By the middle of the 1990s, my considerable study of the literature on both sides of the issue had convinced me that the Book of Daniel is genuinely prophetic and that critical-historical scholars (liberals for short) have performed a comprehensive exegetical demolition operation in their treatment of it. Accordingly, soon after I taught my last college class in the spring of 2000, I undertook the task of making as thorough a critical study of the work on Daniel by critical scholars as I could in the time that I allotted to myself; and in order to shorten the time that it would take to bring a product of my work to market, I chose to focus on the four kingdoms of Daniel 2 and 7 rather than wrestle with all aspects of the controversy over Daniel’s authenticity.

As a neophyte among the ranks of biblical scholars, but one who came to the field with the benefit of a long academic career, I have developed a great fondness for a poem that I ran across many years ago and often find myself thinking about nowadays as I struggle to find the right way to interpret hotly disputed portions of the Bible. That poem is “The Blind Men and the Elephant,” by John Godfrey Saxe, a nineteenth-century Vermont lawyer/journalist/poet. I suppose that many—if not most—of the visitors to this site are familiar with Saxe’s poem, but I am convinced that everyone who engages in biblical exegesis would do well to keep a copy of it at hand.

Put into prose appropriate to biblical scholarship, Saxe’s poem reminds us that before we conclude that a certain passage must be given a particular interpretation, we need to check out any other possibilities that can be advanced with some plausibility. It also reminds us that controversies over biblical interpretation arise when the contending parties fail to give due weight to the evidence presented by their opponents. All of us, I am sure, have a tendency to ignore weak points in our own exegetical analysis while simultaneously magnifying the weak points in the arguments of those who disagree with us. We may not be blind (though I suspect that some biblical analysts must be partially deaf), but the hermeneutical “vision” of all of us is at least partly obscured by our biases. That said, since it is often impossible to read everything that might be relevant to the study of particular biblical topics, making judgments about what is plausible and what is not is an essential ingredient of successful exegesis.

With these introductory thoughts out of the way, I shall turn to the problem of interpreting two of the most important verses in the Book of Daniel, 7:13 and 7:14. Their text is as follows (NIV): 13“In my vision at night I looked, and there before me was one like a son of man, coming with the clouds of heaven. He approached the Ancient of Days and was led into his presence. 14He was given authority, glory and sovereign power; all peoples, nations and men of every language worshiped him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that will not pass away, and his kingdom is one that will never be destroyed.” These two verses follow the appearance of God (the Ancient of Days) in 7:9-10, the indication in 7:11 that the fourth beast in the visions of Daniel 7 is slain and its body “thrown into the blazing fire,” and the statement in 7:12 that the other three beasts, though stripped of their authority, “were allowed to live for a period of time.”

Of great relevance to the exegesis of Daniel 7:13-14 are passages in the Synoptic Gospels that link them to the Book of Daniel. Thus, Matthew 24:15 refers to “‘the abomination that causes desolation’ spoken of through the prophet Daniel”; Matthew 24:30 states that “the nations of the earth . . . will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of the sky, with power and great glory”; and Matthew 26:64 has Jesus informing Caiaphas and the Sanhedrin that “you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the Mighty One and coming on the clouds of heaven.” In light of these passages and the parallel passages in Mark (13:14, 13:26, 14:62) and Luke (21:20, 21:27, 22:69), it is easy to see how one might plausibly interpret Daniel 7:13-14 as pointing to the events of AD 70 that culminated in the burning of the Temple and the destruction of Jerusalem. In that case, the appearance of the “one like a son of man” who comes before the Ancient of Days “with the clouds of heaven” is readily understandable as indicating the investiture of Christ with the authority to take dominion of the earth.

