The Four Beasts of Daniel 7, Explained

Four monsters come up out of a storm-tossed sea, and the chapter tells you what they are before you have to guess. An angel in the vision says plainly that the beasts "are four kings, which shall arise out of the earth" (Daniel 7:17), and speaks of the fourth as a fourth kingdom on the earth (Daniel 7:23).

So the beasts are political powers, and Daniel 7 says so inside itself. What it never does is name them. That is where the disagreement lives: not over whether these are empires, but which four. Two identifications hold the field, and both are held by serious readers.

The vision

And four great beasts came up from the sea, diverse one from another. The first was like a lion, and had eagle's wings: I beheld till the wings thereof were plucked, and it was lifted up from the earth, and made stand upon the feet as a man, and a man's heart was given to it. Daniel 7:3-4

The sea here is the yamma rabba, the great sea. In the Old Testament the sea is where chaos lives, the element God pushed back at creation. Empires rising out of it is a statement about their character before a single one is named.

The word for the creatures is Aramaic cheva, an animal or wild beast. Daniel 7 is one of the sections of the book written in Aramaic rather than Hebrew, the working language of the empires it describes.

The bear comes next, "raised up on one side, and it had three ribs in the mouth of it between the teeth of it: and they said thus unto it, Arise, devour much flesh" (Daniel 7:5). Lopsided, and already feeding.

The leopard follows, with four wings on its back and four heads, and "dominion was given to it" (Daniel 7:6). Speed multiplied, and a rule that comes in four parts.

The fourth breaks the pattern.

After this I saw in the night visions, and behold a fourth beast, dreadful and terrible, and strong exceedingly; and it had great iron teeth: it devoured and brake in pieces, and stamped the residue with the feet of it: and it was diverse from all the beasts that were before it; and it had ten horns. Daniel 7:7

Daniel does not compare it to any animal. There is nothing in the world that looks like it. Then, among the ten horns, something small starts growing.

I considered the horns, and, behold, there came up among them another little horn, before whom there were three of the first horns plucked up by the roots: and, behold, in this horn were eyes like the eyes of man, and a mouth speaking great things. Daniel 7:8

Horns in the ancient world stood for power, in the plain sense that a horned animal is dangerous. This one has eyes and a mouth, which is to say it is a person, and it talks.

The two identifications

Both lists start with Babylon, which nobody disputes: Daniel 2:38 tells Nebuchadnezzar outright that he is the head of gold. Both end with a fourth power that persecutes God's people. The difference is whether Media and Persia count as one empire or two, and that decision pushes everything after it along by one place.

The traditional reading takes the bear as the joint Medo-Persian empire, which suits a beast raised higher on one side, since Persia outweighed Media in the partnership. The three ribs are usually read as its three great conquests, Babylon, Lydia and Egypt. The leopard is Greece under Alexander, whose speed is proverbial and whose empire split among four generals after his death, matching four wings and four heads. The fourth beast with iron teeth is Rome, and the little horn is a future ruler, which is where this reading connects to the antichrist figure and to the mark of the beast.

The critical reading treats Media as a separate kingdom, partly because Daniel 5:31 introduces "Darius the Median" as a ruler in his own right. That makes the leopard Persia, its four heads four Persian kings, and the fourth beast the empire of Alexander and his successors. The ten horns are Seleucid rulers, and the little horn is Antiochus IV Epiphanes, who seized the throne past other claimants. Which three horns he uprooted is not agreed even among those who hold this view; the candidate lists differ from commentator to commentator.

The dating question, briefly

The two readings track a larger dispute. The traditional view holds that Daniel wrote in the sixth century BC, which makes Daniel 7 predictive of empires still centuries away, Rome included. The critical view, argued in detail by H. H. Rowley in Darius the Mede and the Four World Empires in the Book of Daniel (1935) and standard in academic commentaries since, holds that the book reached its present form around 165 BC, during the crisis under Antiochus, and that the vision describes recent history up to that point.

That is a real dispute with real arguments on both sides, and it is not settled by anything in this chapter. It is worth knowing that the fourth-kingdom question and the dating question are joined at the hip, so that people who seem to be arguing about a beast are often arguing about a date.

Antiochus IV, on the record

Whatever you make of the dating, the historical figure is not in doubt, and the critical reading gains its force from how closely he fits Daniel 7:25.

Antiochus IV ruled the Seleucid empire from 175 to 164 BC. He took the title Epiphanes, "God manifest", which his enemies twisted into Epimanes, "the mad one". He outlawed circumcision, Sabbath keeping and possession of the Torah on pain of death. In December 167 BC he had the Jerusalem temple turned over to pagan worship, with an altar set on the altar of burnt offering and swine sacrificed there. The Maccabean revolt followed, the temple was cleansed at the end of 164 BC, and Antiochus died the same year.

And he shall speak great words against the most High, and shall wear out the saints of the most High, and think to change times and laws: and they shall be given into his hand until a time and times and the dividing of time. Daniel 7:25

"Time and times and the dividing of time" is Aramaic iddan, a set period, with pelag, a division or half. One, plus two, plus a half. Read as years it gives three and a half. Defenders of the critical reading point out that the desecration of the temple lasted roughly three years, close to that span without matching it exactly. Defenders of the traditional reading answer that the fit is approximate rather than precise, that the little horn's career in Daniel 7 ends with the judgment scene and the everlasting kingdom, and that Antiochus died of illness in Persia with the world unchanged.

Three and a half is also half of seven, and half a completed period is a way of saying "cut short". Revelation converts the same figure into forty-two months and 1,260 days, which is how the number reaches most modern discussions. The same arithmetic sits behind the seventy weeks of Daniel.

What Revelation does with these four

Now the part that changes how you read both books.

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: and the dragon gave him his power, and his seat, and his great authority. Revelation 13:2

John's beast rises out of the sea, as Daniel's did. It has ten horns, as Daniel's fourth did. And it is assembled out of the other three: leopard body, bear feet, lion mouth. Daniel saw four beasts in sequence. John sees one beast carrying all four at once.

Revelation never announces that it is doing this. There is no "as it is written". The borrowing is done by wording, and once you notice it in Revelation 13 you start finding it everywhere else, because Daniel supplies more of Revelation's raw material than any other Old Testament book.

There is a sharper edge to it still. In Daniel 7:14 dominion "was given" to the one like a son of man, and all peoples, nations and languages serve him. In Revelation 13:7 power is given to the beast "over all kindreds, and tongues, and nations". The beast is not merely frightening. It is described in the vocabulary reserved for the figure it is imitating, which makes it a counterfeit built line by line out of the very passage it is copying.