vv. 36-45 do not conform to what is known of the life and career of Antiochus Epiphanes."⁷
• Baldwin: "the events that are mentioned, such as the conquest of Egypt and the battle between the sea and the glorious holy mountain (45), never took place."¹⁰
• Goldingay: "vv 40—45 cannot be correlated with actual events as vv 21—39 can."⁴

The record of how Antiochus actually died is unusually good, and it comes from four independent directions.  Polybius:  "In Syria King Antiochus, wishing to provide himself with money, decided to make an expedition against the sanctuary of Artemis in Elymaïs.  On reaching the spot he was foiled in his hopes, as the barbarian tribes who dwelt in the neighbourhood would not permit the outrage, and on his retreat he died at Tabae in Persia, smitten with madness, as some people say".¹⁹  Appian has him rob "the temple of Venus Elymais" and die "of a wasting disease."¹⁶  1 Maccabees has him fail at "Elymais in the country of Persia," fall sick "for grief," and say, "I perish through great grief in a strange land."²⁴  2 Maccabees puts the failed robbery at Persepolis and has him die "in a strange country in the mountains."²³  The Babylonian king list records:  "Year 148, Kislîmu [= month IX]: It was heard that An(tiochus IV), the k[ing died]."¹¹  Kislev of Seleucid year 148 by the Babylonian count is November to December 164 BC.  Hartman and Di Lella give the range as "between 20 November and 19 December 164 B.C."⁶  1 Maccabees puts the death in its year 149, which on its face is a year later.  How that book counts the Seleucid years against the Babylonian count is disputed, so the Babylonian list is the firmer date.

The sources disagree on the temple and the town, Artemis or Nanaia, Elymais or Persepolis, Tabae or "the mountains."  They agree on what matters for Daniel:  he died in Persia, far from Judea, after a raid on a temple there.  Tabae is usually placed near Isfahan, about 1,550 km (960 miles) from Jerusalem in a straight line.  Archer's "nearly two thousand miles" doubles that, but the point stands either way.²⁸  He did not pitch his tents between the sea and Zion, and he did not die there.  Porphyry tried to save the verse by making "the seas" the Tigris and Euphrates.  Jerome answered that "it would be foolish to interpret the two seas as being the two rivers of Mesopotamia,"² and James Montgomery, in the International Critical Commentary, noted that such readings "generate the absurdity of a Jew calling a heathen temple ‘Holy Mount of Delight.’"²⁹

One detail lands.  Verse 44 has the king alarmed by news "from the east and north."  In his last two years Antiochus was in fact campaigning in the east and north, against Artaxias of Armenia, whom Appian says he "took prisoner," and in the upper satrapies.¹⁶  Hartman and Di Lella grant that "It may have been possible for the sacred author when he wrote these lines to have surmised correctly that Antiochus would eventually have to deal with these peoples."⁶  It is a partial fit for an expected direction, not a confirmed event, and it sits between two verses that miss.

So the precise point is this.  The last event in Daniel 11 that matches the record is the desecration of the temple in December 167 BC and the start of the resistance that followed (11:31–35).  The chapter shows no knowledge of the eastern campaign that began in 165 BC, of the defeat of the Seleucid generals by Judas, or of the rededication of the temple on 25 Kislev of year 148, December 164 BC, which 1 Maccabees counts to the day.²⁴  An author who had seen the temple cleansed would hardly have left it out of a chapter about its defilement.  Collins puts the conclusion in a sentence:  "The author of Daniel 11 was unaware of the expedition to Persia (which is noted in 1 Macc 3:31—37) and records no actual events after the profanation of the temple."⁵

Four readings of the ending

Everyone agrees that 11:40–45 does not describe Antiochus IV.  They disagree about whom it describes.

