In our deep dive into Daniel Chapter 11, we unravel the complex narratives of ancient rulers and their kingdoms. From the prophetic visions given to Daniel to the real-world historical events of the Greco-Persian wars, and the strategic marriages aimed at political alliances. This episode offers a rich tapestry of biblical prophecy intertwined with world history, revealing the astounding accuracy and depth of biblical scriptures.
Greetings to the brightest audience in the country, and welcome to Bob and Yart Live. Today, we’re getting into a study of the Book of Daniel done by my father and predecessor, Bob and Yart. And if you want, you do not want to miss this. If you want to get all of Bob and Yart’s Bible studies for just $10, you can get that at nyart.shop that has all of these Daniel studies. You do not want to miss those. But today, we’re getting into this study of Daniel, So exciting. Hey, if you can’t afford that $10, email us, service at kgov.com, and we will find a way to get you those Bible studies. Hey, this is Daniel, Bob Enyart’s study of Daniel. So exciting. I’ll see you on the other end.
SPEAKER 02 :
Daniel chapter 11, like previous chapters we’ve seen in this study, has prophecies of future historical events. In the last study, and back in chapters 7 and 8, we talked at some length about our open theist perspective of such historical prophecies. And so those discussions, of course, are very relevant here about the nature of prophecy, fulfilled and unfulfilled prophecies, God incorporating human reactions to prophecies in the scriptures, and also his extraordinary ability to both forecast and to bring to pass future events. So we’ve covered that. Now, on Daniel specifically, years ago, back before public schools became the norm, children learned to read with the Bible as their text. And as part of their curriculum, they would learn about ancient kingdoms like Babel and the Persians and the Assyrians and so on. Today, we learn very little of such matters. It’s all very foreign to us. Now, part of it is just practical. Back in the 1700s, the students of history, they didn’t have to learn about the Vietnam War or the 60s. They didn’t have to learn about World War II. or, for that matter, all of the 20th century, the Soviet Union and the United Nations. So there was a lot less to learn. We have another couple hundred years of history, and it’s very complex and involved. But still, it’d be nice if we could be more familiar with these ancient events in history, because then when we come to the Bible, we would understand it better. So I’m going to review what we’ve covered already in Daniel 11, and then we’ll continue where we left off. In this chapter, first there is a prophecy of four kings, and they are identified by looking back in history, and they go from the last king in the time of Daniel, so the king after him, until the time of Alexander the Great. And then there are references in this chapter to the king of the north, which refers to Syria and the Seleucid Empire over Syria. And that was formed… by the remnants of Alexander the Great’s empire because he died so young. And then we also have in this chapter the King of the South, and that refers to Egypt, and more specifically the Ptolemies, who were well-known kings over Egypt. So King of the North, Syria, and the Seleucid Empire, and King of the South, Egypt, and the Ptolemies. Now in verse 1, we looked at this already, the first year of Darius the Mede, and this is the angel Gabriel saying he strengthened Darius. Remember back when Darius saw that Daniel survived the lion’s den, and he sent out a letter to all his realm saying the God of Daniel was the true God. And verse 2 then speaks of four coming kings. And if you recall, we started our list of names of the kings beginning with the first king after Daniel’s time. So Daniel, his ministry went from King Nebuchadnezzar to the king’s son Belshazzar to his successor Darius the Mede to his successor Cyrus the Persian. So after Cyrus the Persian, there were four kings, and we’ve talked about these, beginning with one named Cambyses from about 500 B.C. So let’s read verse 2. the realm of Greece. So the four kings prophesied are Cambyses and then Smyrdas and Darius I and Xerxes. Then Daniel speaks of an actual military campaign of Xerxes against Greece. Now these wars in this period of time is referred to by historians as the Greco-Persian Wars or just the Persian Wars. They were battles between the armies of Persia which today roughly is Iran, Persia, ancient Persia, and the city-states of Greece. And they lasted from about 500 B.C. to about 450 B.C., so for about 50 years. And notice the phrase in this verse, “…he shall stir up all against the realm of Greece.” Well, Xerxes, that fourth of those four kings, he actually had a successful campaign against Sparta and Athens, which you’ve probably heard about because of a recent Hollywood movie. And his campaign culminated in the battle at Thermopylae. And some of us are familiar with that because we went there. And Josh Craddock and I discussed this in our DVD, A Bible Tour of Greece. which was a wonderful time to work with Josh, first to go on the trip