Totalizing Beasts and Apocalyptic Resistance: Rereading Daniel 7
Photo by Michael Krahn on Unsplash
Church Anew had the incredible honor of hosting Rev. Dr. Walter Brueggemann as our featured columnist from our launch in 2020 through his passing in 2025. We have invited colleagues and students of Dr. Brueggemann to contribute to the Church Anew blog to celebrate and continue his legacy.
To many mainline Christians, the apocalyptic literature of the Bible appears to be little more than an embarrassing obsession of biblical literalists and crackpots––better ignored than explored. But apocalyptic writing has an unrivaled capacity to rupture the totalizing claims of the powers that have a stranglehold on our contemporary cultural imagination.
The problem is that, like any tool, apocalyptic literature can be used for the opposite purpose: when used by those in power, it can reinforce the very monolithic narratives it was designed to shatter and sanctify present power arrangements as divinely ordained stages in God’s predetermined plan. When biblical apocalyptic texts are used to foreclose any conversation about addressing the present moment because it is a waste of time, or when people use them to “other” and catalyze opposition against marginalized people, it becomes demonic. As Shakespeare noted, “the devil can quote scripture for his purpose,” using God’s liberating word to entrench oppression and terrify the afflicted with visions sent to comfort them.
When people in power consider themselves persecuted and then read themselves into apocalyptic texts as God’s righteous warriors, rather than recognizing themselves in the beasts, apocalyptic literature contorts into a perverse and deadly weapon. Privileged American Christians have used Revelation to demonize immigrants as harbingers of the end times; comfortable suburbanites have cited Daniel’s ideas of a new heavens and earth to justify inaction on climate change; political parties appropriate apocalyptic imagery to mark their opponents as cosmic enemies deserving destruction.
When the interpretation of biblical apocalyptic literature disrupts rather than confirms a privileged reader’s comfort, when it reveals that current power arrangements are temporary and under judgment, promises that present suffering has eternal meaning and will someday end, and generates endurance for the powerless, then it is working––meaning that it is busy generating liberative possibilities. When it pushes people to accelerate catastrophe, sanctions political power, or legitimates the status quo, then we can be certain that it is serving demonic ends. The apocalyptic imagination didn’t arise from the halls of power, but from the experience of children torn from parents, boots on necks, a faith community facing extinction.
Yet at the moment when all hope seems lost––salvation arrives.
Daniel 7 presents several intertwined versions of a night vision of four beasts rising from the chaotic sea: a lion with eagle’s wings, a bear with three ribs in its mouth, a leopard with four wings and four heads, and a fourth beast, terrible beyond description, with iron teeth and ten horns (vv. 1–7, 17, 19, 23). From these horns emerges a little horn speaking arrogantly, making war against “the holy ones” (vv. 8, 20–22, 24–25). These beasts represent a series of world empires that, each in turn, dominated the world known to ancient Israelites. The final image of the little horn is a coded reference to the persecution of Antiochus IV (167–164 BCE), which many residents of Jerusalem and its environs perceived to be an attempt to eradicate the Jewish faith. Not only did the residents of Jerusalem not understand what was happening––they could not fathom why their God would allow such a thing to happen.
The destruction of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar was, in a way, interpretable to them––the people had sinned, and were banished from the land––but the attempted eradication of faith in YHWH did not yield to any conceivable explanation. Why would God allow this? If not YHWH, who was responsible? From the perspective of biblical scribes, ancient Israelite religion downplayed the existence and potential power of evil spirits: as nascent monotheists in a polytheistic world, they shied away from speculating about any dark powers, lest they dilute the message that praise and loyalty were due to one and only one lord: YHWH. Good and bad alike came from the hand of YHWH, the one God who ruled unchallenged over all of creation (cf. Job 1:21; 2:10).
Yet the persecution of Antiochus IV disrupted this reductive theological tradition. What happens when it seems like everything in the world proves that God is not in control? The author of Daniel 7 begins to think: perhaps certain events are not attributable to the one God––perhaps there are evil forces at work in the world that are even more powerful than human greed and hatred. What eventuates is Daniel 7, which articulates the beginnings of a theology of spiritual warfare: the little horn fights against the divine beings that serve God––and will even seem victorious for a time (7:21, 25).