Because it is clear to me that the “coming on the clouds of heaven” referred to by Jesus in Matthew 26:64 and Mark 14:62 signals the arrival of “the days of vengeance” (KJV, Luke 21:22) that climaxed with the destruction in AD 70 of the Temple and its worship system, I have a natural inclination to regard Daniel 7:13-14 as alluding to the events of that year. This interpretation, however, is at odds with what most analysts have favored. Futurists of various persuasions regard Daniel 7:13-14 as applying to an apocalyptic end time that still awaits us. Critical scholars generally maintain that Daniel the prophet lived only in the imaginations of those who wrote about him and that most of his “prophecies” were vaticinia ex eventu (after the fact) creations of the second century BC. Daniel 7:13-14 then tend to be treated as failed prophecies that were supposed to have been fulfilled immediately upon God’s intervention to abruptly terminate the life of Antiochus IV (175-163 BC), the brutal Seleucid king who attempted to eradicate Judaism. Some scholars, whom I classify as liberals, impart a messianic Christian interpretation to Daniel 7:13-14 while nevertheless insisting that Daniel’s four-kingdom sequence ends with Greece and the little horn of Daniel 7 is Antiochus IV. Those in this camp find 7:13-14 to be fulfilled in some sense by the events of the first century AD, but they still deny that the fourth kingdom in the Danielic sequence can be Rome. And even among the ranks of those who believe that the fulfillment of Daniel 7:13-14 occurred in the first century AD and that Rome is the fourth kingdom, a common interpretation is that the “coming with the clouds of heaven” of Daniel 7:13 refers to the time of the Ascension, not a conferral of divine authority over the earth about forty years later.

Given a choice among assigning the historical application of Daniel 7:13-14 to (1) a future apocalypse, (2) the second century BC, or (3) the first century AD, there is only one possibility that I take seriously—the first century AD. I have arrived at this conclusion via a process that has involved a considerable effort to thoroughly understand the arguments for the other alternatives. I believe myself to be familiar with the more plausible arguments of those who favor either of the alternatives that I reject. I concede that there are weaknesses in the case for insisting that the end-time of Daniel 7 is to be found in the first century AD, but I am certain that these are far less serious than those of the first two alternatives. That I find myself adhering to a minority position in this matter I ascribe primarily to the unwillingness of their proponents to recognize the full extent of the weaknesses of the positions that they endorse.

The most intractable problems of the futurist alternative are its refusal to recognize that the New Testament means what it says about the time of Christ’s return and its inability to plausibly bridge the gap between the demise of the fourth kingdom of Daniel 7 and the coming with the clouds of the one like a son of man that they believe has never occurred. This gap arises because the fourth kingdom, which futurists (correctly) recognize as the Roman Empire is required by their exegesis to be around for the grand finale in which, at last, the kingdom ruled by Christ literally comes to rule the earth both politically and spiritually.

Futurists persist in ignoring or misinterpreting the abundance of evidence in the New Testament that Christ literally meant it when He said: “I am coming soon” (Rev 22:20), and that when He told the Sanhedrin “you will see the Son of Man . . . coming on the clouds of heaven” (Matt 26:64), He was not speaking about something that was to occur long after those present had died. I must conclude that wishful thinking has triumphed over reality in the minds of our futurist friends, and I refuse to try to force the Bible to say what it plainly does not say because many of the early church fathers who lived after the first century AD decided that the events of the first century did not fulfill their wishes about what the time of the end should be like and established a tradition that cannot be broken without causing major adjustments in the practice of Christianity and serious damage to those whose livelihoods are derived from the preservation of that tradition. Neither can I accept the idea that the Roman Empire has survived in some form until the present or will somehow be reconstituted after a prophetic gap that bridges all the years since the Roman Empire politically and militarily disintegrated.

Immediately after I finished the last paragraph, Dave Green posted on his website, preteristcosmos.com, a thoughtful answer to a question (number 108 in Dave’s list) that relates well to the exegetical wrong turn to which my paragraph refers. How, a questioner asks, “could the Church have totally missed the greatest events in all redemptive history: The Second Coming and the Resurrection of the Dead?” The questioner goes on to suggest that orthodox Christianity (meaning futurism) must repudiate preterism because the Church cannot be “the Pillar and Foundation of the Truth” and have engaged in such a horrific mistake. In response, Dave argues that the early Church did not totally miss the Parousia. Instead, “the Church consciously recognized the coming of Christ Himself to indwell His people”; it understood the nature of the New Covenant; and many of the early church fathers embraced the idea that with the destruction of Jerusalem, the old [spiritual] kingdom had been supplanted by a new one in which the body of believers stood in communion with Christ. Although the early fathers erred in their interpretation of some biblical passages by imparting “an extra-biblical scheme of future events” to them, Dave writes, they also did much that was exegetically sound. That is more than can be said, he implies, for the way that many premillennialists have distorted Scripture.

