Daniel and Revelation, Read Together

Daniel and Revelation are the two books most often read as a code and least often read as books. They were written to be understood by the people who first received them, a captive in Babylon and seven churches under Rome, and everything in them was meant to say something to those readers first. This page is the site's reading of both, chapter by chapter, with the Study Bible one click away at every stop. It is a guide, not a key. Where the early church was of one mind, the page says so. Where the early church was divided, the page says that too, and holds its own view loosely.

Why read them together

Revelation quotes or echoes Daniel more than any other book: the beasts from the sea, the ten horns, the Son of man on the clouds, the time, times, and half a time, the book that is sealed and then opened. John assumed his readers knew Daniel, and the surest way to misread John is to skip Daniel and go straight to the newspaper. The two books also bracket each other. Daniel is told "But thou, O Daniel, shut up the words, and seal the book, even to the time of the end: many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased." (Daniel 12:4). John is told the opposite: "And he saith unto me, Seal not the sayings of the prophecy of this book: for the time is at hand." (Revelation 22:10). What was sealed for a far-off day in Daniel is unsealed in Revelation because the day had come. That one pair of verses settles how the site reads both books: not as sealed until our generation, but as opened in John's.

Daniel

Chapter 2, the statue. Read Daniel 2. Four kingdoms in one image: gold, silver, bronze, iron mixed with clay. Daniel names the first, "Thou art this head of gold," Babylon. The church from the beginning read the rest as Medo-Persia, Greece, and Rome, and the site does too, because Daniel 8 names the second and third himself. Then the stone "cut out without hands" strikes the image and grows into a mountain: "And in the days of these kings shall the God of heaven set up a kingdom, which shall never be destroyed: and the kingdom shall not be left to other people, but it shall break in pieces and consume all these kingdoms, and it shall stand for ever." (Daniel 2:44). In the days of those kings, the Roman days, God set up His kingdom. That is the kingdom Jesus announced as "at hand" and the one the site says is already here (see The Kingdom Is Already Here). The stone is Christ; the mountain is His people growing through the whole age.

Chapter 7, the four beasts and the Son of man. Read Daniel 7. The same four kingdoms, now as beasts from the sea: lion, bear, leopard, and a fourth "dreadful and terrible" with ten horns. Then the vision the New Testament leans on more than any other in Daniel: "I saw in the night visions, and, behold, one like the Son of man came with the clouds of heaven, and came to the Ancient of days, and they brought him near before him. And there was given him dominion, and glory, and a kingdom, that all people, nations, and languages, should serve him: his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom that which shall not be destroyed." (Daniel 7:13-14). Jesus took "Son of man" as His own name and quoted this verse to the high priest at His trial; the coming on the clouds is to the Ancient of days, to receive the kingdom, which is the ascension before it is anything else. The ten horns are explained in the chapter: "And the ten horns out of this kingdom are ten kings that shall arise: and another shall rise after them; and he shall be diverse from the first, and he shall subdue three kings." (Daniel 7:24). Kings, not tribes and not centuries. The little horn that speaks great words and wears out the saints was read by the Fathers as the coming Antichrist, and by the same Fathers as prefigured in Antiochus and in the Caesars; the site holds the spirit of antichrist as present since John's day and its final embodiment as an open question (see The Antichrist). What is not open is the verdict: "the saints of the most High shall take the kingdom, and possess the kingdom for ever."

Chapter 8, the ram and the goat. Read Daniel 8. Daniel does the interpreting: "The ram which thou sawest having two horns are the kings of Media and Persia. And the rough goat is the king of Grecia." The great horn broken and replaced by four is Alexander and his generals, and the little horn that rises from them and stops the daily sacrifice is Antiochus Epiphanes, who did exactly that in 167 BC and whose story the site's Study Bible carries in 1 Maccabees 1. This chapter is the proof that Daniel's visions were fulfilled in real history first, and the pattern for how the later ones will be: a real ruler, a real desecration, a real deliverance.