1.  The same king, wrongly predicted.  This is the critical reading.  The Hebrew of 11:36 continues with "the king," hammelek, with the definite article and no new subject introduced, and verse 40 has the king of the south attack "him."  Collins:  "There is nothing to indicate a change of subjects from the preceding passage, so there can be no doubt that the reference is to Antiochus."⁵  Goldingay, an evangelical:  "There is no hint of a transition to Antichrist or Antiochus V ... or Pompey and his associates (Gurney)."⁴  On this reading the author wrote between the desecration and the rededication, expected one more Egyptian war and a death near Jerusalem, and was wrong.

2.  A future Antichrist.  This is the oldest Christian reading, though its starting point has moved.  Jerome took the turn at 11:21, treating everything from there as spoken of the Antichrist, with Antiochus as a "type":  "those things which happened to him in a preliminary way are to be completely fulfilled in the case of the Antichrist."²  At 11:36 he wrote:  "We too understand this to refer to the Antichrist."²  Young puts the turn at verse 36:  "He adopts the view that Antiochus is portrayed as a type of the Antichrist, but that such portrayal begins only at v. 36."³  Stephen Miller gives the reasons:  "Verse 40 reveals that this king’s activities would take place “at the time of the end” (see Dan. 10:14), and the resurrection of the saints would occur immediately after God delivers His people from this evil individual’s power (see 12:2)."³⁰  Andrew Steinmann states the claim plainly:  the traditional reading "views the end of Daniel 11 not as inaccurate prophecy but as prophecy that is yet to be fulfilled."³¹

The futurist reading has one real textual support.  Daniel 12 follows straight on, "At that time," with the archangel Michael arising, a time of distress without equal, and the dead awaking, some to everlasting life and some to everlasting shame.¹  None of that happened in 164 BC.  The vision certainly reaches past Antiochus somewhere.  Against it are three points.  The Hebrew marks no change of subject.  "The time of the end" cannot mark the switch, because Daniel uses the phrase for the ram-and-goat vision, which Young, Miller and Jerome all assign to Antiochus:  "the vision pertains to the time of the end."¹  And the futurists do not agree where the switch is:  at 11:21 for Jerome, at 11:36 for Hippolytus, Young and Miller, and at 11:40 for others.^{3 5}  A break that has to be placed by the interpreter is not in the text.

3.  Rome.  Gurney, a conservative, made "the king of the north" a new figure at 11:40:  "verses 40-43 are a description of the destruction of the Greek empire by Rome ... To be more precise, they describe the annexation of Syria by Scaurus and Pompey.  I also suggested that verses 44 and 45 describe the unsuccessful campaign of Crassus against the Parthians in 54 BC."⁸  This needs the same unmarked change of subject, and Crassus died at Carrhae in Mesopotamia, not between the sea and Zion.

4.  Prophecy, not history.  Baldwin and Goldingay, from different starting points, both say the passage should not be scored as a forecast of events.  Baldwin:  "If one takes the view that what we have here is history, then this account is mistaken; but if the book is allowed to provide the genre, and what we have here is prophecy, there is no problem.  Biblical prophecy regularly exhibits this characteristic of telescoping the future".¹⁰  Goldingay calls verses 40–45 "an imaginative scenario of the kind of issue that must come from present events," and adds:  "It is not the nature of biblical prophecy to give a literal account of events before they take place."⁴

Readings 2, 3 and 4 have one thing in common.  Each concedes that 11:40–45 is not a fulfilled prediction about Antiochus IV.  The futurist keeps the verses as a prediction still awaiting fulfilment, which cannot count as evidence until it happens.  Goldingay and Baldwin keep them as true in a non-literal sense, which cannot count as evidence of foreknowledge at all.  Only reading 1 treats them as a testable forecast, and on that reading they failed.

Test 1 in both directions

The method article's Test 1 asks whether a text was written before the event, and treats a turning point, accurate to a date and wrong after it, as internal evidence that the author stood at that date.³²  It also warns, with John Oswalt, that a late date resting only on a prediction's accuracy assumes what it sets out to prove.  Both halves of that rule apply here.