I agree with Dave Green that although the Church has made exegetical errors, those have not been of such magnitude as to be fatal to our understanding of the Bible and the meaning of Christ in our lives. In my judgment, the errors have not prevented humankind from achieving spiritual progress, and the great material progress that the world has achieved in the last thousand years was made possible by the impact of Christianity on science, economics, ethics, and spirituality. “There is a time for everything” states Ecclesiastes 3:1, and I believe that it has been God’s will that the full understanding of Scripture is to be achieved only as what we call civilization has matured more fully.

My objections to the second-century BC alternative for the interpretation of Daniel 7 are presented in detail in my book on the four kingdoms of Daniel, and I shall not attempt to offer a detailed criticism of that interpretation here. I must note, however, that because liberals generally insist that the four-kingdom sequence in Daniel 7 is Babylonia, Media, Persia, and Greece and that the time of the end in the Book of Daniel sets in with the death of Antiochus IV (the “little horn” of Daniel 7), it seems intuitively unlikely that Jesus Christ can be the “one like a son of man, coming with the clouds of heaven” of 7:13. Who, then, is this mysterious figure?

An attempt to answer this question within the framework of liberal exegesis that retains some claim to Christ’s divinity is that of the U. S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in its New American Bible (NAB). In its introduction to Daniel, the NAB informs us that “This work was composed during the bitter persecution carried on by Antiochus IV Epiphanes (167-164) and was written to strengthen and comfort the Jewish people in their ordeal.” In the notes to Daniel 7, we are told that the “one like a son of man” of 7:13 represents “the glorified people of God that will form his kingdom on earth” and are represented in this verse in human form. The NAB’s note on Daniel 7:13 also states that “Just as our Lord applied the figure of the stone hewn from the mountain to himself (Daniel 2:36-45), he also made the title ‘Son of Man’ his most characteristic way of referring to himself, as the One in whom and through whom the salvation of God’s people came to be realized.” The NAB’s notes to Daniel 2 state, incidentally, that “The stone hewn from mountain is the messianic kingdom awaited by the Jews.” The NAB thus takes the position that even though the son of man passage in 7:13 and the prophecy of the rock of Daniel 2 were not intended to be long-range prophecies of the coming of Christ, our Lord chose to interpret them to accommodate His purposes. From the NAB’s perspective, therefore, it is evidently permissible to change the meaning of a biblical text when doing so suits a higher purpose. Just as liberal jurists have presented us with the theory of a living Constitution whose interpretation can be altered to suit the temper of the times, so also have liberal theologians given us a “living Bible.”

There is a mystical quality to the NAB’s commentary on Daniel 7:13 that I find difficult to fathom. Perhaps my graduate training in secular disciplines and forty years of serving as a professor of economics have incapacitated me from being able to understand how it is possible to simultaneously embrace the beliefs that Greece is the fourth kingdom in Daniel 7, the “little horn” of 7:8 is Antiochus IV, the Book of Daniel was divinely inspired, and Jesus was justified in applying 7:13 to Himself even though the “one like a son of man” actually refers to a collection of people, not an individual. Moreover, while the NAB’s notes to Daniel 7 indicate that “one like a son of man” represents “the glorified people of God that will form his kingdom on earth,” those notes do not state that “the glorified people” are Christians. Indeed, the NAB indicates that the persecuted people of Daniel 7 are the Jews of the time of Antiochus IV; and it follows that if this is correct, then it is the Jews who lead the rest of the world into the universal faith that is prophesied in 7:14 and is represented by the great mountain of Daniel 2:35 and 2:45. In light of the conflict between Judaism and Christianity that arose in the first century AD, the inference that it is the Jews of the Mosaic or Old Covenant who lead the way to the establishment of the universal faith and become included with the “glorified people of God” is one that I must reject.