with all of our friends from Denver Bible Church and from our audience around the country, and then to work with Josh and produce an educational and enjoyable DVD. By the way, Josh today is a student at the King’s College in Manhattan at their campus in the Empire State Building. And from there, not too many blocks away, is the United Nations, and Josh has his credentials, his badge, to get in the UN because he’s our emissary, our personhood emissary in New York and at the UN, and that’s very exciting. So back to Xerxes, it was the year 480 B.C., and Xerxes personally led an invasion of Greece with one of the largest armies ever assembled in the ancient world. Hence, in this verse, he shall stir up all against the realm of Greece. His victory against Sparta and Athens at Thermopylae allowed the Persians to overrun virtually all of Greece. It was a short-lived victory, But by the size of his army, we see why Daniel would state this prophecy. Of course, Daniel didn’t know, but this was given to him from God. Now, from this verse until about verse 35… It seems to present the reigns of the kings from the time of Daniel at the end of his ministry until that very wicked king that we talked about back in chapter 8. That was Antiochus Epiphanes. And we’ll talk more about him when we get to those verses. We call him the Old Testament Antichrist, so to speak. He’s the one who commanded the Jews to worship Zeus in their temple in Jerusalem. which was shocking. You could imagine that that didn’t go over well, and you could read about that in ancient history. Now, after those kings, the prophecy continues along the lines of what we saw in chapter 8 with the prophecy of a great conqueror who we know as Alexander the Great. And as we saw, true to history, Alexander’s empire was broken up suddenly, He lost it very quickly because of his early death, and it was divided among his four successors as attested to not only a couple times in Daniel, but also in secular history and as we’ve discussed earlier. So Alexander died. very unexpectedly, in a palace in a land that he had conquered. He was Greek from northern Greece, Macedonia. His father was Philip II, and he died in the palace of Nebuchadnezzar, in Babylon at age 32. He had not provided for an effective transition because he died so young, and so there was no reasonable control over the realms that he had subdued. And so after four men divided his kingdom, for the most part, it quickly fell apart. Verse 3, then a mighty king shall arise, that’s Alexander we’re talking about, who shall rule with great dominion and do according to his will. And when he has arisen, his kingdom shall be broken up and divided toward the four winds of heaven, but not among his posterity, nor according to his dominion with which he ruled, for his kingdom shall be uprooted even for others beside these. And sure enough, by secular history, this is what happened. It wasn’t his children who inherited his reign. There wasn’t an Alexander dynasty. It pretty quickly fell apart into four pieces. Egypt and the Ptolemies, that was one piece, the Seleucid Empire in the east, and then there was the kingdom of Pergamon in Asia Minor, what we call Turkey. We also have a wonderful resource, a Bible tour of Turkey, and then Macedon, which is northern Greece. Those were the four parts of Alexander’s empire that broke up. Now, the next 16 verses from verse 5 to 20 refer to the conflict between sort of the north and south of what we just described, between the Seleucid Empire in Syria in the north, northeast, and Egypt in the south, sort of southwest. So it’s… A period of struggle for about a century and a half, from 320 B.C. to about 175 B.C., between the Seleucids, again called in the text the king of the north, who ruled Syria and Alexander’s eastern conquest, and the Ptolemies, called in the text the king of the south, who ruled Egypt. So continuing, verse 5, “…also the king of the south in Egypt shall become strong, as well as one of his princes, and he shall gain power over him and have dominion, and his dominion shall be a great dominion. And at the end of some years they shall join forces, for the daughter of the king of the south shall go to the king of the north to make an agreement.” So this was a political union, a marriage described in ancient secular history to keep peace. A royal daughter from the south, a daughter of one of the Ptolemies named Bernice, was given as a bride to a king of the north of the Seleucids from Syria. Now, this Bernice is the daughter of a well-known king of Egypt named Ptolemy Philadelphus. The political union between, so if you could picture, a princess of Egypt, Bernice, and a king of Syria, of the Seleucids, their political union, it was a marriage, it produced the sun. and Bernice hoped that he would eventually sit on the throne in the Seleucid Empire. That didn’t work out. Not surprisingly, knowing the fallen sinful flesh of man, her son was killed, And then so was she, for that matter. So the plan did not work out well. And let’s continue with verse 6 here. “…but she shall not retain the power of her authority, and neither he nor his authority shall stand.” That is, her son will