Against the early date.  The late date for Daniel 11 does not rest on accuracy alone.  It rests on three facts that would count against a genuine prophet just as much:  a sharp change from accuracy to error at one point in 165–164 BC, a density of detail that peaks at that point, and silence about the rededication that the author's own community celebrated.  Baldwin, defending the early date, stated the critics' criterion more clearly than most critics:  "The author’s true standpoint is to be discerned at the moment of transition, when history can no longer be demonstrated to correspond to the events prophesied."³³  That is a fair test, and Daniel 11 shows such a moment.  It is the same test that dates the Babylonian Dynastic Prophecy and the Egyptian Prophecy of Neferti, as the method article shows.  Applying it to those texts and not to Daniel would fail Test 8.

Against the late date.  The turning point is internal evidence.  A physical date can outweigh it.  A Qumran copy of Daniel, 4Q114, preserves part of chapters 10 and 11, including the Egyptian campaigns of 11:25–29.  Its parchment was radiocarbon-dated in 2025, and on the study's own figures most of the probability in its later range falls before Antiochus IV took the throne.  If that date holds, verses 21–29 were written before the events they describe, and the turning point at verse 40 would have to be explained some other way.  The radiocarbon numbers, their two published misreadings, and the reasons for caution about one sample are set out in When Was the Book of Daniel Written?.  This article takes its conclusion as given:  the internal and the physical evidence point in opposite directions, and neither may be quoted while the other is suppressed.

What survives either way.  If the parchment date is right, Daniel 11:21–35 is a remarkable prediction and 11:40–45 is still unfulfilled.  If the turning point is right, verses 2–39 are history written as prophecy and 11:40–45 is a failed forecast.  On neither view do verses 40–45 count as a fulfilled prediction.  Daniel 11 can be offered to a skeptic as evidence of foreknowledge only after the date of 4Q114 has been settled in its favour, and then only for verses 21–35.

Part 3: Daniel 2 and 7 as predictions

What the two chapters commit to

Test 2 asks what a text commits to in advance:  who, what, where and when, and whether each could fail.³⁴  Daniel 2 and 7 commit to a shape of history more than to events.  There will be four kingdoms in sequence.  The fourth will be the strongest, will "break in pieces and crush the others,"¹ and will become "a divided kingdom."¹  Out of it come ten kings, then another who brings down three of them, speaks against God, persecutes "the holy ones," and seeks "to change times established by law."¹  Then "the court will convene, and his ruling authority will be removed—destroyed and abolished forever!"¹  And God's kingdom "will break in pieces and bring about the demise of all these kingdoms."¹

The chapters do not say when.  They do say what comes next:  God's kingdom follows the fall of the last horn.  That one commitment is what each scheme has to deal with.

On the Greek reading the prediction failed

If the fourth kingdom is Greece and the little horn is Antiochus IV, Daniel 7 predicted that his fall would bring the end of gentile rule and the kingdom of "the holy ones of the Most High."  Antiochus died in 164 BC.  The Seleucid kingdom lasted another hundred years, until Pompey made Syria a Roman province, and the Ptolemaic kingdom another 134, until 30 BC.³⁵  The Hasmonean state that followed the Maccabean revolt was a Jewish kingdom, not an everlasting one, and Rome absorbed it in 63 BC.  Hartman and Di Lella, who hold the Greek reading, say so directly:  the author "believed that the tenth Greek king would be the last ruler of the Greek kingdom—a prediction not borne out by events."⁶

The critical reading is often presented as the one that removes prophecy from Daniel.  It does not remove it.  It finds a real prediction in Daniel 7 and in Daniel 11:40–45, made in the 160s BC, and finds that both failed.  A skeptic who adopts the Greek scheme should say so, because the same reading that dates the book by its turning point also counts its misses.  Gurney's early-date version escapes the failure only by stretching the gap:  he dates the end of the Greek empire to the annexation of Egypt and the coming of the kingdom to Jesus's birth "around 6 BC," and makes the fourth kingdom's destruction a process that "began in the time of Antiochus Epiphanes."⁸  On that reading Daniel 7's sequence holds, but its "until" is about 130 years long.