I have encountered of late the idea that the answer to the problems that I see in a treatment of Daniel 7 like that offered by the NAB is the employment of the marvelously flexible exegetical tool of typology. Thus, one can argue that although the primary historical fulfillment of the end-time prophecies of Daniel 7 occurred in Maccabean times (the second century BC), this does not rule out the possibility of one or more secondary fulfillments at a later time. Perhaps, therefore, one can conjecture, Jesus was justified in ascribing the appearance of the son of man in Daniel 7:13 to Himself after all. I submit, however, that when we read in 7:14 that “He was given authority, glory and sovereign power,” that “all peoples” are to worship Him, and that “his dominion is an everlasting one . . . that will never be destroyed,” we are reading about something that is unique. If a verse like this one can be made to accommodate typological exegesis as outlined here, I fear that we are in the process of rendering the Bible meaningless. Perhaps as my understanding of biblical scholarship improves, I shall change my opinion. At this stage, however, a little voice inside me is saying, “You should live so long!”

Once the higher critics emerged in sufficient numbers to largely displace the more traditional scholars of religion at our leading institutions of higher learning, the most widely held view about Daniel 7:13 came to be that “one like a son of man” was a collective reference to the Jews. Apparently, however, it is difficult to translate Daniel 7:14 so as to eliminate the implication that its language straightforwardly refers to an individual, not a collection of people. This, I think, helps explain why John J. Collins (whose massive critical-historical commentary on Daniel inspired me to write my book on the four kingdoms of Daniel) finds that the prevalent view among critical scholars at present is that the one like a son of man is an angelic being, most probably Michael, the guardian angel of the Jews.

As my knowledge of biblical scholarship relevant to the Book of Daniel has increased, I have come to better appreciate the fact that some prominent scholars whom I admire take the position that the angel Michael may be symbolic of Christ; i.e. a type (!). For example, such is the position taken with regard to both Revelation 12:7 and the Book of Daniel (10:13, 10:21, 12:1) in two fine commentaries on Revelation that I have just finished reading for the first time: the late David Chilton’s The Days of Vengeance and Kurt Simmons’s The Consummation of the Ages. I find myself now leaning toward the view that these authors may be right about Michael. For both of them, however, those Jews who refused to accept the divinity of Christ became apostates to the true faith. I conclude, therefore, that if it is correct to regard Michael as being symbolic of Christ in the Book of Daniel, then it is Christianity, not the apostate Judaism that rejected Christ, which is portrayed therein as the faith that comes to dominate the earth. This, however, is not the view adopted by the critical scholars for whom John Collins speaks.

In writing my book on the four kingdoms, I sought not only to make the case against the “Greek” sequence of kingdoms and the claim that all four of the visions in the second half of Daniel were written with a Maccabean era fulfillment in mind for the end-time prophecies, but also to make the case for AD 70 as the time for the fulfillment of the end-time prophecies in the visions of Daniel 7, 9, and 10-12. I regard Daniel 8 as having been fulfilled in the reign of Antiochus IV. In the preface and elsewhere in my book, I conceded that I did not have definitive answers with regard to precisely how the prophecies of Daniel 7, 9, and 10-12 were fulfilled by AD 70, but I did indicate my preferences. I recognize that some of the visitors to this site are more knowledgeable about the issues pertaining to the AD 70 fulfillment of the Danielic prophecies than I am, and it is with hesitation that I venture onto this ground. Oh well, “A faint heart never won the fair lady.” Besides, I think these issues need to be regularly hashed out on this website. I shall therefore wind up this article by outlining the alternative ways to interpret Daniel 7:13-14 from the preterist perspective as I see them.