Chapter 9, the seventy weeks. Read Daniel 9. Sixty-nine weeks of years from the command to rebuild Jerusalem to "Messiah the Prince," and then: "And after threescore and two weeks shall Messiah be cut off, but not for himself: and the people of the prince that shall come shall destroy the city and the sanctuary; and the end thereof shall be with a flood, and unto the end of the war desolations are determined." (Daniel 9:26). Messiah cut off, and the city and sanctuary destroyed by the people of a prince to come. The site reads the seventieth week as fulfilled in Christ: He is the one who "shall confirm the covenant with many" in His ministry and death, caused the sacrifice to cease by the one sacrifice, and the desolation Daniel foresaw fell on the city in AD 70, as Jesus said it would when He quoted this chapter on the Mount of Olives (see Eschatology at a Glance, where the Irenaeus and Hippolytus reading of a future prince is also stated). Nothing in the text puts a gap of two thousand years between the sixty-ninth week and the seventieth; that gap is the load-bearing wall of the dispensational system, and it was built in the 1830s.

One word in verse 26. "Cut off" is karath, and it is the verb Hebrew uses for making a covenant, because a covenant was cut in blood: "In the same day the LORD made a covenant with Abram" (Genesis 15:18) is the same word. Messiah is cut off in verse 26 and a covenant is confirmed in verse 27. Daniel heard those two sentences in one breath, and the cross is where they meet.

Why a gap does not fit here. We grant that prophecy can look across centuries in one sentence. Isaiah 61:2 holds "the acceptable year of the LORD, and the day of vengeance of our God" side by side, and when Jesus read it in Nazareth He stopped after "To preach the acceptable year of the Lord" and "closed the book" (Luke 4:19-20). The day of vengeance was still ahead. That kind of distance is real, and it is how prophecy often speaks of a landscape. But Daniel 9 is not a landscape; it is a count. Seventy weeks are numbered, and a count with two thousand years placed between the sixty-ninth week and the seventieth is no longer a count of anything. The text itself gives the order: Messiah is cut off "after threescore and two weeks" and the city and sanctuary are destroyed afterward (Daniel 9:26). Jesus set the "abomination of desolation, spoken of by Daniel the prophet" inside the lifetime of the people listening to Him: "This generation shall not pass, till all these things be fulfilled" (Matthew 24:15, 24:34; Luke 21:20).

What the other reading says. Those who place the seventieth week in the future read "in the midst of the week" (Daniel 9:27) as a future ruler breaking a treaty, and they read the forty-two months of Revelation as the second half of that same week. Careful readers have held this, and Hippolytus, in his treatise On Christ and Antichrist in the third century, is the oldest of them. We state it plainly so you can weigh it. The question to put to both readings is which one adds the least. The reading on this page needs no gap, no third temple and no second covenant; the week runs on from the sixty-ninth, Christ confirms the covenant and ends the sacrifice by His death, and the desolation follows as verse 26 says it will.

Chapters 10 to 12, the kings of the north and south, and the resurrection. Read Daniel 11 and Daniel 12. Chapter 11 is the most detailed prophecy in the Bible: the Persian kings, Alexander, the Ptolemies and Seleucids at war for a century, and Antiochus again, his flattery, his desecration, his end. It was so exact that Porphyry, the pagan critic, argued it must have been written after the fact, which is the highest compliment a prophecy can be paid. Then chapter 12 lifts past Antiochus to the end of all things: "And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt." (Daniel 12:2). A bodily resurrection of the just and the unjust, still ahead, which is the site's firm line against every reading that spiritualizes the resurrection away (see the three tenses). "Blessed is he that waiteth."

Revelation

How the book is built. Revelation is not a single timeline read left to right. It is a set of visions that each run from John's day to the end and then start again from a different angle: seals, trumpets, the woman and the dragon, the beasts, the bowls, the harlot, the rider, the thousand years, the city. Augustine read it this way, the Reformers largely did, and it is the only reading on which the book does not contradict itself. Each cycle covers the whole age. That is why the site can say Babylon fell in AD 70 and that Revelation describes the whole age between the two comings, in the same breath (see One Story, Not Two).

