The Four (Animal) Kingdoms: Understanding Empires as Beastly Bodies

Abstract

Put simply, Daniel is a book of empires.1 The first half of the book (chapters 1–6) contains six stories that advocate cooperating with foreign kings as Daniel achieves success in an imperial world.2 In contrast, the second half of the book (chapters 7–12) details apocalyptic visions, which, in large part, center around the end of empires and their replacement with a divine kingdom. Post-biblical interpreters recognized the imperial focus of the book and similarly used Daniel—whether it be with implicit allusions, explicit references, or entirely rewritten passages—when they wanted to say something, even tangentially, about empires. This deployment of the book of Daniel and its motifs became what I have termed elsewhere as the “Danielic discourse.”3 An important part of this discourse was the four kingdoms motif, which was a larger Near Eastern motif depicting a series of empires and which was originally distinct from Daniel. In Daniel, both the narrative and the apocalyptic imagery incorporate a series of empires. The royal court shifts from that of the Babylonians (Daniel 1–5) to Darius the Mede’s (Dan 5:31) and then, finally, to Cyrus the Persian’s (Dan 6:28). The same three imperial settings repeat in Daniel 7–12.4 Beyond the historical setting of the chapters, there are visions in Daniel 2 and 7 that portray a four-part imperial series consisting of Babylonia, Media, Persia, and Greece. Daniel 2 does so with a human-like statue and