Daniel 7:4–8

Daniel 7:4 — The Lion with Eagle's Wings (Babylon) The first beast combines the two most majestic predators of the ancient Near East: the lion, symbol of royalty, and the eagle, symbol of divine swiftness. This composite image deliberately evokes Babylon, whose royal iconography featured winged lions (lamassu) on palace gates at Nineveh and Babylon itself. Jeremiah 49:19–22 uses both the lion and eagle as figures for Nebuchadnezzar. The stripping of the wings suggests the humiliation of Babylonian power — perhaps alluding directly to Nebuchadnezzar's madness in Daniel 4, where the king loses his sovereignty and is "lifted up" again only when he acknowledges God. That he is made to "stand on two feet as a man" and given "a man's heart" is deeply significant: Babylon, the most beast-like of empires, is paradoxically humanized — perhaps the most hopeful moment in the vision, pointing to the possibility of conversion even within the most brutal structures of power.

Daniel 7:5 — The Bear (Medo-Persia) The bear, raised on one side, images the asymmetry within the Medo-Persian empire: Persia dominated Media, just as one side is raised higher. The three ribs in its mouth have generated sustained interpretive debate. Most patristic and scholastic commentators (Jerome, Theodoret of Cyrrhus, St. Thomas Aquinas) identify them as three conquered kingdoms — likely Lydia, Babylon, and Egypt, the great victims of Persian expansion. The divine command "Arise! Devour much flesh!" does not sanctify Persian conquest but rather depicts God's sovereign use of human violence within providential history, a theme running throughout the Deuteronomistic tradition and the prophets (cf. Isaiah 44:28–45:1, where Cyrus is God's "anointed").

Daniel 7:6 — The Leopard with Four Wings and Four Heads (Greece) The leopard's natural speed is supernaturally amplified by four wings — an image of Alexander the Great's breathtaking military campaigns (334–323 BC), which swept from Greece to India in barely a decade. The four heads correspond to the four kingdoms into which Alexander's empire fractured after his death: the Diadochi — the dynasties of Ptolemy (Egypt), Seleucus (Syria-Persia), Cassander (Macedonia), and Lysimachus (Thrace). "Dominion was given to it" uses the passive voice theologically: even Greek imperial power is derivative, a granted authority rather than an absolute possession, anticipating the New Testament insight that all authority comes from above (John 19:11).

Daniel 7:7 — The Terrifying Fourth Beast (Rome / Eschatological Empire) The fourth beast defies all natural categorization — Daniel cannot compare it to a known animal. This namelessness is itself a theological statement: it is something radically new in the history of human evil. Its iron teeth recall the iron legs of the statue in Daniel 2:40, where Rome crushes all opposition. Jerome and the entire Fathers of the Church identify this beast primarily with Rome, whose legions did indeed devour, break in pieces, and stamp underfoot nations from Britain to Mesopotamia. Yet the Church has consistently understood this beast as possessing a dual reference: historical Rome and an eschatological "empire of the Antichrist" at the end of time. The ten horns parallel the ten toes of the statue in Daniel 2 and are taken up directly in Revelation 13:1 and 17:12, where they represent kings who exercise temporary power before the final kingdom of God.

Daniel 7:8 — The Little Horn The "little horn" is the culminating and most chilling image of the vision. Rising among the ten, it uproots three of them by the roots — an image of violent, illegitimate seizure of power. Its most disturbing features are human: eyes like a man's and a mouth speaking "great things" — in Hebrew/Aramaic, this phrase (מִלִּין רַבְרְבָן, millin rabr'ban) means boastful, arrogant, blasphemous speech. Jerome and many Fathers see an initial fulfillment in Antiochus IV Epiphanes (175–164 BC), the Seleucid king who desecrated the Jerusalem Temple — the "abomination of desolation" (Daniel 11:31, 1 Maccabees 1:54). But both patristic tradition and the Church's reading of Revelation identify the deepest referent as the Antichrist, the final adversary of the Church whose character is defined by prideful self-deification. The eyes suggest intelligence and cunning; the mouth recalls the serpent in Eden — the original blasphemer who spoke "great things" against God's order.

Catholic tradition reads Daniel 7 as one of the pivotal prophetic texts of the Old Testament, standing at the intersection of history, apocalyptic, and Christology. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (§673–674) affirms that the Church awaits the final trial that will shake the faith of many, preceded by a religious deception offering an apparent solution to problems at the price of apostasy — a pattern these four beasts embody progressively.

St. Jerome's monumental commentary on Daniel (c. 407 AD) established the dominant Catholic interpretive framework: the four kingdoms are Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece, and Rome, with Rome containing an eschatological dimension pointing to the Antichrist. This "four kingdoms" schema was accepted by St. Augustine (City of God XX.23), St. Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologiae, II-II, q. 174), and remains the lens through which the Magisterium reads the text.

Crucially, Catholic theology — unlike some millenarian Protestant readings — does not interpret these empires with fatalism or despair. The Second Vatican Council's Gaudium et Spes (§39) teaches that "earthly progress must be carefully distinguished from the growth of Christ's kingdom," yet the products of human nature and effort are not simply discarded but purified and transfigured. The beasts of Daniel show the anti-kingdom at its worst: power without charity, authority without accountability to God. Against them, the Son of Man figure (Dan 7:13–14), who receives "dominion, glory, and a kingdom" — explicitly identified with Christ by the Fathers and by Jesus himself (Matthew 26:64) — stands as the definitive answer: true kingship is not iron-toothed and consuming, but sacrificial and eternal.

Pope Benedict XVI (Jesus of Nazareth, Vol. 1) noted that Jesus' self-designation as "Son of Man" before Caiaphas was a deliberate citation of Daniel 7, an implicit claim to be the one who receives the eternal kingdom the beasts could never possess.

Daniel's vision was given to a Jewish exile living under the shadow of a vast, dehumanizing empire — and it speaks with startling directness to Catholics today. We live in an age of ideological "little horns": movements and systems that begin small, displace competing authorities, and speak with enormous self-assertion, claiming to define truth, personhood, and history on their own terms. The vision does not call Daniel to naive optimism or paralyzed despair; it calls him to prophetic sight — to see the beast for what it is, even when it wears the face of civilization.

Practically, this passage invites the Catholic reader to examine where we place our trust. The beasts promise security, prosperity, and order — and deliver devouring. The Church's social teaching (following Rerum Novarum through Laudato Si') consistently warns against absolutizing any economic or political system. Every state, every ideology, is ultimately a beast before the Ancient of Days.

The spiritual discipline this text demands is apocalyptic sobriety: the clear-eyed refusal to give ultimate loyalty to penultimate things — political parties, nations, cultural movements — while remaining fully engaged citizens. The beast in Daniel always has a mouth "speaking great things." Learning to recognize that voice, and to answer it with the quiet witness of holiness, is the distinctly Christian vocation in every age.