On the Roman reading the prediction is open, and late

If the fourth kingdom is Rome, Daniel 2 makes a claim that came true in one sense:  Jesus was born when Rome ruled, "in the days of those kings."  Young's argument rests on it.³  But the claim was not hard to make in the 160s BC.  Daniel 11:30 itself records Rome turning Antiochus out of Egypt, and Baldwin concedes the point:  "if the author was working in the second century BC, during the Maccabean struggle, it was already obvious to the observer without any supernatural gift of insight that Rome was gaining supremacy over Greece."¹⁰  That concession limits Archer's argument that even a Maccabean author predicted Rome.  By 168 BC a Judean did not need revelation to guess that Rome came next.

The rest of the Roman reading is not yet testable.  The ten horns have not been identified in the past:  Jerome placed them "at the end of the world, when the Roman Empire is to be destroyed,"² and Miller says only that the kings "must have a connection with ancient Rome."³⁰  A prediction whose central events are still future passes no test today.  It may pass one later.

Read that way before? The history of the Roman reading

Test 3 asks whether a text was read as a prediction of this event before the event.  For the fourth kingdom the relevant event is Rome's rise to rule the East, from Magnesia in 190 BC to Pompey's capture of Jerusalem in 63 BC.  The early readers line up as follows.

The sources for the table are given in the notes.³⁶  Collins dates the Old Greek translation:  "A date in the late second century remains most probable for the translation of Daniel."⁵  Josephus wrote in the 90s AD:  "In the very same manner Daniel also wrote concerning the Roman government, and that our country should be made desolate by them."²⁰  When Josephus reached Daniel's stone, he declined to explain it:  "I do not think proper to relate it, since I have only undertaken to describe things past or things present, but not things that are future".²⁰  4 Ezra, a Jewish apocalypse written after the destruction of the temple, is the most revealing.  Its angel tells Ezra that the eagle "is the kingdom which was seen in the vision of thy brother Daniel.  But it was not expounded unto him, therefore now I declare it unto thee."³⁷  Goldingay reads this the same way:  "The interpreting angel explicitly notes that in seeing the fourth empire as Rome he is giving Daniel’s vision an interpretation different from that given to Daniel himself."⁴

So no surviving reader identifies Daniel's fourth kingdom with Rome before Rome ruled Judea.  The first who do so write after AD 70, and one of them says the identification is new.  Walton, an evangelical, draws the conclusion fairly:  the early Jewish and Christian readings "all date to the Roman period.  They therefore do not necessarily reflect an attempt at discerning the intentions of the book of Daniel but could just as easily represent reinterpretations of that data to suit what was perceived as historical reality."⁹  By Test 3 the Roman reading of the fourth kingdom is a reading after the event.  That does not make it wrong.  It means it cannot be offered as a prediction that was read as one beforehand.

The Roman readers' own forecasts

The ancient Roman readers did make predictions of their own from Daniel, and these can be scored.  Hippolytus, about AD 200, reasoned that the Persians ruled 330 years and the Greeks 300, so "of necessity the fourth beast, as being strong and mightier than all that were before it, will reign 500 years.  When the times are fulfilled, and the ten horns spring from the beast in the last (times), then Antichrist will appear among them."³⁸  He also dated Jesus's birth to the year 5500 from Adam and expected the world to end at 6000:  "6, 000 years must be fulfilled."³⁸  That put the end around AD 500.  Jerome, about AD 407, saw the iron-and-clay feet in his own day:  "so also in these last days there is nothing more feeble ... since we require the assistance of barbarian tribes both in our civil wars and against foreign nations."²  He expected ten kings to divide the Roman world and an eleventh to overcome three of them, "the king of Egypt, the king of [North] Africa, and the king of Ethiopia."²

The Christian writer Ian Huyett credits these readers with a hit.  He quotes Hippolytus and Jerome and concludes:  "That Rome would have no immediate successor is, by itself, a remarkable prediction, as it was far from obvious at the time."³⁹  The claim fails Test 2, because it never says what would count as a successor.  Several later states ruled large parts of Rome's world or claimed its name, and whether any of them "succeeded" Rome is a matter of definition, not of fact.  It also scores one clause while ignoring the forecasts it came with.  The ten kings did not divide Rome on Jerome's pattern, and the end did not come around AD 500.  Counted by Test 6, with the misses beside the hits, the ancient Roman reading of Daniel 2 and 7 has no clear success.

