Earlier in our study mention was made of king Belshazzar of Babylon who, in chapter 5 of Daniel, is recorded as having seen a ghostly hand writing on the wall; words that when translated by Daniel
turned out to be announcing the judgment about to fall on both him and his kingdom. It was during
the reign of this same Belshazzar that Daniel received, as recorded in chapter 8, new visions of
kingdoms that would come after Babylon. These visions focus on the first two of the three kingdoms
which were to come after Babylon, the first being represented by a ram with two horns and the
second by a male goat with a “notable horn between his eyes”.
Like many of the core prophecies in Daniel we are not left to guess at their meaning, for in 8:20-21
we are told that the ram with two horns represents the kings of Media and Persia, while the male
goat is the kingdom of Greece. In the prophecy the larger horn of the ram comes up last, signifying that the Persian kings would rise to power later than the Median kings within the Medo-Persian
Empire. Yet, despite the great power of this kingdom represented by the ram, Daniel’s prophecy
predicted that a king would come from the west (Greece) and attack the ram with furious power,
casting it down to the ground and trampling on it. In Daniel chapter 7 this beast is seen as a leopard with four wings, and here we see it described as coming “across the surface of the whole earth,
without touching the ground”. Indeed Alexander the Great’s conquests were of unparalleled speed,
his whole empire being built in only 13 years.
After defeating Persia in verse 7, the notable horn in the vision is broken and in its place four horns come up. In verse 22 it says:
As for the broken horn and the four that stood up in its place, four kingdoms shall arise out of that nation, but not with its power.
(Daniel 8:22)
After Alexander the Great’s death, in an amazingly accurate fulfillment of this prophecy, his kingdom ended up divided amongst four of his top generals. As the prophecy predicted though, none of the
resulting kingdoms had the same degree of power as the complete Grecian kingdom out of which
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they came.