Daniel and Revelation: How the Last Book of the Bible Was Written Out of the First

Read Revelation with an Old Testament open beside you and something odd shows up quickly. John never once says "as it is written". There is no citation formula anywhere in the book, no quotation marks, no naming of Isaiah or Ezekiel or Daniel. And yet almost every line sounds like something you have read before.

That is the whole phenomenon in one sentence. Revelation contains no formal Old Testament quotation and more Old Testament language than any other book in the New Testament. It does not cite scripture. It is made out of scripture. And of all the books it is made out of, Daniel supplies more in proportion to its length than any other.

What an allusion is, and why the counting is hard

An allusion comes from the Latin alludere, to play toward or touch on lightly. In literary study it means a deliberate echo of an earlier text that the author expects you to catch without being told. A quotation announces itself. An allusion relies on you.

That reliance is exactly what makes the counting difficult. If John writes "hair like wool" and Daniel wrote "hair of his head like the pure wool", almost anyone would grant the connection. If John writes "a great voice" and somewhere in Ezekiel there is also a great voice, the case is much weaker. Every scholar draws that line in a different place, so every scholar produces a different number.

Here is the range as G. K. Beale sets it out, and the spread is the point rather than any one figure.

The low counts admit only near-verbatim matches. The high counts admit general echoes and stylistic parallels as well. Nobody is being careless. They are answering slightly different questions.

How scholars grade confidence

Because of that spread, careful work on Revelation grades its allusions rather than simply listing them. Beale uses three levels, and they are worth knowing because they let you weigh a claim instead of accepting or rejecting it whole.

Beale adds one more requirement for the top two grades: you have to be able to say why John would have wanted the echo there. An allusion nobody can give a motive for is probably an accident of vocabulary.

Where Daniel shows up

With that grading in mind, the Daniel material in Revelation is not a scattering of coincidences. It clusters, and it clusters in the places where Revelation is doing its heaviest work.

Beale notes that the Daniel 2 allusions land at the four structural seams of Revelation, the points where the book changes gear. That is a design decision, not an accident of memory.

The frame: what must come to pass

The very first sentence of Revelation is already Daniel. John says the book was given "to shew unto his servants things which must shortly come to pass". Daniel had told Nebuchadnezzar that God "maketh known to the king Nebuchadnezzar what shall be in the latter days".

John keeps Daniel's phrase and swaps Daniel's timing. Daniel's "in the latter days" becomes John's "shortly". Whatever you make of that theologically, the literary move is unmistakable, and it is the reason the four kingdoms of Daniel 2 matter to a book that never mentions Nebuchadnezzar.

The hair that came from the wrong figure

In Daniel 7 the enthroned judge is described this way.

I beheld till the thrones were cast down, and the Ancient of days did sit, whose garment was white as snow, and the hair of his head like the pure wool: his throne was like the fiery flame, and his wheels as burning fire. Daniel 7:9

In Revelation 1, John sees "one like unto the Son of man" and then says this of him.

His head and his hairs were white like wool, as white as snow; and his eyes were as a flame of fire. Revelation 1:14

In Daniel those details belong to the Ancient of Days, and the son of man is a separate figure brought before him. John has moved them. That single transfer is the most discussed detail in the whole Daniel-Revelation relationship, and it is worth its own treatment: see who the Ancient of Days is and the son of man in Daniel 7.

The throne room and the sealed book

Revelation 4 opens with a throne set in heaven and one seated on it. Revelation 5 fills the room with "ten thousand times ten thousand, and thousands of thousands". Daniel 7:10 has "thousand thousands ministered unto him, and ten thousand times ten thousand stood before him: the judgment was set, and the books were opened".

Then comes the sealed scroll that nobody is worthy to open. Daniel had been given a specific instruction about a book.

But thou, O Daniel, shut up the words, and seal the book, even to the time of the end. Daniel 12:4

At the end of Revelation the instruction is reversed word for word: "Seal not the sayings of the prophecy of this book: for the time is at hand." Whether John means the same physical book or the same commission is the interesting question, and it is the subject of the sealed scroll of Revelation 5.

The beast built out of Daniel's four

Daniel 7 has four beasts in sequence: a lion, a bear, a leopard, and a fourth so strange it gets no animal name. Revelation 13 has one beast, and it is assembled from the first three in reverse order.

And the beast which I saw was like unto a leopard, and his feet were as the feet of a bear, and his mouth as the mouth of a lion. Revelation 13:2

The reversal suggests John is working from the text rather than from memory: he runs Daniel's list backwards, ending where Daniel began. Daniel's little horn has "a mouth speaking great things" and makes "war with the saints, and prevailed against them". Revelation 13 gives the beast "a mouth speaking great things and blasphemies" and says "it was given unto him to make war with the saints, and to overcome them". What Daniel spread across a chapter, John compresses into one creature. That compression is the subject of the four beasts of Daniel 7.

Beale argues that some of these reuses are deliberately ironic: John gives the enemy the language of Daniel 7:14, which in Daniel described the authority handed to the son of man, so that the beast reads as a counterfeit rather than a rival.

Time, times and half a time

One more phrase runs straight through. Daniel 7:25 says the saints are given into the little horn's hand "until a time and times and the dividing of time". Daniel 12:7 repeats it as "a time, times, and an half". Revelation 12:14 says the woman is nourished in the wilderness "for a time, and times, and half a time".

Revelation also converts it. Forty-two months and 1,260 days appear in chapters 11, 12 and 13, and they are the same span counted differently. Christians disagree sharply about whether the span is literal, symbolic, past or future. They do not disagree about where the phrase came from.

One honest complication

Daniel's date is genuinely disputed. The traditional view places the book in the sixth century BC with the Daniel of the exile. Most critical scholarship, following an argument first recorded from the philosopher Porphyry in the third century AD, places its final form around 165 BC, during the crisis under Antiochus IV. John J. Collins argues the later date at length; Joyce Baldwin and Tremper Longman have defended the earlier one.

For the literary question here it makes little difference. Either way Daniel was old, settled and widely read long before John wrote. The dating debate changes what you think Daniel 7 originally meant. It does not change whether Revelation 13 is quarrying it.

What this actually changes

None of this settles a single end times argument, and it is worth being clear about that. Preterists, historicists, idealists and futurists all see the same allusions. What changes is the kind of book you think you are holding.

Read Revelation as a coded forecast and every image becomes a puzzle to be matched against a newspaper. Read it as a book written out of Daniel and the images stop being ciphers. They become arguments, and the argument is one you can follow, because you can go and read the passage John is pointing at.