Yet at the moment when all hope seems lost––salvation arrives.
Suddenly, the scene shifts to a heavenly courtroom (7:9–11, 13, 22, 26–27). Thrones are hastily placed by divine attendants––admitting that, even if just for a short time, God had abdicated the role of divine judgment over the world, allowing the evil powers to run rampant. But divine judgment finally arrives when God, depicted as the “Ancient of Days,” takes to the throne along with many thousands of powerful divine attendants surrounded by fire (vv. 9–10). Books are opened, judgment pronounced, and the beasts lose their dominion (vv. 11, 22, 26–27).
The striking reversal then occurs: “one like a son of man,” meaning basically “somebody who looks like a nobody,” comes flying down riding the clouds of heaven (vv. 13–14). The Aramaic phrase deliberately emphasizes mortality and weakness. Why would this be striking? The “cloud rider” is an epithet for massively powerful gods in the ancient world such as Baal, and was sometimes applied to YHWH (Ps 104:3). This nobody isn’t a divine warrior, though––it’s a vulnerable, fragile figure. So: why would this Nobody be flying around on the cloud-chariot? It would be like a random kid flying a B-2 bomber! And this Nobody has the gall to approach the Ancient of Days! But to the surprise of everyone, the Ancient of Days grants the Nobody everlasting dominion. An angel explains to Daniel that this figure represents “the holy ones of the Most High” who receive the eternal kingdom after enduring persecution (7:27, cf. vv. 14, 18).
This stunning reversal presents us with the central scandal of biblical faith: namely, that the sovereign God of the universe chooses to work not through the mechanisms of worldly power but through a vulnerable human community who maintains faith under crushing pressure. This matches the consistent biblical pattern: God chooses the enslaved over Pharaoh, the younger son over the elder, the crucified one over Caesar. Divine sovereignty doesn’t flow through conventional channels of power, but through what Paul calls “the foolishness of God” that is “wiser than human wisdom” (1 Cor 1:25). Essentially, the text insists that ultimate authority belongs not to those who wield violence but to those who endure it faithfully. It offers a radically subversive understanding of how divine sovereignty operates in history, and one that contemporary Christianity desperately needs to recover.
Many years later, Jesus will refer to himself as the “son of man,” or “mortal one,” somewhat ironically: he’s just a nobody, he’s saying. But everyone knows that he’s a former nobody who now draws massive crowds and is rumored to perform miracles. So when Jesus was being tried before the high priest Caiaphas in the last hours of his life, and he referred to himself one last time as the “son of man,” onlookers might have thought that he was trying to shrug off the charges of blasphemy and insurrection by calling himself the “nobody” (Mark 14:62; Matt 26:64). But then he swerved: Jesus, the “nobody,” said he would appear again coming out of the clouds, just like Daniel 7:14 (Mark 14:62; Matt 26:64). Salvation again coming from the least expected place: the execution of an innocent nobody.
But Christians miss something when they only think of Jesus as the referent of Daniel 7:13–14. Jesus cited this scripture not because it only ever referred to him, but because it had long been an important text that everybody understood to refer to the Jewish people as a whole (and indeed the angel interprets it that way even in the text of Daniel 7:27). Jesus disclosed an extra resource of meaning within the text, not its only meaning. And Christians could well learn more from this text which clearly had captivated Jesus’ imagination.
When the angel in the vision identifies the “people of the holy ones of the Most High” as the recipients of the eternal kingdom (7:27; cf. vv. 18, 22), we witness something revolutionary: a democratization of divine authority. Divine authority is not given to a king, or to another solitary figure like a messiah. It is bestowed to a community: specifically, a community of those “overcome” by imperial power (7:21) who nevertheless receive divine vindication.
This corporate understanding is crucial: God’s sovereignty doesn’t create another hierarchical, beastly empire with a new emperor. Instead, it disperses authority among a community of the vulnerable faithful.
Throughout history, powerful Christians have understood Daniel 7 to show them that God has chosen them to be divinely appointed world rulers––but then behave more like the beasts than the “nobodies” that God actually chooses to rule. From Constantine’s theologians claiming to establish the kingdom of the saints, to Charlemagne’s biographer describing his kingdom as the renewed fourth empire, to American notions of manifest destiny that drew on the language of Daniel 7: empire after empire has claimed what they think is Daniel’s promise of eternal global domination. Those claiming to be the holy ones became the beast, speaking arrogant words and making war on the vulnerable communities who suffer under systems of domination.
