17 Several reasons suggest terminating our investigation at that point in time, as we shall see.Ģ The Common Mediaeval Apocalyptic Tradition This paper examines the four kingdom schema of Daniel in the early mediaeval writings, from the fifth to the twelfth centuries.
The sack of Rome in 410 CE and the withdrawal of Imperial authority in the West mark the gradual transition to the mediaeval centuries but a sharp turning-point in the history of apocalyptic speculation. In the latter, it found its classic expression in Jerome’s commentary on Daniel. 15 This identification remained consistent throughout the late-antique period in both rabbinic Judaism and patristic Christianity. 12 By the second century CE, Rome had become the “empire without end” ( imperium sine fine), extending from Mesopotamia in the East to the Pillars of Hercules in the West.įor the Jews and the Christians of the era, 13 the final kingdom 14 was no longer the “Greece” of the intended audience of Daniel and the other early apocalypses, but world-spanning Rome. Even to its contemporary chroniclers, Rome’s rise to supreme world power seemed to have been foreordained. 11 Over the next 150 years, the Seleucid Empire and the other Hellenistic states fell to Rome like dominoes. 10Īntiochus perished and his kingdom was overthrown, though not as the book of Daniel had predicted. This identification is reinforced elsewhere by allusions to the hated Antiochus, 8 including a skeleton version of the schema in chapter 8 (in which all the kingdoms but the first are named) 9 and the introduction of a different schema of “seventy weeks” in chapter 9. For the intended audience of the book, the fourth and final kingdom was the oppressive Seleucid Empire. Its simplified view of the conflict, coded by its symbolic imagery, pit traditionalist Jews against their Seleucid (Hellenistic Greek) overlords, whose monarch, Antiochus IV Epiphanes, had desecrated the Jerusalem Temple. The book of Daniel attained its final Masoretic form towards the end of the Maccabean Revolt of 167–164 BCE. Equating the fourth kingdom with a present-day kingdom or state enabled a group to locate itself within the sequence of this history, thus placing it on the cusp of salvation. Its overthrow represents the turning-point in the divine plan for history that was approaching its foreordained culmination. The cardinal issue was the identity of the fourth and final world-kingdom. The ambiguity of the images was critical to the schema’s enduring significance, since it allowed for later interpretations in light of new circumstances. The fourth beast is the most terrible of all and has iron teeth. In chapter 7, Daniel is shown a vision of the four hybrid-beasts that crawl out of the sea, one after the other. 6 In chapter 2, King Nebuchadnezzar dreams of a giant statue that is composed of four metals of descending value, gold, silver, bronze, and iron. The four kingdoms are never named but instead are identified symbolically. 4 Both chapters expect the fourth kingdom to be overthrown by the eschatological kingdom of God, thus terminating the sequence. 2 There the schema is presented in the form of heavenly revelation, 3 which gave it a predetermined dimension. Although it originated in classical antiquity, 1 the schema received its enduring formulation in chapters 2 and 7 of the biblical book of Daniel, where it acquired an apocalyptic valence. The four kingdom schema is a historiographic framework that divides the last phase of human history into four periods, each period ruled in turn by a dominant power or world-empire.