Chapters 1 to 3, the letters. Read Revelation 1. The book announces itself as "things which must shortly come to pass" and says "the time is at hand" (Revelation 1:3). The site takes those words as meaning what they say. The seven letters are to seven real churches, and every warning in them is a warning to a church, which is why they belong on the Warnings page as much as here.

Chapters 4 and 5, the throne and the Lamb. Read Revelation 5. The center of the book. The scroll no one can open is opened by "a Lamb as it had been slain," who is also the Lion of Judah and the Root of David. Everything after this is the Lamb unrolling history from the throne. Keep verse 6 in mind; the beast of chapter 13 is built to look like it.

Chapters 6 to 11, seals, trumpets, and the two witnesses. Read Revelation 6. The seals are the Olivet Discourse in another form: war, famine, death, persecution, the shaking of the heavens. The first rider is disputed. Some read him as a counterfeit Christ; Irenaeus, the earliest to comment, read him as Christ Himself, "He went forth conquering, that He should conquer," and it fits the discourse the seals follow, where the gospel goes out to all nations first (Matthew 24:14). Either way, every rider acts only because something "was given" him, and the Lamb opens every seal. The 144,000 are Israel sealed and then seen as "a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations," the same people from two angles, which is the whole Israel-and-church question answered in one chapter (Revelation 7:9). The trumpets echo the plagues of Egypt. The two witnesses are killed in "the great city, which spiritually is called Sodom and Egypt, where also our Lord was crucified" (Revelation 11:8). That verse names the great city, and it is Jerusalem.

Chapter 12, the woman and the dragon. Read Revelation 12. The woman is Israel, from whom the man child comes; the dragon is Satan; the child is "caught up unto God, and to his throne," the ascension; the woman becomes the church in the wilderness, kept for "a time, and times, and half a time," Daniel's phrase for the whole time of trouble. Satan is cast down at the ascension, "I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven," and makes war on "the remnant of her seed, which keep the commandments of God, and have the testimony of Jesus Christ."

Chapter 13, the two beasts. Read Revelation 13. Daniel's four beasts merged into one, rising from the sea, with the dragon's authority. One head "as it were wounded to death; and his deadly wound was healed" (Revelation 13:3). Set that beside 5:6 and it is plainly a counterfeit of the Lamb slain and alive. The beast parodies the resurrection; that is what makes it antichrist and not merely anti-God. The second beast, later called the false prophet, is identified by what it does: signs and wonders that deceive men into worshipping the first beast and its image. The number is "the number of a man," and the oldest reading, with the letters of Nero Caesar summing to 666 in Hebrew, is the one the site gives most weight, while granting that the number was given so that every generation could test its own beast (see The Antichrist). The ten horns are "ten kings, which have received no kingdom as yet; but receive power as kings one hour with the beast" (Revelation 17:12). Kings, as in Daniel.

Chapters 14 to 16, the harvest and the bowls. Read Revelation 14. The Lamb on Zion with His sealed people, the everlasting gospel to every nation, the fall of Babylon announced, the harvest of the earth. The bowls are the trumpets completed, the judgments now full, and they gather the kings to "a place called in the Hebrew tongue Armageddon."

Chapters 17 and 18, Babylon. Read Revelation 17. The harlot "drunken with the blood of the saints," seated on the beast, "that great city, which reigneth over the kings of the earth." The site's primary reading is Jerusalem: 11:8 has already named the great city as the place of the crucifixion, Jesus said "it cannot be that a prophet perish out of Jerusalem," and 18:24 charges Babylon with "the blood of prophets, and of saints, and of all that were slain upon the earth," which is Matthew 23:35BH nearly verbatim. Rome is the second reading and an honest one; the seven hills are Rome's, and the early church often said so. Augustine took the widest view, Babylon as the city of man in every age, and the recapitulation reading lets all three stand: the harlot was Jerusalem in AD 70, was Rome under the Caesars, and is every city that kills the prophets and calls itself holy (see Armageddon and Babylon).

