Daniel 7:1

CHAPTER VII

The prophet having, in the preceding chapters of this book,

related some remarkable events concerning himself and his

brethren in the captivity, and given proof of his being

enabled, by Divine assistance, to interpret the dreams of

others, enters now into a detail of his own visions, returning

to a period prior to the transactions recorded in the last

chapter. The first in order of the prophet's visions is that

of the four beasts, which arose out of a very tempestuous

ocean, 1-9;

and of one like the Son of man who annihilated the dominion of

the fourth beast, because of the proud and blasphemous words of

one of its horns, 9-14.

An angel deciphers the hieroglyphics contained in this chapter,

declaring that the FOUR beasts, diverse one from another,

represent the FOUR PARAMOUNT empires of the habitable globe,

which should succeed each other; and are evidently the same

which were shadowed forth to Nebuchadnezzar by another set of

hieroglyphics, (see the second chapter,) 15-26.

But for the consolation of the people of God, it is added that,

at the time appointed in the counsel of Jehovah, "the kingdom

and dominion, and the greatness of the kingdom under the whole

heaven, shall be given to the saints of the Most High;" and

that this kingdom shall never be destroyed or transferred to

another people, as all the preceding dominations have been,

but shall itself stand for ever, 27, 28.

It will be proper to remark that the period of a time, times,

and a half, mentioned in the twenty-fifth verse as the duration

of the dominion of the little horn that made war with the

saints, (generally supposed to be a symbolical representation

of the papal power,) had most probably its commencement in

A.D. 755 or 756, when Pepin, king of France, invested the pope

with temporal power. This hypothesis will bring the conclusion

of the period to about the year of Christ 2000, a time fixed

by Jews and Christians for some remarkable revolution; when

the world, as they suppose, will be renewed, the wicked cease

from troubling the Church, and the saints of the Most High

have dominion over the whole habitable globe. But this is all

hypothesis.

NOTES ON CHAP. VII

Verse Daniel 7:1. In the first year of Belshazzar] This is the same Belshazzar who was slain at the taking of Babylon, as we have seen at the conclusion of Daniel 5:30-27. That chapter should have followed both this and the succeeding. The reason why the fifth chapter was put in an improper place was, that all the historic parts might be together, and the prophetic be by themselves; and, accordingly, the former end with the preceding chapter, and the latter with this. The division therefore is not chronological but merely artificial.

Told the sum of the matters.] That he might not forget this extraordinary dream, he wrote down the leading particulars when he arose.