Kings Make Plans, and the Covenant Bears the Pressure

The chapter break falls in the middle of a speech: the messenger of chapter 10 is still talking. “Him” is most naturally Michael. In 10:21 Michael was the only one who held with the messenger; here the messenger recalls a time, in the first year of Darius, when he stood to strengthen Michael.

“The truth” picks up “the scripture of truth” from 10:21. After Cyrus came Cambyses, the pretender Bardiya, and Darius I; the fourth, far richer, fits Xerxes, whose vast army against Greece in 480 BC fills Herodotus’s seventh book. Persia had several more kings after him, and the text leaps straight to its fall.

“Stand up”, amad, is the verb of this chapter, used more than twenty times: kings stand up, and armies cannot stand before them, and in the end nobody stands. The “mighty king” is universally read as Alexander, though the text gives no name.

“When he shall stand up” means as soon as he has risen: Alexander ruled only thirteen years. “Not to his posterity”: his half-brother Philip Arrhidaeus was murdered in 317 BC and his son Alexander IV about 310, both in the wars of his generals.

The king of the south is Ptolemy I of Egypt. “One of his princes” fits Seleucus I, who served under Ptolemy while exiled from Babylon between 316 and 312 BC, then won back Babylon and built a realm stretching to India, larger than his old patron’s.

The king’s daughter is Berenice, daughter of Ptolemy II, married to the Seleucid Antiochus II about 252 BC on condition he set aside his wife Laodice. When Antiochus died in 246, Laodice’s party had Berenice and her infant son murdered. “He that begat her”, Ptolemy II, died the same year.

“A branch of her roots” is her brother, Ptolemy III, who invaded the Seleucid realm to avenge her in the Third Syrian War, beginning in 246 BC. “The fortress of the king of the north” fits Seleucia Pieria, the Seleucid harbour city, which he took.

Ptolemy III brought home Egyptian sacred images that Cambyses had carried off to Persia three centuries earlier, and the Egyptian priests praised him for it in the Canopus Decree of 238 BC. He did outlast his rival: Seleucus II died about 225, Ptolemy III about 222.

The King James takes the subject as the king of the south, but the Hebrew is usually read the other way: the king of the north comes into the southern kingdom and has to go home. That fits Seleucus II’s failed counterattack on Egypt around 242 BC.

“His sons” are Seleucus III, murdered in 223 BC, and Antiochus III, later called the Great. “Overflow, and pass through” fits Antiochus III’s drive down the coast in 219–217 BC toward the Egyptian frontier.

The battle is Raphia, near Gaza, in 217 BC. Polybius (5.79) gives Antiochus about sixty two thousand infantry and a hundred and two elephants. Ptolemy IV beat him, and the great multitude was “given into his hand”, the other king’s hand.

Polybius counts nearly ten thousand of Antiochus’s infantry killed. Ptolemy IV then made a quick peace and went home to his pleasures. 3 Maccabees 1 tells of him trying to enter the Jerusalem temple after Raphia, a heart “lifted up” in the most literal way.

“After certain years” is literally at the end of the times, years. Ptolemy IV died in 204 BC, leaving a child, Ptolemy V, and Antiochus III came south again in the Fifth Syrian War, this time with the larger army and the fuller treasury.

“Robbers of thy people” is literally sons of the violent among your people. Josephus says the Jews welcomed Antiochus III and helped him against the Egyptian garrison in Jerusalem (Antiquities 12.3.3). “To establish the vision” may mean they believed they were bringing prophecy to pass.

“Cast up a mount” is to build a siege ramp. After Antiochus III beat the Egyptian general Scopas at Panium, near the springs of the Jordan, in 200 BC, Scopas fled to Sidon and surrendered there after a siege. “His chosen people” are the south’s picked troops.

From 198 BC Judea was Seleucid. “Consumed” translates kalah, which can mean destruction or completeness: either the land will be ruined by his hand or it will be wholly in his hand. The “glorious land” is the “pleasant land” of 8:9 under another rendering.

“The daughter of women” is Cleopatra I, Antiochus III’s daughter, married to the young Ptolemy V in 194/193 BC to bind Egypt to her father. As queen and later regent she served Egypt’s interest, not his. “Upright ones” may rather be equitable terms, a treaty.

The isles are the coastlands of Asia Minor and Greece, where Antiochus III crossed in 192 BC. “A prince” fits the Roman commander Lucius Scipio, who defeated him at Magnesia in 190. The Peace of Apamea (188) stripped him of land west of the Taurus and laid a vast indemnity on him.

Short of money for Rome, Antiochus III died in 187 BC raiding a temple of Bel in Elymais, killed by the local people. “Not be found” sounds like Psalm 37:36 on the wicked in great power: “I sought him, but he could not be found.”

The raiser of taxes fits Seleucus IV, still paying Rome, who sent his minister Heliodorus to seize the Jerusalem temple treasury (2 Maccabees 3). He died in 175 BC not in battle but murdered, by the same Heliodorus.

“Vile” is nivzeh, despised. Antiochus IV took the name Epiphanes, God made manifest; Polybius reports that people called him Epimanes, the madman (26.1). The rightful heir, Seleucus IV’s son Demetrius, was a hostage in Rome. “Flatteries” is slippery things, smooth talk.

“The prince of the covenant” is widely taken as Onias III, the high priest ousted when his brother Jason bought the office from Antiochus in 175 BC, and murdered near Antioch about 171 (2 Maccabees 4:7–10, 33–34). The flood returns from 9:26.

