The Real History of the End of the World (5 page)

Nebuchadnezzar liked this interpretation and rescinded the order to kill all the wise men of the kingdom. He gave Daniel and his friends increased responsibility at court, and put Daniel in control of the wise men, something anyone could have guessed would turn out badly.

Nebuchadnezzar seems to have forgotten how impressed he was with the Hebrew God and His prophecies. In chapter three, the king has a gold statue made, and commands all his people to worship it. The wise men, annoyed at having been upstaged by an outsider, tell Nebuchadnezzar that the Jews won't comply with the public adoration of the statue. Daniel's three companions, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, are thrown into a fiery furnace when they refuse. With the aid of a divine presence, the three walk safely through the flames (Daniel 3:19-27).

Apparently Nebuchadnezzar was hard to convince even with this miraculous proof. Therefore, God sees that his life takes a downturn. He has more dreams, goes mad, and spends seven years grazing like an ox before he finally comes to his senses and praises God. Upon his death, his son, Belshazzar, takes over.

Belshazzar must have also been a slow learner or had not paid attention to his father's experiences with the god of the Jews. One day he decided to have a feast and use the ritual gold and silver vessels that Nebuchadnezzar had looted from the Temple in Jerusalem. While he and the court were all eating and drinking, a hand appeared in the air and began writing on the wall next to the lamp stand.
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Daniel interpreted the words
mene, mene, tekel parsin
to mean doom for Belshazzar (Daniel 5:5-29). That night, the king is killed, and Darius, the Mede, takes over the kingdom.

Darius has no trouble with dreams, just bad advisers. Again Daniel is punished for not praying to the gods of the Medes and Persians and is punished by being thrown into a lion's den. The lions don't eat him, and his accusers and their families become the lions' breakfast instead.

Darius finally caught on that Daniel's god was a force to be reckoned with and issued a proclamation that everyone in his kingdom “should tremble and fear before the God of Daniel” (Daniel 6:28). And high time, too. After this, Daniel lived out his days in peace.

Now, in my opinion, all of this has just been prologue to show that Daniel is a good Jew and a deserving prophet. The second half of the book of Daniel is very different. Instead of a king, the dreamer is Daniel, and large parts of the story are told in first person. Chapters seven through twelve are decidedly apocalyptic, with many-horned monsters and other warnings of the end. Daniel is terrified and puzzled by his dreams and enters into them to ask what they mean. At one point, he needs to be visited by the angel Gabriel, first in the dream and then in reality, for the visions to be explained. The style of this section is very different from the first part, and many scholars have suggested that the second half of the book was written separately from the first.
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While the mystery of who actually wrote the prophecies and when is important in biblical scholarship, it makes little difference in a history of how people viewed the upcoming end of the world. Most scholars now think that chapter eleven, particularly the image of “king of the north,” referred to the Greek invader Antiochus. The following chapter is seen as foretelling his defeat by the Maccabees, as is commemorated every year by the festival Hanukkah, and the visions in the second half of Daniel are believed to have been written in the second or third century B.C.E. and after the fall of Antiochus. That hasn't kept many others, including John of Patmos, from seeing the visions of Daniel as specific to their own time.
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Daniel's first dream is one of the most bizarre and popular among doomsday seekers. In it, Daniel saw four beasts rise out of a wind-tossed sea. The first was a lion with the wings of an eagle. As Daniel watched, its wings were plucked; it was made to walk on two feet and given a human mind. The second beast was a bear with three tusks that was told to devour many bodies. The third beast was sort of like a leopard, except it had four heads and four wings. It was given dominion over the earth.

The fourth beast is the one that captured the imagination of centuries of interpreters. It had iron teeth that destroyed everything around it. It also had ten horns. Daniel was staring at these when another horn began to grow, uprooting three others to make room. This horn had human eyes and a mouth that spoke arrogantly (Daniel 7:1-8).

Just as the vision was at its worst, Daniel saw a celestial court ruled over by the Ancient of Days, which destroyed the fourth beast and diminished the power of the other three. An attendant at the court explained to him that the first three beasts were kingdoms that would submit to God but that the fourth would then arise and “devour the whole earth” (Daniel 7:23). This kingdom would last “for a time, two times and half a time” before finally being overthrown, after which all the kingdoms of the world would be given to “the people of the holy ones of the Most High” (Daniel 7:25-27).

The view of most biblical scholars is that the four kingdoms in Daniel's dream were Assyria, Persia, Greece, and Rome. Other scholars have suggested that the kingdoms are actually those created by the break up of the empire of Alexander the Great.
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This section of the dream had resonance for downtrodden people that continues to the present day. The identity of the “little horn” has been speculated on with as much intensity as the search for the Antichrist. Sometimes the two have been combined. People suffering under oppression must have found great comfort in the promise that the beast would be destroyed.