Part 4: The best case each way

For genuine prediction

1. The parchment date of 4Q114. If a copy of Daniel 10–11 really was made before 175 BC, then verses 21–29 were on parchment before Antiochus IV came to the throne, and no theory of composition in 165 BC survives for those verses. This is the strongest piece of evidence for prediction in Daniel, and it is physical, not interpretive. Its limits are set out in When Was the Book of Daniel Written?.
2. The futurist reading is coherent. Daniel 12:1–3 does describe events that did not happen in 164 BC, so the vision does reach past Antiochus somewhere, and Jerome, Hippolytus, Young and Miller can point to that. If the vision's last section is about a future figure, then Daniel 11 has no failed prediction in it, only an unfulfilled one.
3. The ram of 8:20. The one place where the book interprets its own symbols for Media and Persia, it makes them one animal. The Roman scheme follows that lead, and the critical scheme has to treat chapter 8 as adapting an older vision to escape it.
4. The density of correct detail. If Daniel 11 is early, its record of marriages, battles and betrayals over two centuries is without parallel. Nothing in verses 2–35 is contradicted by any source.

For history written as prophecy

1. A dated turning point. The match is close through the desecration of December 167 BC and the first resistance, loose in verses 36–39, and absent in 40–45, where four independent records place the king's death in Persia in late 164 BC. The chapter is silent about the rededication of December 164. That places the author between those two dates by the same rule that dates the Dynastic Prophecy and the Prophecy of Neferti.
2. The density curve. Detail rises steadily from one verse for Persia to nineteen verses for eleven years of Antiochus IV, and then stops.
3. The other forecasts fail in the same window. On the Greek reading, Daniel 7 expected God's kingdom to follow the fall of Antiochus IV; it did not. The day counts of 8:14 and 12:11–12, argued in When Was the Book of Daniel Written?, rise in a way that looks like a deadline being revised.
4. No early Roman reading. The Roman identification of the fourth kingdom first appears after Rome ruled Judea, and 4 Ezra says outright that it is a new interpretation.

The two lists do not cancel.  The case for prediction rests mainly on one radiocarbon sample and on a reading of 11:40–45 that defers the test to the future.  The case for history written as prophecy rests on a turning point that the commentators of every school concede, and on the independent record of how Antiochus died.

Objections and responses

1. "Critics date Daniel late only because they deny that prophecy is possible."  Some have.  But the argument here does not need that premise.  It rests on a turning point, which would date a genuine prophet's text just as well, and the method article adopts Oswalt's rule that accuracy alone proves nothing about date.³²  Porphyry's own argument was a turning-point argument:  "whatever he spoke of up till the time of Antiochus contained authentic history, whereas anything he may have conjectured beyond that point was false".²  Baldwin, defending the early date, accepted the criterion and disputed the facts.

2. "Daniel 11:40–45 is about the Antichrist, so nothing has failed."  That reading is possible, and the resurrection in 12:2 gives it a real foothold.  But it moves the verses from "fulfilled" to "not yet fulfilled," and an unfulfilled prediction is not evidence of foreknowledge.  The Hebrew marks no new subject, "the time of the end" is used of the Antiochus vision in 8:17, and its defenders place the switch at 11:21, 11:36 or 11:40.  Young, who holds it, grants that verse 45 "cannot possibly apply to Antiochus."³

3. "Daniel 8:20 makes Media and Persia one kingdom, so the fourth kingdom must be Rome."  It is the best argument for the Roman scheme.  But it does not force Rome.  Porphyry also made Medo-Persia one kingdom and still ended with Greece, as Alexander and his successors.  Goldingay answers that version too:  "Dan 7 sees the fourth empire as stronger and more violent than the third: this is not the estimate of the Seleucids in relation to Alexander".⁴  And the little horns of chapters 7 and 8 share a career too closely to be two different kings.

