Anticipating Armageddon: The Interpretation of Daniel’s Dream
“But Daniel, keep this prophecy a secret; seal it up so that it will not be understood until the end times, when travel and education shall be vastly increased! (Daniel 12:4). The traditional date of the Babylonian captivity, the era in which the army of Nebuchadnezzar captured Jerusalem, is usually thought to be 586 BC. Historians now argue that other dates are more accurate, but that will do as well as any other. The story told in the Old Testament is that a great deportation took place. The cream of the Jewish nation was marched in slavery to Babylon. Among them was a young man named Daniel. He was to figure prominently in Babylonian/Persian/Hebrew history, and his story is told in the book of Daniel, an important book in the Hebrew Bible. The book of Daniel is sometimes called the ‘Little Book of Revelation’. In many ways it is the Old Testament equivalent of the New Testament apocalypse. It represents an important plank in the platform of most prophetic interpretive systems.
Daniel interprets Nebuchadnezzar's Dream W. A. Spicer - Our Day in the Light of Prophecy, Southern Publishing Association: Nashville, Tennessee.(1917) (Public Domain)
Those who believe that it tells the future of the human race are in good company with scholars of long ago. Josephus, a Hebrew historian who lived circa 40-100 AD, wrote in his monumental Antiquities of the Jews that when Alexander the Great was shown the Book of Daniel, wherein Daniel declares that one of the Greeks would destroy the empire of the Persians, Alexander supposed that he himself was the person intended.
