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Context No. 222 of 4322 · Daniel (Greek)

Context · Reflection

Daniel (Greek) 11:14-19: in context

14“In those times many will stand up against the king of the south. Also the children of the violent among your people will lift themselves up to establish the vision; but they will fall. 15So the king of the north will come and cast up a mound, and take a well-fortified city. The forces of the south won’t stand, neither will his chosen people, neither will there be any strength to stand. 16But he who comes against him will do according to his own will, and no one will stand before him. He will stand in the glorious land, and destruction will be in his hand. 17He will set his face to come with the strength of his whole kingdom, and with him equitable conditions. He will perform them. He will give him the daughter of women to corrupt her; but she will not stand, and won’t be for him. 18After this he will turn his face to the islands, and will take many; but a prince will cause the reproach offered by him to cease. Yes, moreover, he will cause his reproach to turn on him. 19Then he will turn his face toward the fortresses of his own land; but he will stumble and fall, and won’t be found.

Daniel 11 is one long, unusually detailed forecast of the wars between two Greek dynasties that carved up Alexander's empire and fought for generations over the land in between. The king of the south is Ptolemaic Egypt, the king of the north is Seleucid Syria, and Judea lies on the road between them. These verses follow one northern king through his whole career.

He is Antiochus the Third, called the Great. The passage watches him beat Egypt, take a fortified city, and stand in the glorious land, which is Judea. It watches him try a quieter weapon, marrying his daughter to the Egyptian king in order to undermine that kingdom from the inside, a plan that fails when she takes her husband's side. It watches him turn to the coastlands and the islands until a commander stops him and turns his own insult back on him, which is Rome checking him in Asia Minor. Then the last line: he stumbles and falls in his own land and is not found. Antiochus the Third died plundering a temple for money.

The detail is so exact that most readers, including many Catholic scholars, take the finished book to have been written during the later crisis under Antiochus the Fourth, looking back across this history to steady people living through the next chapter of it. Either way the message holds. The great kings maneuver and marry and invade, and each one stumbles in his own land at the end. Whose power am I overestimating right now, that is already walking toward its own stumble?

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