Biblion Bible Commentary
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How Long Will the Vision Be?
Daniel 8:13
13 Then I heard a holy one speaking; and another holy one said to that certain one who spoke, “How long will the vision about the continual burnt offering, and the disobedience that makes desolate, to give both the sanctuary and the army to be trodden under foot be?” · WEB
Two holy ones speak and the prophet only overhears — and the question they ask about his vision is the one he could not answer at the end of the last.
Then I heard a holy one speaking; and another holy one said to that certain one who spoke, "How long will the vision about the continual burnt offering, and the disobedience that makes desolate, to give both the sanctuary and the army to be trodden under foot be?" Daniel 8:13.
Daniel is not addressed. Two heavenly beings are in conversation, and one puts a question to the other; the prophet is listening in on a discussion of his own vision. The answer will be given to him directly Daniel 8:14, but the question was not his to ask — a small, unsettling detail that says the matter concerns heaven before it concerns him. What has just been shown is not merely a hardship for God's people; it is an affront in the presence of the whole host, and one of them raises it.
The question gathers the preceding verses and adds nothing. The continual, taken away Daniel 8:11. The disobedience that makes desolate — the transgression whose effect is desolation, the phrase the book will use again of what stands in the sanctuary's place Daniel 11:31 Daniel 12:11 and which the Lord cited by name as still ahead in his own day Matthew 24:15. And both the sanctuary and the army... trodden under foot: the two objects of the horn's attack, the holy place and the holy people, treated together because in this vision they cannot be separated. Nothing new is introduced. The horn's work is summarized and handed one word.
How long.
It is the question the last chapter left open. Daniel had been told the saints would be given into that hand until a time and times and half a time Daniel 7:25 and had gone away sick with what he had seen Daniel 7:28. Now the same question is asked in heaven, in sanctuary terms, and it is asked about duration rather than about outcome — the outcome had already been settled in a courtroom Daniel 7:22 Daniel 7:26.
Scripture asks this constantly and is never rebuked for it. It is the cry of the psalms under oppression — how long, Yahweh? Psalms 13:1 Psalms 74:10 Psalms 79:5 — the prophets' complaint Habakkuk 1:2 Isaiah 6:11, and the words of the souls under the altar in the last book of the Bible Revelation 6:10. What comes back is characteristic of this book. Not reassurance, not an explanation of why the trampling was permitted, and not a promise of rescue — a term. The question about how long is answered with a number and a verdict, and the number is the reason the rest of Daniel exists.
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