Chapter 19, the rider. Read Revelation 19. The marriage supper of the Lamb and the rider on the white horse, "King of kings, and Lord of lords." This is the visible return, and the site holds it as one event, future, bodily, and seen by every eye (Revelation 1:7), with no secret coming before it (see Is the Rapture in the Bible?). The beast and the false prophet go into the lake of fire here; Satan is dealt with in the next chapter.

Chapter 20, the thousand years. Read Revelation 20. The one chapter on which the early church was honestly divided, and so the one on which the site holds its view most loosely. "Blessed and holy is he that hath part in the first resurrection: on such the second death hath no power, but they shall be priests of God and of Christ, and shall reign with him a thousand years." (Revelation 20:6). Augustine, and the church after him for a thousand years, read the first resurrection as the new birth, Satan's binding as the gospel going to the nations, and the thousand years as this whole age between the comings; the site leans that way. Irenaeus, Justin, and Papias, closer to the apostles, read a bodily rising of the just and an earthly reign before the last judgment; the site states that fairly and refuses to call it error. What both readings agree on is more important than where they differ: one visible return, one general resurrection, one judgment, and the devil in the lake of fire before the new heaven and earth.

Chapters 21 and 22, the city. Read Revelation 21. No temple, "for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are the temple of it." The tree of life from Genesis 2, healing the nations. The bride, which is the church, which is the new Jerusalem, which is where God dwells with men. Then the book closes with the warning not to seal it, and the promise, "Surely I come quickly."

What the site holds, and how tightly

Firmly. One people of God, Jew and Gentile in one olive tree. One visible return of Christ, still ahead. One bodily resurrection of the just and the unjust, still ahead. Daniel's four kingdoms end in Rome and the stone is Christ. The seventieth week is fulfilled in Christ and the desolation fell in AD 70. Revelation was "at hand" for its first readers and recapitulates the whole age. The beast's healed wound is a counterfeit of the Lamb. The spirit of antichrist has been in the world since John's day. Babylon is, first, the city that crucified the Lord.

Loosely. Whether the thousand years is this age (Augustine) or a reign to come (Irenaeus). Whether antichrist has a final personal embodiment still ahead, and who. Whether Rome or Jerusalem is the primary harlot; the site says Jerusalem first and Rome fairly. The chart on the timeline page draws one line through all of this and says which line it draws.

Not at all. A secret rapture before the tribulation. A gap of two thousand years inside Daniel 9. A rebuilt temple with restored animal sacrifice as God's plan. Two peoples of God with two destinies. Naming a modern nation as the beast or the false prophet from the news. Each of those is the modern form of the system, and none of them is the early church's ordinary reading. One qualification we owe the other side: Hippolytus, about the year 204, already detaches Daniel's seventieth week and puts it at the end, so the gap itself is older than 1830 even though the system built on it is not.

A note on dating: the readings here lean on John having seen the Revelation before the year 70. Most of the early church said 95. The voices on both sides, the emperor count and the temple are gathered on When John Saw It; we hold the early date loosely and say why there.

Study the passages

Daniel: 2, 7, 8, 9, 11, 12. The Olivet Discourse: Matthew 24, Luke 21. Revelation: 1, 5, 11, 12, 13, 17, 19, 20, 21. The history between the Testaments that Daniel 8 and 11 foresaw: 1 Maccabees 1.

Related: The End Times in the Prophets and the Apostles, One Story, Not Two, Eschatology at a Glance, The Antichrist, Armageddon and Babylon, Is the Rapture in the Bible?, The Kingdom Is Already Here, and What Is Dispensationalism?. Scripture from the King James Version, linked to BibleHub; the words of Christ are marked in purple and the words of God in gold. Chapter links open the site's Study Bible, where the KJV, Berean, and Douay-Rheims sit side by side. The verses themselves, side by side across Daniel, the prophets and Revelation, are on Lining Up the Verses About the End.