Gift of His Word

Minor lesson

The Book and Its Four Visions

Who Daniel was, what the names mean, and the four visions that all trace the same four empires.

October 11, 2026

The names

Daniel means ‘God is my judge.’ Nebuchadnezzar means ‘Nabu, protect my heir.’ Nabu was the Babylonian god of writing, wisdom, and prophecy. So the king named after a god of prophecy has a dream he cannot read, and his own wise men cannot read it either. A servant of the true God reads it for him.

Daniel says it plainly to the king: "there is a God in heaven who reveals mysteries."

When Daniel lived

Daniel was taken to Babylon when Nebuchadnezzar first came against Jerusalem, "in the third year of the reign of Jehoiakim king of Judah."

That first deportation is usually dated to 605 BC, the year Nebuchadnezzar defeated Egypt at Carchemish and came to the throne. Daniel was still serving when Babylon fell in 539 BC, and he received a vision "in the third year of Cyrus king of Persia." He lived through the whole Babylonian Empire and into the Persian one.

The four visions

I break Daniel's prophecy into four parts. The dates are the ones I used in the sermon.

  • The statue (about 602 BC). Nebuchadnezzar's dream, .
  • The four beasts (about 553 BC). Daniel's dream, , and its interpretation, .
  • The ram and the goat (about 551 BC). Daniel's vision, , and its interpretation, .
  • The kings of the North and the South (about 539 BC).

Daniel dates these himself by king. The statue is "in the second year of his reign," Nebuchadnezzar's. The beasts are "in the first year of the reign of Belshazzar over Babylon." The ram and goat are in the third year of Belshazzar. The vision of chapters 10 and 11 is in the third year of Cyrus. The BC years come from matching those kings to the Babylonian records.

All four cover the rise and fall of four major empires: Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece, and Rome. The statue and the beasts give the big picture. The ram and the goat zoom in on Persia and Greece. Daniel 11 zooms in even closer, on the kings who fought over the land of Israel.

Two languages

Daniel was written in two languages, Hebrew and Aramaic. The Aramaic runs from the middle of Daniel 2:4 through the end of chapter 7. You can see the switch in the text: the wise men "answered the king in Aramaic." That matters for the skeptics' arguments in How Skeptics Answer Daniel.

Back to the lesson: From Daniel to Christ.

Sources sighted

  • Babylonian Chronicle (ABC 5); Jeremiah 46:2

This is a deeper teaching under From Daniel to Christ. Its home is Prophecy.