The date of the end is suggested several times in Daniel. The first time is with the enigmatic phrase “for a time, two times and half a time.” Of course, the problems have always been just how much “a time” is and when does it start. Newton and the Millerites are among the many who have tried to figure these out.

Added to this quandary is the next, and final, section of the book. After Daniel has spent several days in prayer and fasting, the angel Gabriel comes to him to give him wisdom and understanding as well as the “book of truth.” First he tells Daniel that the Jews will have to wait seventy weeks to finish atoning for their transgressions. Then the angel tells Daniel in great and confusing detail about the rise of the “anointed one” and the battles that will lead to the end of the world (Daniel 9-11).

Gabriel ends by saying that a great prince named Michael will come and everyone whose name is in the book, including those who have already died, shall be saved. He adds that Daniel is “to keep the words secret and the book sealed” until just before the end (Daniel 12:4).
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The angel repeats the need for secrecy, and then Daniel sees two men on either side of a river, one dressed in linen. The man in linen tells the other man that it would be “a time, two times and a half ” until the end, reinforcing Gabriel's prophecy.

However, Gabriel then adds that “from the time that the regular burnt offering is taken away and the abomination that desolates is set up, there shall be one thousand two hundred ninety days. Happy are those who persevere and attain the thousand three hundred thirty-five days” (Daniel 12:11-12).

The confusion that these two numbers created is responsible for centuries of disappointment for millennial mathematicians.

Daniel's prophecies were interpreted by Jews in the first centuries before and after the Common Era as foretelling the end of foreign domination of Israel. The image of the leader who would destroy the evil kingdoms was very powerful to those suffering under the yoke of Rome and it fed their expectations of a warrior Messiah.
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Later Jewish commentators used Daniel both to support their messianic expectations and to refute Christian insistence that the Messiah had already come.

Saadia ben Joseph (892-942), Gaon of Sura, in Persia, was one of the preeminent medieval Jewish scholars. Saadia wrote that Daniel predicted the end of both the Roman Empire and the Islamic one. He fixed the date for this by working out the three time periods as three ways of calculating the same date. The “time, two times and half a time” he worked out to total 1335, the second number given by Gabriel. For the number 1290, Saadia counted from the time of the “removal of the daily sacrifice,” which he figured at forty-five years after the building of the Second Temple. Starting from two different points, he arrived at the same number 4725 by the Hebrew calendar, or 965.
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Two hundred years later, the scholar Rashi, born Solomon ben Isaac (1040-1105), started with the time of the Exodus to predict the end in 1352.
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The early Christians, coming from the Jewish tradition, took the Book of Daniel as a prophecy of Christ's return. At the end of the first century, a document known as the Epistle of Barnabas used the Book of Enoch and Daniel's “little horn” in its plea for new Christians to turn away from Jewish customs because Christ would soon return.
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The third-century writer Julius Africanus worked out a chronology of the Bible, including leap years. He was determined to prove that Jesus was the savior Daniel foretold, who would come at the end of seventy weeks—that is, 490 years.
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Africanus started from the twentieth year of the reign of Artaxerxes of Persia, which signaled the return from the Babylonian Captivity. His computations are impressive, including reconciling the years of the Persian Empire, the Olympiads (Jesus was born in the year of the 202nd Olympiad, by the way), and the Jewish calendar as well as changing the date from solar to lunar measurements.
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Africanus didn't predict the end; he just wanted to reconcile all the dates.

Leviathan c1280. Fish curving round to form a circle. The Leviathan was, according to Talmudic sources, one of the my thical creatures that would be consumed at the messianic banquet awaiting the virtuoso in the world to come. From the “North French Miscellany,” a Hebrew manuscript written by Benjamin The Scribe. Location: British Library, London, Great Britain.
HIP / Art Resource, New York

The prophecies of Daniel are part of Islam as well. Some apocalypses written in the first few centuries after the death of Muhammad draw on Daniel's visions. Other apocalyptic Muslim authors use Daniel as a character to give their own visions more credibility, proving that he was respected as a prophet in Islamic tradition, too.
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In the seventeenth century, Daniel's dreams were the basis for the militant millennial movement in England known as the
Fifth Monarchy.
Daniel's four kingdoms seem to have had a universal popularity for that era. The Portuguese Jesuit António Vieira, wrote in his
História de Futuro
that Brazil would be the fifth kingdom.
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Isaac Newton spent many hours studying the Book of Daniel, both to reconcile it with the Book of Revelation and to compute the end of the world.
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In any study of apocalyptic predictions, Daniel must be included as a major influence and as the chief contributor to the game of “When will the world end?” We shall hear of his visions many times in this book.

But if you believe that . . . the races of men perished in blazing
fires or that the cities fell in a great upheaval of the world,
or that . . . devouring rivers spread all over the earth and
drowned the towns, so much the more must you . . . admit
that destruction awaits the earth and sky, too.

—Lucretius,
De Rerum Natura V
, 11. 339-341
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