they shall take away the daily sacrifice, and they. shall set up the abomination that maketh desolate. And such as do wickedly against the covenant they shall cause to dissemble with flatteries1: but the people, that know their God, will firmly retain and practise it. And those among the people, that understand, shall instruct many: yet they shall fall, by the sword and by flame, by captivity and by spoil, many days. Now, when they fall, they shall be holpen with a little help : but many shall cleave to them with flatteries. And some of them of understanding shall fall", in purifying them, and in purging them, and in making them white, even to the time of the end: because it is yet unto the time appointed.

And that king3 shall do according to his will. And he shall exalt and magnify himself above every god. And above the God of gods shall he speak marvellous things. And he shall prosper, until his angry defiance shall be finished: for

1 The Arabic and the Seventy read this verb plurally: and such, I apprehend, is the proper reading; for the seed of the Roman Chittim are here spoken of, as they were in the preceding sentence.

2 That is, perish or be cut off. The word, used here, is the same as that which occurs immediately above, when the men of understanding are said to fall by sword and by flame.

Heb., iste rex. The plain reference is to the seed of the Chittim or the Roman Empire mentioned above. Before any application of the prophecy to the Roman Empire, in any one of its members, can be justly made, the chronological arrangement of the passage must obviously be settled.

the thing determined upon shall be done. And unto the gods of his fathers he shall have no respect; and, unto the Desire of women, and unto every god, he shall have no respect: for above all he shall magnify himself. Yet, together with a god, shall he honour strong military protectors in his office: even, together with a god whom his fathers knew not, shall he honour them with gold and silver and precious stones

:

The application of the word Dy, here used by Daniel, has excited much discussion: but it seems to be pretty generally agreed, that, so far as its abstract meaning is concerned, the term itself is military. Those, who imagine a god to be intended, make that god to be Baal-Samen or Aziz (my) or the Syrian Mars and those, who more rationally would translate the word as a common noun, render it, either fortifications as speaking of a thing, or the military defenders of such fortifications as speaking of persons. The term itself is capable of either sense: for, as Mr. Mede well remarks, the Hebrews use abstracts for concretes. Accordingly, he produces five passages from the Psalms, in which the word is rendered personally both by the Seventy and by the Vulgate: the former translating it væɛpaσTLOTns or a defender with a shield, and the latter translating it protector. See Psalm xxvii. 1. xxviii. 8. xxxi. 3, 5. xxxvii. 39. Mede's Works, book iii. chap. 16. p. 669, 670. The word

y, then, denoting strong military protectors, the persons so described, may doubtless be understood, either as literal or as allegorical soldiers. Mr. Mede and Bp. Newton, agreeably to their interpretation of the prophecy as relating to the christian apostatic demonolatry of the middle ages, adopt the latter sense; and thence suppose these protectors to be saints and angels, venerated as tutelary demigods by ecclesiastical superstition but still the main and proper idea of the term is preserved inviolate.

and desireable things. Thus shall he do for the restrainers of the strong military protectors', together with the foreign god whom he shall acknowledge: he shall multiply glory; and he shall cause them to rule over many; and he shall divide the land among them by barter 2.

And, at the time of the end, the king of the South shall butt at him; and the king of the North shall tempestuously come against him, with chariots, and with horsemen, and with many ships. Yet he shall enter into the countries,

3

which I have ,מבצרי The word למבצרי מעזים .Heb •

translated restrainers, must assuredly describe persons and not things: because, immediately afterward, it is said, that the wilful king shall cause them to rule over many. Such, accordingly, is the sensible remark of Houbigant on the place. I consider the word ", as the regular active participle from the verb to restrain or coerce: and, the whole phraseology here employed having been taken from the art of war, I suppose these restrainers or coercers of the strong military protectors to be their captains, whether literal or allegorical.

Heb. 1. The word denotes barter or exchange; that is to say, the jobbing and trucking of one thing for another. Thus, by Aquila, Symmachus, and the Seventy, the word is usually rendered αλλάγμα and ἀντάλλαγμα. In the present passage, the Seventy render it év dwpois.