4. "Jesus applied 'the abomination of desolation' to a future event (Matthew 24:15), so Daniel 11:31 is about the future."  Baldwin notes that "Jesus went on to apply Daniel 9:27; 11:31; 12:11 to a time still future."¹⁰  But the oldest datable reading of the phrase is 1 Maccabees, about 100 BC, which uses it for Antiochus's altar:  "they set up the abomination of desolation upon the altar."²⁴  Whether Jesus reapplied Daniel's words to Rome or uncovered their only referent is a question about typology, Test 3.  It does not change what happened in 167 BC.

5. "The radiocarbon date of 4Q114 proves Daniel 11 is older than Antiochus."  It is real evidence, but from one sample, and it dates the animal skin, which could be older than the writing on it.  Its earlier and later ranges are almost equally probable, and the weight of the later range falls before 175 BC only on a reading of the study's figures that the dating article explains.  Even if the date is accepted in full, it does not make 11:40–45 fit.

6. "Daniel 2:44 says God's kingdom comes in the days of those kings, and Jesus came when Rome ruled."  True, and on the Roman reading it is a hit.  But by 168 BC Rome had already turned Antiochus out of Egypt, and Baldwin grants that Rome's rise was "already obvious to the observer without any supernatural gift of insight."¹⁰  The identification also first appears after the event.

7. "Josephus was a priest who knew the Jewish tradition, and he read the fourth kingdom as Rome."  He wrote in the 90s AD, after Rome had destroyed Jerusalem, and his own explanation of the iron kingdom names no one.²⁰  4 Ezra, from the same decade, says the Roman interpretation "was not expounded" to Daniel.³⁷

8. "Verse 45's places are symbolic, so the death of Antiochus elsewhere is no problem."  Young argues that Egypt, Edom, Moab and Ammon are "employed in these vv. in a symbolical sense," and admits that "Precisely what is signified it is difficult to determine."³  If the place names are symbols, the verse cannot be tested at all.  Reading the kings as literal and the places as symbols is a choice made after the fact.

9. "The accuracy of Daniel 11:2–35 is itself proof that it was written after the events."  It is not.  That is the question-begging Oswalt warned against.  Accuracy is evidence of late writing only when it is joined to a turning point, and Daniel 11 has one.  A skeptic should argue from the turning point, not from the accuracy.

10. "Archer showed that even a Maccabean author predicted Rome."  Archer's argument assumes the Roman scheme, which is the point in dispute.  And Baldwin, who holds the Roman scheme, grants that in the 160s BC the guess required no revelation.  Archer also overstates his supporting facts:  Tabae is about 960 miles from Jerusalem, not "nearly two thousand."²⁸

11. "Porphyry was a hostile pagan whose reading should be discounted."  His reading of chapter 11 as Antiochus is older than he is:  the Old Greek translator rendered the king of the south as Egypt and the ships of Kittim as Romans, and 1 Maccabees used Daniel's phrase for Antiochus's altar.  Jerome himself conceded that Porphyry "could not deny that they had taken place."²  Jerome's own rebuttals were not always accurate:  he dismissed Porphyry's three horns by saying the two Ptolemies "died long before Antiochus was born,"² although a few pages later he reports without objection that Antiochus marched against "his sister's son."²

12. "The ten horns are the states of modern Europe."  That is a futurist or historicist reading, and it belongs to Eschatology and Israel.  Walton found no example of the revived-Rome version before the nineteenth century.⁹

