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An unnamed angel continues giving Daniel a prophecy of Israel’s future. He predicts a time of tribulation but also of deliverance and salvation. There will be a resurrection of some to eternal life and others to shame and contempt. Believers will shine like stars. A series of cryptic time periods – 1,290 days, 3 1/2 years, 1,335 days – leave Daniel confused and troubled. The angel tells the prophet to seal up the book “until the time of the end.”

Notes on Daniel 12:1-13

The unnamed angelic being continues to reveal in cryptic language the future of Israel. The Jews will face a period of terrible persecution, but will prevail in the end. Israel’s independence under the Hasmonean dynasty ends with the growth of Roman power. Another willful king arises under Rome’s authority named Herod.

Notes on Daniel 11:1-45

Daniel is confessing his own sins and the sins of the Jewish exiles when the Angel Gabriel appears with a prophecy to impart. He lays out a timeline of the future beginning with a decree releasing the Jews to return to their land and including the arrival and mysterious “cutting off” of the Messiah. The timeline also includes word of another future destruction of Jerusalem.

Notes on Daniel 9:1-27

Daniel has another vision, this time of Alexander the Great’s defeat of the Medo-Persian empire and the rise of Antiochus Epiphanes later, who persecutes the Jews, defiling the Temple and forbidding Torah, circumcision and Judaism itself. This cruel, prideful tyrant is the model for the Antichrist of the New Testament.

Notes for Daniel 8:1-27

Daniel relates a troubling vision from God of four beasts rising up out of the sea, representing the kingdoms of Babylon, Medo-Persia, Alexander the Great and Rome. The fourth beast, Rome, is the most ferocious. It has ten horns, and a final “little horn” arises to persecute and “wear down” God’s people. But the central vision of the chapter is the image of the Ancient of Days and “One like the Son of Man” who achieve the final victory over little horn and the beasts.

Notes on Daniel 7:1-28