Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Daniel · About this commentary
Seal the Book Until the Time of the End
Daniel 12:4
4 But you, Daniel, shut up the words and seal the book, even to the time of the end. Many will run back and forth, and knowledge will be increased.” · WEB
The book is closed with an instruction that is also a forecast: at the time of the end it will be opened, and knowledge will increase.
But you, Daniel, shut up the words and seal the book, even to the time of the end Daniel 12:4.
The instruction is not concealment but reservation. A sealed document in the ancient world was authenticated and preserved, kept intact for the person entitled to open it Jeremiah 32:10–14 Isaiah 29:11. The words are to be shut up even to the time of the end — which means there is an opening date, and the sealing is the guarantee that the contents will still be there when it arrives.
The same command had closed the earlier vision, and for the same reason: seal up the vision, for it belongs to many days to come Daniel 8:26, with the prophet left not understanding what he had faithfully written down Daniel 8:27. The book therefore contains material its own author could not use — the strongest possible argument that it was not composed to serve the purposes of the generation that received it. And the contrast with the last book of Scripture is deliberate: that one is told don't seal up the words of the prophecy of this book, for the time is at hand Revelation 22:10. One prophecy is sealed because its terminus is distant; the other is left open because it is not. Read together, the second is the first unsealed.
Many will run back and forth, and knowledge will be increased.
And the sealing comes with a sign of the season in which it ends. The two clauses belong together, and the context governs their sense: the subject of the sentence is a sealed book and the time of its opening, so the running to and fro and the increase of knowledge are most naturally what happens to this — a searching of the words, and an understanding that grows once the reserved period has expired. The chapter says as much a few verses later, where the same sealing is repeated and followed by a division between those who understand and those who do not: none of the wicked will understand, but those who are wise will understand Daniel 12:9–10. Knowledge increases at the end, and it increases for a particular kind of reader.
That this era has also seen an unprecedented expansion of travel and of learning generally is not the verse's point, though it is not foreign to it either — Scripture's own prophets speak of a running to and fro in search of God's word and of a famine of hearing it Amos 8:11–12. What the verse asserts is narrower and more useful: a book deliberately held in reserve, and a time when its readers would search it and see.
Which is the reason this prophet was told, in the same chapter, both to go his way and to expect to stand at the end of the days Daniel 12:13. His work was to write it accurately and seal it. Understanding it was somebody else's assignment.
held with reason What this mark means