The Book of Daniel and the Four Kingdoms

The Book of Daniel is the first apocalypse with a real date hidden inside it, and the first one written as resistance literature. Its visions, added in Greek times around 167–164 BCE, under the persecution of Antiochus IV, are a coded history of the empires that had ruled Israel: Babylon, Media, Persia, Greece, the golden head, the silver arms, the bronze belly, the iron legs of Nebuchadnezzar's dream in Daniel 2, and in Daniel 7 the four beasts rising from the sea: the lion with eagle's wings, the bear, the leopard, the ten-horned monster. The fourth beast is Rome's Greek predecessor, the Seleucid kingdom, and its eleventh horn is the persecutor himself. The codes were transparent to the persecuted and deniable to the censor: the little horn speaks "great things," the saints are given into its hand "for a time, times, and half a time," and then the throne is set.

The scene that follows is the most influential in apocalyptic literature. The Ancient of Days, white-robed, takes his seat; the books are opened; the beasts are stripped of dominion; and one like a son of man comes on the clouds to receive an everlasting kingdom. Chapter 12 adds the resurrection: "many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt," the first unambiguous resurrection of the dead in the Hebrew Bible, complete with a sealed number: 1,290 days, then 1,335, and a blessing for whoever reaches the later figure.

Daniel shows that apocalypse is a wartime genre. It was written by people who expected to die, coded for people who expected to be searched, and its promise is precise: the persecutor's time is numbered, the books are open, and the kingdom is already being handed over. Every later apocalypse that promises an end to oppression, Revelation above all, is Daniel's descendant, and the coded numbers are the genre's original puzzle, an invitation to calculate that has been accepted by every generation since.

The genre's afterlife runs through the arithmetic. The 1,290 and 1,335 days of chapter 12 are the first instance of prophecy as calculation, and the practice proved more durable than any single reading: Joachim of Fiore, William Miller and every pamphlet date since are working Daniel's puzzle with new keys. Collins's commentary remains the standard account of the book's composition, and Cohn's broader argument places Daniel at the hinge where Persian and Jewish ideas of a final judgement fuse into something recognisably modern. The tradition it stands in is Jewish Eschatology; its greatest descendant is the Book of Revelation; its oldest inherited vocabulary, the divine warrior's day, belongs to the Day of YHWH. The land where the four kingdoms were read is described under Israel.