In the original, the ex

• Heb. N21, And he shall enter. pression is ambiguous: for the conjunction 1, when prefixed to verbs, sometimes indicates that a continued series of them have a nominative case in common, and sometimes the reverse. Thus, in Eccles. x. 3, we have an instance of the latter mode of construction: for, though, in point of mere grammar, the original may be translated, either His wisdom faileth him and saith to every one, or His wisdom faileth him and HE saith to

and shall overflow, and shall pass over, and shall enter into the glorious land; and many

every one; yet the second version ought certainly to be preferred. And thus, in 2 Chron. xxiv. 22, the verb slew may grammatically be referred, either to Joash, or to Jehoiada: but our translators, rightly concluding Joash to be the person meant, have marked their view of the passage by rendering the disjunctively but instead of conjunctively and. So, in the present passage, the verb shall enter may grammatically be referred, either to the wilful king, or to the king of the North: but, as I am fully satisfied that it relates to the wilful king and not to his northern antagonist, I have marked its proper ascription by rendering the 1 disjunctively yet ; which, in our English language, unambiguously determines the wilful king to be the person spoken of.

In this sense, if I mistake not, the Jewish authors of the Masoretic system of punctuation understood the passage: for they place the accent, which is equivalent to a colon, immediately before the grammatically ambiguous clause And he shall enter ; thus making a concluding pause, in the detail, at many ships: by which, apparently, they would refer the ambiguous clause, not to the king of the North, but to the wilful king. In this sense also, the passage must have been understood in the primitive Church: for in no other manner can we account for the early prevalent opinion, that Antichrist, whom the Fathers rightly identified with the wilful king, should perish between the two seas of Palestine near the glorious holy mountain. And, in this sense too, the passage was understood by the late eminently learned Bishop Horsley: whom I specially consulted on the subject, stating to him my own sentiments relative to the ambiguous clause, and requesting correction if correction were

necessary.

I entirely agree with you, says his lordship in the letter which I received from him, that the latter part of the eleventh chap-ter of Daniel (that is, all that follows the 30th verse) has no

countries shall be overthrown but these shall escape out of his hand, even Edom and Moab

sort of relation to Antiochus or any of the Syrian kings. And the wilful king of the last ten verses I can understand of nothing but the great Antichrist of the last ages.

On this principle of applying the exploits, recorded in Dan. xi. 41-45 and in the latter part of ver. 40, to the wilful king and not to the king of the North, the Bishop, accordingly, has altogether proceeded in his Letter to Mr. King on Isaiah xviii. He pronounces the wilful king, depicted in Dan. xi. 36—39, to be the great infidel or God-denying Antichrist of the last ages and, to the Antichrist thus depicted, he ascribes the whole expedition into Palestine, foretold in Dan. xi. 40-45; adding, in perfect harmony with ver. 45, that there is ground for believing, as the early Fathers believed, that Palestine is the stage, on which Antichrist in the height of his impiety will perish. See Letter on Isaiah xviii. p. 86-88, 98, 102-108. The same view of the subject is also taken by M. Jurieu and Mr. Frazer: both of whom, in a similar manner, ascribe the expedition into Palestine, not to the king of the North, but to the wilful king. See Jurieu's Accomp. of the Proph. vol. i. p. 105. Frazer's Key to the Proph. p. 229. Yet, as the contrary opinion has been maintained by commentators of no less name than Brightman and Mede and Whiston and the two Newtons, it may not be amiss to say something relative to the ground, on which, with Horsley and Jurieu and Frazer, I am constrained to differ from them.

I maintain, then, that, even independently of all other considerations, the very context of the prophecy abundantly shews, that it is not the king of the North who is to invade Palestine and Egypt, but his rival the wilful king. Daniel, in the last grand section of his vision which commences at ver. 31, is treating of the Roman Empire and its dependencies: and, in the latter part of that section which commences at ver. 36, he is writing a history, neither of the king of the South nor of the