Here then we have those that were persecuted by their enemy — Antiochus Epiphanes. "And they that understood (or, are wise) among the people shall instruct many" (Dan. 11:33). The phrase means "the" many. It is to be regretted that the article is not conveyed in English where it stands in the Hebrew. For there are the two varieties: the word "many" sometimes with, and sometimes without, the article. The Revisers have taken no notice of the difference, any more than the A.V. "And they shall fall by the sword, and by the flame, by captivity, and by spoil, [many] days. Now when they shall fall, they shall be holpen with a little help; but many shall cleave to them with flatteries" (Dan. 11:33, 34). So it came to pass that Antipater, the Edomite father of Herod, got in. For the family had not a shadow of right to reign over the Jews. Only he stood with the last unworthy scion of the Maccabees, and through Roman help also slipped into power. But such retributions were allowed in God's providence, in order to the humiliation of His guilty people. "And [some] of them of understanding shall fall, to try them and to purge, and to make [them] white, [even] to the time of the end; because [it is] yet for the time appointed" (Dan. 11:35). Just here it is where the text itself shows an interruption of the history till we come to "the time appointed" — "the time of the end." Throughout the prophecy will be found a similar break. Even this remarkably successional chapter discloses such an interruption both at the beginning and at the end. The first undeniably occurs at the end of Dan. 11:2, after the defeat of Xerxes, and before Alexander the Great. What left room for it is Xerxes stirring up all against the realm of Greece. After a century and a half this entailed the return blow by Alexander. All the intervening history was passed over. In the same way the Spirit of God has brought us down to the time that follows Antiochus Epiphanes. No notice is here taken of the successive kings that reigned in the north and south; for the next we shall see to be king in the land between the two countries, a king who had not yet come to the throne. After Antiochus Epiphanes we do hear of certain Jews making a bold stand to maintain their law against the apostates, and with trials of all kinds till "the time of the end." That time is still future; but it shall assuredly come, the great crisis for the Jew, which the wise and prudent ignore, and therefore count all the rest of the chapter "too fabulous for a contemporary historian." The truth is that it is all future, but will surely be fulfilled in its season. There is a perfect answer in the past history to all we have seen up to Dan. 11:35, but to nothing more. Yet it is not to be allowed that the words from Dan. 11:36 are indeterminate in the least degree. The only appearance of it (and this is intentional vagueness, if such a phrase be permitted here) is in the words, "until the time of the end." It already covers an intervening space of something like 2000 years. The blank at any rate occurs there. In Dan. 11:36 we read, "And the king shall do according to his will." This is no king of either north or south, but quite another monarch who is called simply "the king." No other designation was required. Every intelligent Jew would at once know, as every