Dr. Keith Essex · The Master's Seminary · 87 minutes
Lecture by Dr. Keith Essex, from The Master's Seminary's public channel. Study notes below from Medina Community Church.
This final session reads Daniel whole. Dr. Essex traces the book's three movements, the remnant planted in Shinar, the course of Gentile dominion in Aramaic for the nations, and Israel's own future in Hebrew, then works through the interpretive gauntlet: the date Christ himself settled, the identity of the four kingdoms, Nebuchadnezzar's doxology, Darius the Mede, Antiochus and the Antichrist, and the seventy sevens. Listen for why chapter 1 deliberately echoes Genesis 11, and for the hope that closes both the book and the course: as for you, go your way to the end.
In the Writings Daniel stands providentially between Esther and Ezra-Nehemiah. Esther showed God protecting the seed of Abraham under Gentile domination without ever naming himself; Daniel explains why: God has a plan running from 605 BC to the end of the age, a succession of Gentile kingdoms until the final one is destroyed by the stone cut without hands of chapter 2, the one like a son of man of chapter 7, who establishes God's kingdom on earth. Then Ezra-Nehemiah shows Israel living under Persian decrees, exactly the arrangement Daniel announced: God ruling his people through Gentile powers until the kingdom comes.
The first theme every commentator concedes: from chapter 2 through chapter 11, Daniel declares God's sovereignty over human kingdoms. There is a God in heaven who reveals mysteries, and he has made known what will take place in the latter days, the Aramaic twin of the Hebrew phrase running from Jacob's deathbed in Genesis 49 through Numbers 24, Deuteronomy 4 and 29, and the prophets: the end of the days when the Abrahamic promise is fulfilled. And the narratives march the Gentile kings themselves to that confession: Nebuchadnezzar after the dream, surely your God is a God of gods and a Lord of kings; after the furnace, a decree protecting the name of the God of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego; after his humbling, his dominion is an everlasting dominion; and Darius after the lions' den, he is the living God, enduring forever, whose kingdom will not be destroyed. Only Belshazzar's chapter carries no confession, for there judgment simply falls as Daniel said it would.
The second theme: Israel is now a remnant under Gentile rule, and chapter 1 models the posture. Daniel and his three friends show proper respect to their overlords, receiving Babylonian education and service as from God's own hand; even the food issue is handled by respectful appeal, not defiance, the ten-day test of vegetables and water proposed so the commander loses nothing. They are obedient servants of the Gentile kings, except at exactly one point: when worship is demanded that conflicts with the worship of their God, the furnace of chapter 3 and the den of chapter 6. And chapter 9 reveals the duration: the subservience extends past Jeremiah's seventy years to seventy times seven, so that Jeremiah 29's charge, seek the welfare of the city where God has sent you, remains Israel's pattern through the present age, a standard, Essex notes, against which even Mordecai's conduct in Esther invites reflection.
Daniel is unsentimental about the Gentile rulers: their besetting sin is pride. Nebuchadnezzar, told he is the statue's head of gold, is not content with a head: chapter 3 opens with an image entirely of gold, worship commanded, the pride of the ruler demanding from subjects what belongs to God alone, the very sin of the one standing behind the Gentile kingdoms, whose first fall was pride, and, Essex warns, the standing temptation of leaders in the church of Jesus Christ as well. Chapter 4 humbles Nebuchadnezzar for seven years to the mind of a beast for saying, look what I have built; and the book's perspective shifts accordingly: what Nebuchadnezzar dreamed as a magnificent statue, Daniel sees in chapter 7 as ferocious beasts, man's view of empire and God's. All of it prepares for the battle of the little horns, chapter 7's and chapter 8's, two future rulers whose pride demands worship as God and whose reigns bring fierce persecution of the saints, until God humbles them. The purpose of the whole: to show the sweep of human history during Gentile domination until the establishment of God's kingdom upon the earth, and its last word is personal: blessed is he who attains to the 1,335 days, and, as for you, go your way to the end; you will rest, and rise for your allotted portion at the end of the days.