There are, as I see it, three possibilities for interpreting Daniel 7:13-14 from a preterist perspective that presuppose the validity of the “Roman” sequence of the four kingdoms and perceive the one like a son of man in 7:13 to be Jesus Christ and only Jesus Christ. Possibility one is that 7:13 corresponds to the Ascension ca. AD 30-31. Possibility two is that it portrays the conferral of authority over the earth by God to Christ immediately before the coming of Christ that preterists generally assume occurred in AD 70. Possibility three is that it symbolizes the completion of the task of gaining dominion over the earth by Christ and His followers. This last possibility is one that I have not encountered in my study of the literature on 7:13, but I feel certain that I am not alone in considering it. In bringing it up, it, I want to make clear, I am not suggesting a futurist interpretation with the Second Coming, the Antichrist, etc. What I am suggesting is the possibility that while those parts of Daniel 7 that deal with the little horn and the judgment against him suggest an AD 70 fulfillment, it could be that the fulfillment of verses 12-13 (and perhaps 27 as well) has yet to be completed.

I suspect that the Ascension interpretation is the dominant one among preterists. I have run across it a number of times, and Lloyd Dale, an energetic and very knowledgeable email contact, has persuasively emphasized the point that Acts 1:11 seems consistent with this view. I cannot deny that the mental picture of Jesus ascending with the clouds is consistent with the scene portrayed in Daniel 7:13. Moreover, from the preterist perspective, was not the year of the Ascension the time when the Mosaic Covenant became inoperative and the New Covenant under the authority of Christ became operational?

Against this compelling line of argument it can be pointed out that Daniel 7:13 does not specifically indicate that the one like a son of man comes from earth to enter into the presence of the Ancient of Days. It can also be argued that although the New Covenant became operational ca. AD 30, it did not go fully into effect until AD 70. Thus, one could hold that what we have in 7:13 is the picture of Christ appearing before the Ancient of Days just prior to His return in AD 70. Furthermore, recall Christ’s statement to Caiaphas and the Sanhedrin assuring them that they would see the Son of Man “coming on the clouds of heaven” (Matt 26:64, Mark 14:62), which I believe refers to the events of AD 70. Consequently, I am not willing to unreservedly reject the idea that Daniel 7:13-14 should be dated to the latter year. In any event, I do not see that the preterist interpretation of Daniel is greatly affected by the choice between ca. AD 30 and AD 70 for the fulfillment of 7:13-14.

Relevant to the interpretation of Daniel 7:13-14, however, are the immediately preceding verses; i.e. 12-13, which inform us that the fourth beast is slain and its body thrown into the fire and that the other three beasts are “allowed to live for a period of time” but wield no authority. Just how our understanding of verses 13 and 14 should be affected by verses 11 and 12 is, I think, a relatively neglected issue. It is my opinion that preterists need to consider the implications that stem from the possibility that the events in verses 13 and 14 follow those of 11 and 12 in time, but I have not run across many instances in which they have done this.

Although we commonly see Daniel 7 treated as though it contains a single vision, I have noticed that the NIV indicates in Daniel 7:1 that the ensuing material consists of visions. In verse 13, the NIV places vision in the singular, but there are other translations, including the NAB, that have “visions” there. One could argue, therefore, that verses 11 and 12 may have been part of one vision while verses 13 and 14 were part of another and that for this reason, one cannot necessarily assume that the latter two verses follow the earlier two in time. I must acknowledge, however, that the material of verses 8 through 14 readily lends itself to being seen as a three-part historical sequence. First, the Ancient of Days appears before the multitude with a river of fire flowing before him, and the books of judgment are opened (v.9-10). Second, judgment is rendered against the four beasts and their existence is terminated, with the first beast, at least, being cast into the fire (v.11-12). Third, the one like a son of man appears and receives everlasting dominion over the earth. On the other hand, the insertion of the material in 11-12 could also be viewed as simply being a digression from the judgment scene vision that begins in verse 8 and is resumed in verse 13. Supporting this idea is the fact that the ends of the lives of the four beasts are not mentioned again in Daniel 7.

