Biblion Bible Commentary
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Astonished at the Vision
Daniel 8:27
27 I, Daniel, fainted, and was sick for some days. Then I rose up and did the king’s business. I wondered at the vision, but no one understood it. · WEB
The prophet is ill for days, goes back to work, and is left with exactly one thing unexplained — which is why there is a ninth chapter.
I, Daniel, fainted, and was sick for some days Daniel 8:27.
He collapses. It is the third time this vision has put him on the ground Daniel 8:17–18, and this time the effect lasts for days — the same physical wreckage the last vision leaves him in Daniel 10:8 and the same grief the beasts had caused Daniel 7:15 Daniel 7:28. Whatever comfort is in this chapter, it did not reach him as comfort. He had seen a Prince's ministry usurped and his people trampled, and been given a term so long that the answer was itself part of the weight.
Then I rose up and did the king's business.
A small, honest sentence, and easy to pass over. The man who has just been shown the course of the world gets up and goes back to the administration of Belshazzar's province. The vision does not excuse him from his post; there is no retreat to the wilderness, no resignation, no claim of a higher calling that dissolves the ordinary duties of an official in a doomed government. He is ill, he recovers, he works — and Scripture's prophets are generally people with jobs Amos 7:14 1 Thessalonians 4:11.
I wondered at the vision, but no one understood it.
And the chapter ends on a failure that is not the vision's. Everything in it had been explained except one thing. The ram was named, the goat was named, the four kingdoms accounted for, the horn described at length, its end foretold. What Gabriel had been commissioned to explain Daniel 8:16 and did not return to was the number — the 2,300 evenings and mornings, and what it meant for a sanctuary to be set right Daniel 8:14. The commission was left incomplete, and the prophet knew it.
The book notices the gap and closes it. When Gabriel comes to Daniel again, he comes explicitly to finish this job — consider the matter and understand the vision, and I have now come to give you wisdom and understanding Daniel 9:23 Daniel 9:22 — and the first thing he supplies is a period cut off from a longer one, anchored to a datable decree Daniel 9:24–25. The unexplained number of chapter eight is the reason chapter nine happens, and the two must be read together because they were given together.
So the ending is also an instruction. A prophecy may be delivered complete and be understood only long afterward, and the man who received it may be the last person to see what it meant. He was told to seal it for many days to come Daniel 8:26 and told at the very end of the book that the words would be opened at the time of the end Daniel 12:9. His part was to write it down accurately and go back to work.
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