But history also shows us that Daniel 7 has time and again provided remarkable, even miraculous, comfort and courage to the oppressed; it contains an irreducible core that resists complete co-option by power. Medieval Jews under Christian and Muslim persecution (as seen in the poetry of Pinhas the Priest and the chronicles of Joseph ben Isaac Sambari); medieval European peasants buckling under the weight of their debts (see the preaching of Thomas Müntzer); African American women’s emancipation and social liberation (see the writings of Anna Julia Cooper); Latin American communities resisting U.S. military intervention (see the work of Pablo Richard); and many more have found in this text hope for surviving under the extractive rule of evil powers.
Written for Jews experiencing persecution, forced to choose between faithfulness and survival, Daniel 7 doesn’t promise immediate political victory. It promises that their suffering has meaning; that God sees and remembers; that imperial power, however overwhelming it appears, is temporary and under God’s judgment; and that the apparent triumph of evil isn't the final word. As Walter Brueggemann taught us, this is the prophetic imagination: the capacity to envision God’s alternative future even while suffering under empire’s present brutality. God’s sovereignty means that no empire, no matter how brutal, has the final word.
If you are one of those who is keeping faith amidst the terrors of the world: you are one of the Nobodies whom God chooses to bear divine authority. You are one of the saints of the Most High. The powers that oppress you want you to believe their dominion is permanent, that resistance is futile, and that God has abandoned you. But Daniel 7 insists otherwise: their power is limited to “a season and a time.” The Ancient of Days has seen every injustice, every act of violence, every arrogant word spoken. The books are open. Judgment has been rendered, even if not yet fully executed.
The oft-disappointing history of biblical interpretation teaches us this crucial lesson: you can’t become a beast in order to defeat beasts. You can’t wait for God to punish your oppressors so that you can finally celebrate. The powers that oppress you want you to believe that God’s justice demands that someone has to bleed. They want you to hunger for vengeance, because you conform to their image in your quest to defeat them. But Daniel 7 offers something far more radical: the way of the Nobody who looks at the very soldiers executing him and says: “Father, forgive them, because they don’t know what they are doing.”
We believe that the Ancient of Days has already rendered judgment. Death itself has been defeated. The Nobody riding the clouds has already won. Yet even though the decisive judgment has been made, and the oppressive beasts’ “dominion was taken away,” nevertheless “their lives were prolonged for a season and a time” (7:12). In this strange interim, when the powers have been defeated and yet they still seem to dominate our world, we inhabit a pregnant possibility where every meal shared, every encouraging word, every tear wiped away, every act of defiant hope contributes to the realization of the already-emerging world that the empire cannot even imagine––and ultimately can neither resist nor destroy.
For more information, see Brennan Breed, “Daniel’s Four Kingdom Schema: A History of Re-writing World History,” Interpretation: A Journal of Bible and Theology 71 (2017): 178–189.
On Anna Julia Cooper, see:
Anna Julia Cooper, A Voice From the South (Mineola: Dover, 2016), 22–23.
On Thomas Müntzer and the peasant revolutions, see:
Thomas Müntzer, Revelation and Revolution: Basic Writings of Thomas Müntzer (ed. and trans. M. Baylor; Cranbury: Associated University Presses, 1993), 108–109.
On Pablo Richard and radical central American interpretation of Daniel, see:
Pablo Richard, “El pueblo de Dios contra el imperio: Daniel 7 en su contexto literario e histórico,” RIBLA 7 (1990): 22–40.
For Pinhas the Priest (Pinhas haKohen), see :
Wout van Jac Bekkum, “Four Kingdoms Will Rule: Echoes of Apocalypticism and Political Reality in Late Antiquity and Medieval Judaism,” in Endzeiten: Eschatologie in den monotheistischen Weltreligionen (ed. W. Brandes and F. Schmieder; Berlin: de Gruyter., 2008), 101–118.
For Joseph ben Isaac Sambari, see:
Martin Jacobs, “An Ex-Sabbatean's Remorse? Sambari's Polemics against Islam,”
The Jewish Quarterly Review 97 (2007): 347–378 (see 356).