The classic outline halves the book, chapters 1 to 6 history, third-person like all Hebrew narrative, and 7 to 12 visions, first-person; Gooding's parallel scheme, charted in Walton, pairs 1 to 5 with 6 to 12 and has persuaded few, though its local correspondences are real. Essex follows a significant minority, first met in Culver's Daniel and the Latter Days, that reads the book by its languages: Hebrew to 2:4a, Aramaic from 2:4b through chapter 7, Hebrew for 8 to 12. Three movements result: chapter 1, the godly remnant planted among the Gentiles; chapters 2 to 7, in the Gentiles' own tongue, the prophetic course of Gentile dominion from 605 BC to the kingdom, open to Gentile ears and to the Aramaic-speaking second generation of exiles alike; chapters 8 to 12, in Hebrew, the prophetic course of Israel's own history within that dominion.
Chapter 1's second verse says Nebuchadnezzar carried the vessels to the land of Shinar, deliberately reaching back to Genesis 11, where the nations gathered in the plain of Shinar to build a tower for their own name, pride enthroning man in God's place, until God confounded their language. God's answer to that rebellion was the Abrahamic covenant; and now, because of Israel's own sin, the physical seed of Abraham stands in Shinar learning the language of the Chaldeans, the very languages born at Babel. Daniel's opening thus announces how God will keep working his Abrahamic purpose: the godly remnant placed among the Gentiles, and kept there, until the kingdom is established and blessing reaches Israel and the nations at the end of the days.
The Gentile section is ordered as a mirror. Chapter 2's dream and chapter 7's vision each present four Gentile kingdoms and the final kingdom from heaven, statue in the one, beasts including a lion in the other. Chapter 3's golden image and accusation of the three friends answers chapter 6's decree and accusation of Daniel, faithful worshipers delivered from furnace and lions. Chapter 4's humbling of Nebuchadnezzar, sent to live with the beasts and restored upon repentance, answers chapter 5's humbling of Belshazzar, who acted the beast, responded weakly, honored Daniel, and lost the kingdom that night. The movement from statue to beasts is itself the message: empire as man admires it, and empire as heaven sees it.
Bibliography: Goldingay's Word Biblical Commentary is the exegetical foundation, rich in lexical and textual detail and wide in its interactions, watch out for his conclusions; Lucas largely echoes him. For interpretation, Walvoord is the standard premillennial commentary and Leon Wood the one Essex enjoys a little more; good expositions scarcely exist, though Daniel is one of only two Old Testament books Dr. MacArthur has preached, with portions in print. The overarching issue is the date. Liberals place the book in the Maccabean era, 165 to 150 BC, precisely because Daniel 11 is too accurate: verses 2 to 35 trace Persia, Alexander, and the Ptolemy-Seleucid wars down to Antiochus with a precision that, if predictive, proves prophecy, and even the broadly evangelical Goldingay and Lucas accept a Maccabean final composition from earlier documents, complete with elaborate source charts, while insisting inspiration stands. Essex's answer runs through Matthew 24:15, where Jesus cites that which was spoken through Daniel the prophet, let the reader understand: I will take Jesus Christ over any liberal commentator; all of Daniel comes from Daniel, the book completed around 530 BC by a man near ninety, its last vision dated to 536.
Two apparent discrepancies dissolve under accession-year reckoning. Daniel 1:1 dates Nebuchadnezzar's approach to Jehoiakim's third year while Jeremiah 25:1 says the fourth: Babylon counted a king's accession year separately, Judah's system did not, and Daniel, trained in Babylon, counts the Babylonian way. Likewise Daniel 2:1 places the dream in Nebuchadnezzar's second year though the youths trained three years: accession year, year one, year two, parts of years counting, so the training ends and the dream falls within the second year. The book's precision survives its critics at exactly the points they press.
The head of gold is fixed by the text: you, O king, are the head of gold, Nebuchadnezzar and his Babylon. Goldingay declines to name the rest; Lucas, identifying chapter 7's little horn with chapter 8's Antiochus, makes Greece the fourth kingdom and splits Media from Persia to fill the sequence. The decisive answer is Daniel 8:20: the ram with the two horns represents the kings of Media and Persia, one kingdom, never divided anywhere in Daniel. The sequence therefore runs: Babylon, the gold and the lion; Medo-Persia, the silver and the bear; Greece, the bronze and the leopard; and Rome, the iron legs and the dreadful, nondescript beast with iron teeth, the power that in fact crushed the Hellenistic kingdoms. The feet of iron and clay and the ten horns with the rising little horn belong to that fourth kingdom's final, future form, the classic premillennial term is revived Rome, Rome's law, language, and culture persisting and one day coalescing under the final little horn, the kingdom destroyed by the stone cut without hands to make way for the kingdom from heaven.