not take this elusive throne. “…but she shall be given up with those who brought her, and with him who begot her, and with him who strengthened her in those times.” But from a branch of her roots, one shall arise in his place, who shall come with an army, enter the fortress of the king of the north, and deal with them and prevail. So the text says, well, her son didn’t end up in power. But a branch of her roots shall arise and basically get vengeance. Now, what would that mean, a branch from her roots? Well, a branch of hers or an offshoot from her might be a son or a daughter. But a branch from her roots would mean somebody that came from her parents. And it turns out that, sure enough, Bernice had a brother. And his name is Tomi Eugetes. Tomi E-U-E-R-G-E-T-E-S. Tomi Eugetes, brother of Bernice, who, by the way, was married to a Bernice, but thankfully it was a different Bernice. He avenged his sister’s death by overrunning Syria, even to the Euphrates. And while he was avenging, he heard about a sedition happening back in Egypt, where he’s from. And so he returned quickly. He brought with him the spoils of war, and… By the way, he reigned for a long time, for decades, and he had a counterpart in Syria named Seleucus, and he outlived his counterpart by four years. So let’s go to verse 8. And he shall also carry their gods captive to Egypt with their princes and their precious articles of silver and gold, and he shall continue more years than the king of the north.” And now for verse 9, there was a king of the Seleucids, the king of the north, named Seleucus Callinicus. And he was killed in an accident, and his two sons reigned after him, one briefly. But before that, let’s read in verse 9, “…also the king of the north shall come to the kingdom of the king of the south, but shall return to his own land.” However, his sons shall stir up strife and assemble a multitude of great forces. And one shall certainly come and overwhelm and pass through. Then he shall return to his fortress and stir up strife. Wow, that’s a bit confusing. Well, the two sons of… This king, after his death, when he fell from a horse and was killed, they began to reign. The first had a very similar name to his father. He was Seleucus Seranus and his brother Antiochus the Great. Now Seranus died. And so Antiochus fought a war with one of the Ptolemy kings, Ptolemy Philopator. We’ll learn more about him later. Until he had recovered all the parts of Syria that had been lost to the Egyptians. And verse 11, and the king of the south of Egypt shall be moved with rage and go out and fight with him with the king of the north, Syria, who shall muster a great multitude, but the multitude shall be given into the hand of his enemy. When he has taken away the multitude, his heart will be lifted up, and he will cast down tens of thousands, but he will not prevail. So this Ptolemy is the fourth, and he had a popular title given to him by the masses. He was called Father Lover. that is, Ptolemy Philipator. Like Philadelphia would be brotherly love, and Philip Potter would be fatherly love, or love of the father. But this name was given to him not because he loved his father, but quite the opposite, because he was a murderer, and he freely killed members of his own family, including his mother. And he murdered his own brother, who was going to take a bath, you know, Roman bath style. And Philippator had him scolded to death. So this is an evil king. And history reports that he killed 10,000 soldiers from Antiochus’ army, and he captured another 4,000. Verse 13, for the king of the north will return, that is, they’re going to renew the war, and muster a multitude greater than the former, and shall certainly come at the end of some years with a great army and much equipment. So it says at the end of some years. Antiochus went to war in Persia and in India. After… that he did return to battle in Egypt about 14 years after he had left off there. So at the end of some years, he comes with a great army and much equipment, and he went to war against the son of Philopator, who was called Ptolemy Epiphanes. Ptolemy Epiphanes was a very young king And he brings us to the time in history of the Cleopatras. Cleopatra I was daughter of a Seleucid king, who was Antiochus III. And so Antiochus III had a daughter, Cleopatra I. And she married Ptolemy Epiphanes. Well, they had three kids. One of their three kids was Cleopatra II. And you could imagine then there’s a Cleopatra III and the fourth until you get to the one who has a romance with Mark Antony, and she was Cleopatra VII. So we take these moments in history that we’re more familiar with, and when we learn new details, we try to fill in the gaps. Verse 14, Now in those times, many shall rise up against the king of the south. Also, violent men of your people shall exalt themselves in fulfillment of the vision, but they shall fall. These many, it says many shall rise up, include a king you may have heard of, I mentioned him just a moment ago, Philip of Macedon. Macedonia is northern Greece, Achaia is southern Greece. So Philip of Macedon joined forces with Antiochus and rebels who were in Egypt proper, and they all went to