page_title: Daniel 8
section_title: Genre and themes
hierarchical_section_title: Daniel 8 / Genre and themes
caption_attribution_description: English: statue of Antiochus IV of Syria Suomi: Syyrian Antiokhos IV
context_page_description: Daniel 8 tells of Daniel's vision of a two-horned ram destroyed by a one-horned goat, followed by the history of the "little horn", which is Daniel's code-word for the Greek king Antiochus Epiphanes.
  The subject of the vision is Antiochus' oppression of the Jews–he outlawed Jewish customs such as circumcision, Jewish monthly/Lunar calendar, dietary restrictions, and Sabbath observance, made ownership of the Torah scroll a capital offense, and built an altar to Zeus in the Temple. His program sparked a popular uprising which led to the retaking of Jerusalem and the Temple by Judas Maccabeus.
context_section_description: The Book of Daniel is an apocalypse, a literary genre in which a heavenly reality is revealed to a human recipient; such works are characterized by visions, symbolism, an other-worldly mediator, an emphasis on cosmic events, angels and demons, and pseudonymity (false authorship). Apocalypses were common from 300 BCE to 100 CE, not only among Jews and Christians, but Greeks, Romans, Persians and Egyptians. Daniel, the book's hero, is a representative apocalyptic seer, the recipient of the divine revelation: has learned the wisdom of the Babylonian magicians and surpassed them, because his God is the true source of knowledge; he is one of the maskil, the wise, whose task is to teach righteousness. The book is also an eschatology, meaning a divine revelation concerning the end of the present age, a moment in which God will intervene in history to usher in the final kingdom.
  Daniel 8 conforms to the type of the "symbolic dream vision" and the "regnal" or "dynastic" prophecy, analogous to a work called the "Babylonian Dynastic Prophecy"–a more extensive example appears in Daniel 11. For its sources it draws on Daniel 7, which supplies the symbolism of the "little horn" and the "holy ones" (angels), as well as on  the Book of Ezekiel, which provides the location by a river and the epiphany of the angel, and on the Book of Habakkuk with its concern with the "end of time." The "little horn" which casts some of the stars to the ground recalls Isaiah 14:12 and Lucifer, which in turn presupposes the Ugaritic (Canaanite) myth of Attar's attempt to take the throne of Baal.
  Chapter 8 is about the actions of the world-powers at the "end-time". The course of history is pre-determined, and Antiochus is merely playing a role in the unwinding of God's plan. Daniel 8 is thus a reinterpretation and expansion of Daniel 7: where chapter 7 spoke only cryptically of the change-over from the Medo-Persian empire to the age of the Greek kings, chapter 8 makes this explicit; by the same token, chapter 8 speaks cryptically of the "little horn," whose story will be taken up in detail in the following chapters.
caption: Antiochus IV Epiphanes – Altes Museum, Berlin.
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