Chapter 4 is Nebuchadnezzar's own document, quoted through verse 37: now I, Nebuchadnezzar, praise, exalt, and honor the King of heaven, for he is able to humble those who walk in pride. Is that saving faith? Wood argues yes with unmatched confidence; the classic line from Calvin and Hengstenberg answers that the king affirms no more than he affirmed after the furnace and Darius after the den: real recognition of Yahweh's supremacy, short of renouncing all other gods to worship him alone. Essex leans, question mark attached, to the classic reading, cheerfully confessing that on this one his feet are firmly planted in midair alongside Walvoord, Archer, and the Bible Knowledge Commentary, and advising every preacher to know his position before Sunday, because the congregation will ask.
Darius the Mede received the kingdom at about sixty-two, and for the last century and a quarter this has been the book's most debated historical statement, since no extrabiblical document names him, and liberals would make him fiction and the book with him; no recommended commentator concedes that. The candidates: Ugbaru, the general who took Babylon and died days later; Gubaru, the governor Cyrus installed over Babylon, the identification argued by Whitcomb and followed by Wood and Archer; Cyrus's son Cambyses as co-regent; or, with Wiseman and the MacArthur Study Bible, Cyrus himself under another name, the reading Essex leans toward on the strength of 6:28, which can be rendered, in the reign of Darius, that is, the reign of Cyrus the Persian: Cyrus was of Median descent, and Darius appears to have functioned as a throne name, the very name a later usurper took in 522 for its royal ring.
Daniel 8 interprets itself: the goat is Greece, the great horn its first king, Alexander; the four horns the kingdoms carved from his empire; and from one of them the little horn, identified by liberal and conservative alike as Antiochus Epiphanes, who in 168 and 167 BC desecrated the sanctuary, suspended the regular sacrifice for the 2,300 evenings and mornings, roughly 1,150 days, and persecuted the saints so fiercely that the Maccabean revolt was born, until he was broken without human agency and the temple was rededicated. But chapter 7's little horn rises from the fourth beast, Rome, not Greece: he is therefore not Antiochus but the one Antiochus prefigures, the man of sin of the last days, who will do to Israel in the final three and a half years of Daniel's seventieth week what Antiochus did under the third kingdom, until the one like a son of man receives the kingdom.
In Darius's first year, 538, Daniel, reading Jeremiah's seventy years as nearly complete, confesses Israel's sin as any man of Torah would, seeking the forgiveness on which restoration rests. Gabriel's answer recalibrates the hope: final atonement and the kingdom await not seventy years but seventy sevens, best understood as 490 years. Goldingay and Lucas make the figure symbolic; some liberals take it literally as Daniel-to-Antiochus and land eighty years short, a miss Essex declines to shrug off. Among premillennialists two calculations stand: from Ezra's decree of 458 BC, 483 years reach the beginning of Christ's ministry, the reading of Wood and Archer, with the covenantal variant of E. J. Young ending the weeks at the cross and AD 70; or, the classic position of Walvoord and Pentecost following Sir Robert Anderson, from Nehemiah's decree of 444 BC, 483 prophetic years reach the triumphal entry, if you had known in this day the things that make for peace, with Messiah cut off after the sixty-ninth week, the prince's people destroying city and sanctuary in AD 70, and the seventieth week, the covenant made and broken at its midpoint, still future in the tribulation.
All interpreters agree that 11:2 to 35 traces, with stunning precision, Persia, Alexander, and the long duel of the kings of the South and North, Ptolemies and Seleucids, down to Antiochus, ending with the refining of the wise until the end time, for it is yet to come at the appointed time. At verse 36, the king will do as he pleases, Goldingay and Lucas keep Antiochus; premillennialists see the appointed-time signal of verse 35 as the hinge to the final king whom Antiochus prefigured. Verse 40 decides it: at the end time the king of the South will collide with him, and the king of the North will storm against him, and if the king of the North is still Antiochus, the king of the North is attacking himself. Essex therefore takes the three-kings reading: verses 36 to 39 describe the Antichrist, exalting himself above every god, and at the end time distinct southern and northern powers move against him in the promised land, until he comes to his end with none to help him, destroyed by the ultimate King, the stone, the son of man.