“League” is an alliance, a joining together. Antiochus came to the throne with a small party of backers and the support of the king of Pergamum, and he grew strong through the parties that bought favour from him, Jason among them.

1 Maccabees 3:30 says Antiochus IV gave gifts with a liberal hand and “abounded above the kings that were before him”, the same boast of unprecedented spending as this verse. His father’s and grandfather’s generation had taken; he scattered.

The Sixth Syrian War began in 170 BC, when the ministers of the young Ptolemy VI, Eulaeus and Lenaeus, prepared to retake Coele-Syria. Antiochus struck first and beat the Egyptian army near Pelusium. “Forecast devices” means laying plots in advance.

“The portion of his meat” is pat-bag, the Persian word for the king’s rations in 1:5 and 1:8. Daniel refused the royal portion in chapter 1; here the men who eat it are the ones who betray the king who feeds them.

The two kings at one table were uncle and nephew: Ptolemy VI’s mother, Cleopatra I, was Antiochus IV’s sister. After his capture in 169 BC they posed as allies against Ptolemy’s younger brother in Alexandria. “The time appointed” is mo’ed, a set time, a word this chapter keeps returning to.

On his way home in 169 BC Antiochus plundered the Jerusalem temple, taking the golden altar, the lampstand and the table (1 Maccabees 1:20–24). “The holy covenant” is named here for the first time, and it will be named three more times in five verses.

The second invasion, in 168 BC. “Not as the former, or as the latter” means this campaign will end differently from the earlier ones. It is the first time in the chapter that the king of the north does not get what he came for.

Chittim, Kittim, first meant Cyprus and then westerners generally; Balaam foresaw “ships... from the coast of Chittim” (Numbers 24:24). Near Alexandria the Roman envoy Popillius Laenas drew a circle in the sand round Antiochus and made him answer before stepping out of it (Polybius 29.27). He went home humiliated.

“Arms” are armed forces. “The sanctuary of strength” may point to the temple as fortress, with the Seleucid citadel, the Acra, built beside it. 2 Maccabees 6:2 says the temple was renamed for Zeus Olympios. The daily offering stops, and a pagan altar is set on the old one.

“Corrupt” is yachanif, to make profane, godless. Against the flattered stand “the people that do know their God”, who act. 1 Maccabees 2 tells of Mattathias at Modein refusing the king’s sacrifice and killing the man who stepped up to make it.

“They that understand” are the maskilim. “The many” they teach, harabbim, became the name the Qumran community used for its full members. Sword, flame, captivity and spoil fit 2 Maccabees 6–7: the aged Eleazar, the seven brothers, and those burned in caves for keeping the sabbath.

“A little help” is widely taken as the Maccabean revolt, called little because from this book’s angle the teaching of the wise matters more than the armies. That reading is an inference. Some join the faithful “with flatteries”, insincerely, perhaps out of fear once the rebels were winning.

Three verbs from the smelter’s craft: to try (tsaraf, to refine metal), to purge, and to make white. The same three return in 12:10, “purified, and made white, and tried”. Malachi 3:3 pictures God sitting “as a refiner and purifier of silver”.

He is now simply “the king”, no longer the king of the north. “God of gods” is el elim, found only here. Antiochus’s coins called him Theos Epiphanes, god manifest. Paul borrows this language for the man of sin who “exalteth himself above all that is called God” (2 Thessalonians 2:4).

“The God of his fathers” may be the gods of his fathers, and the Seleucid ancestral god was Apollo. Antiochus IV’s coins increasingly replaced Apollo with Zeus Olympios. “The desire of women” has been read as a god favoured by women, perhaps Tammuz, whom the women wept for in Ezekiel 8:14.

“God of forces” is god of fortresses. Livy (41.20) says Antiochus began a temple of Jupiter Capitolinus at Antioch, the god of Rome, the power that had just humbled him. “Pleasant things” is chamudot, the word used of Daniel as “greatly beloved” and of the bread he refused in 10:3.

1 Maccabees 3:36 has the king order his regent to settle foreigners in Judea and “divide their land by lot”, and 1:33–38 describes a foreign garrison planted in the Acra. The god of fortresses is honoured in the strongest fortresses.

Up to verse 39 the chapter tracks known events closely; from here it does not match any recorded campaign of Antiochus IV, who died in Persia in 164 BC. Many scholars see the text turning from record to prediction at this point, and many others see it turning to a final figure. “Whirlwind” is sa’ar, a tempest.

Edom, Moab and Ammon were Israel’s old neighbours east of the Jordan and the Dead Sea, and Isaiah 11:14 foresaw Israel taking them. By the second century they survived mainly as regions, Idumea above all. “The chief” is the first or best of Ammon.

“Shall not escape” uses peletah, the word for a surviving remnant. Egypt, which slipped out of his grasp in verse 30 thanks to the ships of Chittim, is here left with no escape at all.

Lubim and Kushim, Libyans and Ethiopians, are named as Egypt’s allies in Nahum 3:9 and Ezekiel 30:5. “At his steps” means in his train, following behind him. The treasures of Egypt pass to him along with its allies.

“Tidings” that trouble a king and turn him back are what Isaiah promised against Sennacherib: “he shall hear a rumour, and shall return to his own land” (Isaiah 37:7). Antiochus IV did march east in 165 BC, against the Parthians.

“Palace” is appeden, the Persian apadana, the great columned audience hall of Susa and Persepolis: a royal pavilion pitched “between the seas”, the Mediterranean and the Dead Sea. Polybius (31.9) and 1 Maccabees 6 have Antiochus IV die of sickness in Persia, far from Jerusalem.