Daniel 7:7 Commentary and Bible Study

‘After this I saw in the night visions, and behold a fourth beast’ – there is a pause because this next beast is to be so fearful. This time no animal is used to describe this beast; it seems to defy all comparison – ‘dreadful and terrible, and strong exceedingly; and it had great iron teeth.’ It is a horrible and unnatural picture of a beast that seems intent only on destroying and devouring. There is no mercy or gentleness in this picture, but only crushing power. The Roman Empire, that followed the empire of the Greeks, was depicted in Nebuchadnezzar's dream as being of iron, and iron features again here with its iron teeth. ‘It devoured and brake in pieces.’ That was, everyone agrees, a characteristic of Rome. Not rather, as the Babylonians did, trying to police and rule the regions by using nationals – taking them to Babylon as captives, as Daniel was taken, training and indoctrinating them in the ways of the Babylonians, and then posting them back home to administer the regions they had come from. There was nothing like that with Rome. Rome just broke and smashed everything in its path, ‘and stamped the residue with the feet of it.’ It cared nothing about preserving what was there before; it simply asserted itself. It was less magnificent than the preceding empires, but more ferocious, more vicious. Rome gave us roads, but that was for their benefit, not for the benefit of conquered nations. It regarded all others as barbarians. It was arguably the most brutal of all the empires. ‘And it was diverse from all the beasts that were before it; and it had ten horns.’ Its diversity from the previous three beasts seems to be partly linked to this feature: that it had ten horns. Those ten horns attract particular scrutiny from Daniel in his vision, and he says so in verse 8. ‘I considered the horns.’ I intently gazed at the horns and studied them in the vision. The vision to some extent is interactive in this way. ‘And, behold, there came up among them another little horn,’ – and then something very strange – ‘before whom there were three of the first horns plucked up by the roots.’ Of the three horns that are displaced, Barnes says, ‘The number three would either indicate that three parts out of ten were absorbed in this way, or that a considerable, though indefinite proportion, was thus absorbed.’ It doesn't say how it happened; it doesn't say that the little horn did this and achieved this, or who did it for him, because those things are not necessary to know. It is just the meaning of it, which is going to be important. ‘And, behold, in this [little] horn’, which is quite different from the others, ‘were eyes like the eyes of man’, capable of scrutiny, ‘and a mouth speaking great things’ – proud things, bombastic things, boastful things, is the idea behind the words. All the words of unbelieving kings of the earth can be expected to be pompous, so, to be described as speaking great things, these words of the little horn must have been especially proud (Revelation 13:5). So this is of particular interest. In spite of being little, the little horn is the most powerful and influential of the horns; it is little in some other respect, perhaps in what initially seems to be its significance. It has eyes like the eyes of a man, which seems to indicate that there is a human person behind it. It represents a person (some say, a movement) of immense influence, one of great intelligence. What might the ten horns be, that are described here? Each of the other beasts consist not just of a single king, but a series of kings – in Daniel 7:23 the fourth beast is said to be a kingdom – so the ten horns cannot simply mean that there is more than one ruler belonging to this fourth beast. Further explanation about them and about the little horn will be given later in the chapter from verse 20 onwards. The vision shows us what takes place over time: the ten horns are ‘ten kings that shall arise’ – after the initial appearance of the fourth beast – and the little horn arises after the ten horns have already sprung out of the head of the beast (verse 24). It is not easy to be certain about the identity of these ten horns. Calvin insisted that they were just the regional governors of the empire at Rome. Others would assign them to various kings that followed Rome. But a more common view is that they represent, after the fall of Rome, just kingdoms in general, because ten is a number signifying completion in Old Testament prophecy, and so we are not called to be specific; there is no detailed description of them. The ten horns will not live and die with the fourth beast, but they are in some way connected with it. They represent human control after Rome all the way to Christ’s return. We need to see this to have a Christian perspective of time. So after Rome is a period of nation-states and governments and kings, and probably they refer to that. But among them and from them, there is a particularly virulent anti-Christian power and force at work, represented by the little horn. More will be explained later in the chapter.At the demise of the Roman Empire there would never be a true world empire again. Strictly speaking, there is only one empire after the fall of Rome: the spiritual empire of the kingdom of Christ. That alone has people from every nation of the world. None of the four preceding empires were strictly world empires, but they were as close as it gets.