Daniel 8:9 Commentary and Bible Study

Out of the four horns that replaced Alexander came a little horn; from one of the four generals came one who eclipsed all the others. This was the Syrian branch, the Seleucid empire – Seleucus had expanded his empire to include Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Turkey, Syria and Lebanon. So from the Syrian region of the Greek empire comes this leader or successor. It is a little horn, something relatively small, which you might think to be an obscure king at first, but which ‘waxed exceeding great, toward the south, and toward the east, and’ – this is the significant part in the verse 9 – ‘toward the pleasant land.’ The pleasant land, obviously, in Daniel's writing, refers in his own terms to Israel, to the people of God. Who is this little horn? A few verses later (verses 20-23) we are told what the two beasts that preceded it are, and so it is quite easy to understand who is meant here. The little horn is Antiochus Epiphanes, a Hellenistic Greek king arising out of part of the empire of Greece, who, unusually and terribly, was vindictive and hostile towards the Jews, invaded and attacked Israel, and devastated Jerusalem, murdering according to traditional records some forty thousand Jews, and who took into slavery some forty thousand others. He nearly conquered Egypt but didn't succeed in that, but he was particularly vicious, vindictive and cruel toward the Jews, and all commentators, bar just one or two among such an army of commentators, have always said this is unquestionably, incontrovertibly, Antiochus Epiphanes (literally, ‘manifested’, that is, manifested as God, a name which he assumed for himself), Antiochus IV. Daniel gives this detailed description of future events and future individuals, but he does not know their names. ‘And it waxed great, even to the host of heaven.’ By ‘host of heaven’, we might think that Daniel refers to the angels, or to heavenly powers, but of course he doesn't; ‘host’ is used in this chapter to describe the Jews, the people of heaven. ‘And it cast down some of the host and some of the stars.’ Daniel also uses ‘stars’ in Daniel 12:3 to describe eminent Jews. So this 10th verse refers to his having destroyed people of great eminence and significance: those still on earth are represented as the rightful occupants of heaven. His antagonism is depicted as bringing down the people set aside for heaven. ‘And it cast down some of the host and of the stars to the ground, and stamped upon them. ¹¹ Yea, he magnified himself even to the prince of the host, and by him the daily sacrifice was taken away, and the place of his sanctuary was cast down.’ What a statement! The prince of the host, the God of Judah, the God of the people of God. ‘He magnified himself’ – we learn what Antiochus Epiphanes did in Jerusalem: how he committed those terrible sacrilegious acts in the temple, and he abolished and did away with the Jewish worship and he brought in heathen worship, pagan worship, and the very worst of it. He had pigs offered in the temple, which was an abomination in the Jewish house of God, and even placed a statue of Zeus in the Jewish temple, claiming himself to be the incarnation of Zeus. These events are recorded in the apocryphal Book of 1 Maccabees, chapter 1. Antiochus replaced the high priest in Jerusalem, with another man – a higher bidder for the office – and went down to fight against Egypt. Jerusalem heard a rumour that he had died there in Egypt, but the rumour was false. Believing that he had died the Jews reinstated the previous high priest, but Antiochus took revenge and slaughtered many Jews and took many others into slavery. There were Jews that compromised, and actually carried out his worship and his wishes. Because so many were hypocritical, God gave them into the hands of Antiochus Epiphanes. Many went along with him and so prospered. We see it in our land – professing believers capitulate, and they are left alone by the world, not affected by the persecution which oppresses God’s true people. But there were others that stood their ground and wouldn't have it, and they paid the price, sometimes with their lives. These are probably the people who are mostly referred to here. He was the first king ever to make coins with his own image and with the claim to divinity on the image. He magnified himself and he seemed to get great pleasure in sacking the temple, denigrating the religion of the Jews, and even challenging God. He says in effect, ‘I am divine also, and I can get away with this. I can trample them underfoot foot. I hate them and I can do as I please.’ This took place in 167 BC. From the Syrian section of the division of the Greek Empire came this ruler who did such evil to Israel.Verse 12 is difficult to understand: ‘And an host was given him against the daily sacrifice by reason of transgression, and it cast down the truth to the ground.’ The best sense is probably that he killed many – they were given over into his hand – because they resisted him in the abolition of the daily sacrifice in the temple. This was the fiercest ever persecution and hostility to the Jews during the Old Testament with all imaginable cruelties, and Antiochus Epiphanes carried them out. Nevertheless he seemed to prosper for a time. ‘And it practised, and prospered’; he got away with it. There didn't seem to be, for a long time, any divine action against him. This brings us to the ‘angelic bystanders in the vision’, and the part that they play. ‘Then I heard one saint’ – which you could equally be translated here as ‘holy one’; it’s obviously a reference to angels who are there present in the vision – ‘speaking, and another saint [or angel] said unto that certain saint which spake, How long shall be the vision concerning the daily sacrifice?’ How long will the temple be desecrated and the worship be discontinued, and pagan worship put in its place? ‘ How long ‘the transgression of desolation, to give both the sanctuary and the host to be trodden under foot?’ How long will the persecution and the killings continue? It is a rhetorical question. The answer given is that it will last ‘two thousand and three hundred days; then shall the sanctuary be cleansed.’ Literally this would be about six and a third years. That is very strange, because it does rather roughly correspond to the period of the persecutions of Antiochus Epiphanes. Nevertheless historians who treat these times as literal find it hard to precisely fit this period up with the historical events. Actually the persecution of Antiochus lasted seven and a half to eight years, but various attempts are made to fit the days of the vision to significant events within this period. The period of time being measured seems to relate specifically to the suspension of the daily sacrifices in the temple. Thus it is literally referred to as ‘evening and morning two thousand three hundred’, evening and morning being when the two daily sacrifices were offered up. We may be inclined to ask, why would Daniel in this vision start to use literal periods of time, when elsewhere in the book he uses symbolic periods (Daniel 7:25; 12:11-12), periods which are treated as symbolic in the Book of Revelation (Revelation 11:3; 12:6, 14; 13:5) and which relate to the gospel age? The answer may be that in the first place it is literal, but it also symbolises a future period of persecution under the antichrist. The Jews were going to have to live through this time and they would count the days to the end of it, just as they had to live through the literal seventy years of exile in Babylon, a literal period which Daniel also refers to (Daniel 9:2). It will not be long, and then it will end. Antiochus Epiphanes was a type of the antichrist, and there are future events which we only dimly understand now.