war against Ptolemy. Now that is Philip I. His son, Philip I, The second is buried in Virginia. We traveled there. Some of you will remember. Now, that is interesting for two reasons. One, Philip II is the father of Alexander the Great. So it’s starting to all fit together. And secondly, he is buried in a most extraordinary underground tomb that was only discovered and excavated recently in 1977. You can enter this underground complex, as we did, and you could see the front of Philip’s tomb. And we went in there with Josh and our whole crew, and we describe in our Bible Tour of Greece DVD the tomb of Philip II, the gold tomb, It’s a small coffin. It’s called a larynx, and it’s a closed box or a coffin that they believe that Philip II’s remains, that it still contains some of his actual bodily remains. So let’s continue verse 15. So the king of the north, that is Antiochus the Great, shall come and build a siege mound and take a fortified city and the forces of the south, and at this time they were led by an Egyptian general named Scopus. The forces of the south shall not withstand him. Even his choice troops shall have no strength to resist. According to Jerome, who was a church historian who wrote about 400 A.D., forces were sent to deliver Scopus and they failed. And that’s what we’re reading here. Even his choice troops have no strength to resist. Verse 16, But he who comes after him shall do according to his own will. That is, Antiochus coming against Ptolemy Epiphanes. And no one shall stand against him. He shall stand in the glorious land with destruction in his power. Now, we mentioned in our last study that as you go through Hebrew prophecies, they often have a double meaning. fulfillment, referring to something temporary or in the near future, and then something spiritual or eternal or something far off in the future. And I think as we proceed, we’re going to get into that. And it’s somewhat complicated. For example, when you read about the fall of Lucifer, it’s in the context of the king of Tyre. And so how do you transition from Tyre to Lucifer? Well, God expects us to be able to do it if we’re on the same page that he’s on. So it’s a little bit more complicated than reading the newspaper. The glorious land here in this verse, he shall stand in the glorious land. Other references to this in Daniel and Ezekiel show that this is exactly what we would presume. It’s a reference to the land of Judea, southern Israel. Verse 17. He shall also set his face to enter with the strength of his whole kingdom and upright ones with him. Thus he shall do. And he shall give him the daughter of women to destroy it, but she shall not stand with him or be for him. Now, as we’re going through, and I’m mentioning different kings and successions of kings or generals or battles, and they sort of all hit you like a blur. To counter that, we would have to do one or two semesters of ancient history focusing on the Persians and the Greeks and the Ptolemies. And obviously, in the context of a verse-by-verse study of Daniel, we can’t do that. So I mentioned some commentaries last week, and I do believe that things are getting sufficiently well-advanced on the Internet that you can Google some of these verses, some of these kings, and find out things about them pretty quickly. So we read here that, well, there’s a plan with a woman. to do something, but she’s not going to stand with him or before him. What in the world is that about? Well, Antiochus ended up giving to Ptolemy Epiphanes his own daughter, Cleopatra, in marriage. But the verse says, she shall not stand with him or before him. That is, she ended up, as happens, favoring her husband rather than her father, so his scheme failed. And verse 18, after this, he shall turn his face to the coastlands and shall take many. But a ruler shall bring the reproach against them to an end. And with the reproach removed, he shall turn back on him. Now, Antiochus, who we’re talking about, warred with the Romans. And in so doing, you could imagine that he’s sailing west. And as he does, he takes many of the isles, the Greek isles that are in the Aegean Sea. He took many of those, but he couldn’t hold on to the land that he took. Verse 19, then he shall turn his face toward the fortress of his own land, but he shall stumble and fall and not be found. There shall arise in his place one who imposes taxes on the glorious kingdom, but within a few days he shall be destroyed, but not in anger or in battle. So this…
SPEAKER 01 :
Stop the tape. Stop the tape. Hey, we are out of time here on KLTT Radio. If you want the entire thing, you can find it in two different ways. One, you can go to kgov.com, click on the store, and purchase the Daniel Bible Study, which is a little bit expensive. I’ll be honest. It’s a little bit expensive. Or for way cheaper, you can go to nyart.shop and get all of Bob Enyart’s Bible Studies for just $10. You do not want to miss that. $10. What a steal. If that’s too expensive for you, reach out service at kgov.com and we will find a way to get that to you. No charge. We want to be a blessing to you. Again, nyart.shop. That’s E-N-Y-A-R-T dot S-H-O-P. Hey, may God bless you guys.