Regardless of which of these three alternatives is favored, a problem for those preterists (the majority, I believe) who consider Rome to be the fourth kingdom is how to deal with the facts that the Roman Empire survived well past AD 70 and its predecessors retained some of their identity past that time as well. In the admittedly modest amount of research I have done on this point, I gather that perhaps the prevailing view is that the dominion over all peoples of the earth of 7:14 is to be understood in a spiritual sense, not a political one. In the same sense in which the Mosaic Covenant established the spiritual superiority (“dominion”) of the Jews over the other people of the earth until the first century AD, I think the argument goes, the New Covenant that came into being at that time has established the spiritual “dominion” of Christianity. A variation of this argument holds that the Roman Empire fell in a spiritual sense after the first century AD because emperor worship after Domitian (81-96) was no longer an important feature of the Empire’s rule. But even if one accepts this spiritual sense argument as applied to the Roman Empire, there remains the problem that Daniel 7:12 has the other three kingdoms being allowed to live for a while.

Perhaps because of my secular background and the difficulty I have in comprehending what I regard as mystical approaches to biblical scholarship—or maybe it’s just an inborn lack of imagination—I cannot take this line of argument seriously. I find myself contemplating the general status of the world and muttering “THIS is the kingdom of heaven?” My view of Daniel 7:13-14 (and 27) is that these verses suggest the eventual triumph of Christianity in a political and material sense. This is the sense in which the domination of the four sequential earthly kingdoms of Daniel 2 and 7 is portrayed, and it stands to reason, as far as I am concerned, that it is the sense intended for the everlasting kingdom of the one like a son of man. It is true that 7:13 states that “all peoples, nations and men of every language worshiped him,” but this verse does more than indicate the spiritual aspect of His reign. It also states that “He was given authority, glory and sovereign power,” all of which, I believe, are attributes of ruling that extend beyond the spiritual realm.

I argued in my December article on this site (“Did Daniel See Beyond AD 70?”) that it is reasonable to view the prophecy of the rock as one whose fulfillment does indeed stretch beyond the first century AD. If this is correct, then is it not reasonable to expect that Daniel 7 may have a prophetic horizon that extends beyond that time as well? But for anyone who reads this and thinks that I am endorsing a futurist interpretation, please think again. My position is that all of the material in Daniel 7 pertaining to the little horn and his persecution of the “saints” or “holy ones” had a first-century AD fulfillment.

My reference to the “saints” or “holy ones” reminds me of what I regard as the most difficult problem confronting anyone who favors a preterist interpretation of Daniel 7—how to deal with the “saints” mentioned to in verses 18, 21, 22, 25, and 26. From the conservative perspective, these would seem to consist of Christians, but it is easy to see how one could interpret them to be the body of faithful Jews. Compounding the problem of identifying them for those who identify Rome as the fourth kingdom is the fact that 7:25 refers to a period of “a time, times and half a time” during which the saints are to be handed over to the little horn. This period is generally understood as being three and a half years. In its note to 7:25, incidentally, the NAB states that this period of three and a half years should be understood as signifying “an indefinite, evil period of time.” The NAB also identifies those “holy ones” being persecuted as the Jewish people.

I have used up all the space (and more) that I allotted to myself for this article and will close without making an effort to resolve the problem of the identity of the saints. Perhaps I, or someone else, can take up that issue in a future article on this site. For the moment, suffice it to say that I do not agree with those who insist that virtually all of those Jews with Christian sympathies escaped with their lives during the Jewish War of AD 66-70 and that I believe that a satisfactory way can be found to deal with the identity of the saints problem within a preterist framework of analysis.

In conclusion, I shall offer the opinion that I do not believe the thrust of preterist exegesis is decisively affected by the choice among the three alternatives I have suggested for identifying the historical moment at which the “coming with the clouds of heaven” occurs. I do, however, think that preterists need to do more work on the problem posed by the fact that the Roman Empire was removed from the historical scene well after the first century and its predecessors survived in some sense after that time as well.

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