Issues and unanswered questions

1. Sachs and Wiseman's 1954 edition of the king list was not read. It is behind a paywall. Its text is quoted here from R. J. van der Spek's translation of the same tablet, BM 35603, which carries the editor's warning that the translation "needs to be revised" in places; the Antiochus IV entries are among the clearer lines.
2. Several defenders of the futurist reading were not obtained: Steinmann's 2008 Concordia commentary and the body of his 2005 article, Miller's 1994 New American Commentary, and Newsom's 2014 commentary. The futurist case is stated here from Jerome, Young, Archer, Miller's 1998 digest of his commentary, and Steinmann's own first page.
3. The date of 4Q114 is the hinge of Test 1 for Daniel 11. It is argued in the dating article, and this article does not re-weigh it.
4. The War Scroll's dependence on Daniel 11:40–12:3 is Vermes's judgement, and its column and line numbers were not checked against a printed edition.
5. Who is the "covenant leader" of 11:22? Onias III and the boy co-king Antiochus both fit, and the choice affects whether 11:22 dates the author's knowledge to 171 or 170 BC.
6. Gurney's and Walton's Median empire rests on Median power after Nebuchadnezzar's death in 562 BC, before Cyrus's victory in 550. Hartman and Di Lella say no record shows a Median kingdom between the Babylonian and Persian empires, and Walton's version makes the first kingdom Assyria although Daniel 2:38 makes it Nebuchadnezzar. Neither variant has been tested here against Median history.
7. A Babylonian diary of 163 BC mentions, in a broken line, men who came with "the king's corpse," in the month of Kislev or just after, but names no king.⁴⁰ If a better reading names Antiochus, it would be a second contemporary Babylonian witness to the death.
8. A marginal note in one Greek manuscript at Daniel 7:7 reads "the Romans who now rule." Its date was not checked. If it were early, it would be the oldest Roman reading of the fourth beast.
9. The Sibylline ten-horns passage (book 3) cannot be dated closely enough to say whether it is the earliest allusion to Daniel 7.

Verdict

Which kingdoms.  Daniel 8 names its two empires, Media-Persia and Greece, and its small horn is Antiochus IV;  on that the commentators of every school agree.  For Daniel 2 and 7 the text's own markers lean toward a Greek fourth kingdom:  the little horn's career matches chapter 8's, the book names no power after Greece, and the ten horns can be filled from Seleucid records that now include a co-king Antiochus IV had killed.  The Roman scheme's best support is the single ram of 8:20.  The question does not settle the book's date, since early-date conservatives hold the Greek scheme and late-date critics could hold either.

How closely the visions match.  Daniel 11:2–35 matches the Persian and Hellenistic record closely, with 48 checkable claims, none contradicted by an independent source and most confirmed by Polybius, Appian, Livy, Diodorus, Babylonian tablets or the books of Maccabees.  Verses 36–39 fit Antiochus IV only loosely.

Where the match stops.  It stops after the desecration of the temple in December 167 BC and the first Maccabean resistance, and before the rededication of December 164 BC.  Verses 40–45 describe a third Egyptian campaign and a death near Jerusalem.  Antiochus made no such campaign and died in Persia in November or December 164 BC.  Every commentator consulted, conservative or critical, agrees that these verses do not describe what he did.

What survives as prediction.  No reading turns 11:40–45 into a fulfilled prediction:  on the critical reading it failed, and on the futurist reading it is still to come.  Daniel 11:21–35 counts as prediction only if the radiocarbon date of 4Q114 holds.  Daniel 2 and 7 offer no fulfilled prediction that passes Tests 2 and 3:  on the Greek reading their one checkable commitment failed, and on the Roman reading the hit was guessable by 168 BC and was first read that way after Rome ruled Judea.  Daniel's visions of empires can be offered to a skeptic as a prediction only after the date of 4Q114 has been settled in their favour.  The stronger prophetic arguments from Daniel, the seventy weeks of chapter 9 and the "one like a son of man" of 7:13, do not depend on which empire the fourth beast is.  The seventy weeks are argued in Daniel 9.  The "son of man" is scored in Messianic Prophecy:  An Overview, and its early readings are in Second Temple Messianic Expectations.

Sources