Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Daniel · About this commentary
The Ram and the Goat Named
Daniel 8:20-22
20 The ram which you saw, that had the two horns, they are the kings of Media and Persia. · WEB
Two of the three powers are identified outright, and the plainness does work far beyond these verses: it fixes the sequence and the method.
The ram which you saw, that had the two horns, they are the kings of Media and Persia Daniel 8:20.
Prophecy is rarely this plain. One ram, two horns, and both empires named in one clause — which also disposes of a reading that made the ram Media alone and the goat Persia in order to shorten the chain. The text will not carry it: two horns on one animal, the second rising later and higher Daniel 8:3, is exactly how those two powers came to stand together.
The rough male goat is the king of Greece. The great horn that is between his eyes is the first king Daniel 8:21.
Named, in Babylon, while Babylon still stood — two centuries before Greece was anything. And the first king identifies the conspicuous horn as an individual, which the next verse confirms by describing what happened when he was gone.
As for that which was broken, in the place where four stood up, four kingdoms will stand up out of the nation, but not with his power Daniel 8:22.
Four kingdoms out of the nation — from within the Greek world, not foreign conquerors — and the qualification is precise: not with his power. The successors held the territory and never the man's momentum, which is the historical verdict on the division of that empire.
The plainness here does two jobs beyond identifying two animals.
It fixes the sequence. Whatever the chapter goes on to describe follows Greece and its four divisions, in the order the vision gives — and the little horn arises in the latter time of their kingdom Daniel 8:23, after them. A reader cannot rearrange the chain, because the chain's middle links are named. And when this vision is laid beside the previous one, the same succession appears with Babylon at its head and the fourth empire in place of the goat's divisions Daniel 7:4–8 Daniel 2:38–40: the book runs one course of history repeatedly, each pass enlarging the last power.
It also fixes the method, and this is the more useful lesson. Where the text supplies an identification, the identification governs and no one is free to substitute a preference. Where the text withholds a name — as it does, deliberately, for the horn — the reader is held to the description: the profile given, and nothing added to it. That the chapter names two powers outright and describes the third at four times the length is the strongest possible signal about where its interest lies, and about what kind of certainty is available for each.
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