The final numbers count from the midpoint of the seventieth week: the last three and a half years, at 360-day years, are 1,260 days, ending with Messiah's return; 12:11's 1,290 days add thirty for the judgment of Christ's enemies and the reestablishment of the regular sacrifice; and blessed is he who attains to the 1,335 days, the further interval of the judgments of living Israel and the nations and the resurrection of Old Testament saints, for the one standing on that day enters the kingdom. The numbers are literal, the interval between tribulation's end and the Millennium's beginning, and the Millennium, Essex adds, is a thousand years: that is chronology too. Preaching Daniel therefore carries both of the book's gifts: the faithful life, how the people of God live during the times of the Gentiles, and the prophetic frame on which the Olivet Discourse and the book of Revelation are built. Study it through, and sometime preach through it as God allows. And with Daniel's own benediction, go your way to the end, the course of the Latter Prophets and the Writings is complete.
Each opens the chapter in your ESV app or on esv.org.
Tap an answer. A wrong guess points you back to the outline; when all twenty-four are right, the lecture is marked complete on this device.
1. What does Daniel's placement between Esther and Ezra-Nehemiah teach?
2. Where does the phrase the latter days in Daniel 2:28 reach back to?
3. Which chapter of the court narratives carries no royal confession of Yahweh?
4. At what single point do Daniel and his friends refuse their Gentile overlords?
5. What does chapter 9 reveal about the duration of Israel's subservience?
6. What is the besetting sin of the Gentile kings in Daniel?
7. What does the movement from statue to beasts signify?
8. On what basis does Essex divide Daniel into three movements?
9. Why is the Aramaic section addressed, as it were, to Gentile ears?
10. What does the word Shinar in Daniel 1:2 deliberately recall?
11. Which chapters mirror each other in the Aramaic chiasm?
12. Why do liberals require a Maccabean date for Daniel?
13. How does Essex settle the date of the book?
14. How is Daniel 1:1's third year reconciled with Jeremiah 25:1's fourth?
15. What text decides against splitting Media from Persia in the four kingdoms?
16. What is the identification of the four kingdoms Essex teaches?
17. Where does Essex land on Nebuchadnezzar's conversion?
18. What reading of Darius the Mede does Essex lean toward?
19. Who is the little horn of Daniel 8, by common consent?
20. Why is chapter 7's little horn not Antiochus?
21. What is the classic premillennial reckoning of the sixty-nine weeks?
22. What question defeats keeping Antiochus in view at Daniel 11:40?
23. What do the 1,290 and 1,335 days measure?
24. What two gifts does Daniel give the preacher?
All twenty-four correct. Lecture 28 is complete.
Daniel served Babylon faithfully and drew exactly one line: worship. Where is the line between honorable service within an unbelieving system and compromise of worship in your own work and citizenship?
The kings' besetting sin was pride, and Essex names it the standing temptation of church leaders too. Where does the desire for recognition most quietly operate in you, and who is allowed to tell you?
Chapter 1 plants the remnant in Shinar, Babel's own plain, and Jeremiah 29 says seek the city's welfare. What does faithful presence, rather than withdrawal or assimilation, look like where God has placed you?
Nebuchadnezzar praised the King of heaven, and the commentators still debate whether he was converted. What distinguishes admiring God's greatness from actually surrendering to him, and how would the difference show in a life?
Daniel's last word is personal: go your way to the end; you will rest, and rise for your allotted portion. Having finished the prophets and the writings, what has this course changed about how you wait for the kingdom?
Daniel 7:14
Read Daniel 1 to 7 in one sitting, watching the statue become beasts and the kings come to confession, then chapters 8 to 12 with the two little horns and the seventy sevens in view. Read Genesis 11:1 to 9 beside Daniel 1:1 to 7, and Matthew 24:15 to 31 as the Lord's own reading of this book. That completes Old Testament Studies II: twenty-eight lectures through the Latter Prophets and the Writings, from Isaiah's vision to Daniel's allotted portion at the end of the days.