Gabriel said: “I am going to tell you what will happen later in the time of wrath, because the vision concerns the appointed time of the end. 20The two-horned ram that you saw represents the kings of Media and Persia. 21The shaggy goat is the king of Greece, and the large horn between his eyes is the first king. 22The four horns that replaced the one that was broken off represent four kingdoms that will emerge from his nation but will not have the same power.
At the time Daniel received his vision from God, the people of Judah were exiles in Babylon, because of their persistent indifference to God and to his Word. God’s prophets had foretold that God would bring a remnant of his people back from exile and permit them to resettle in the Promised Land.
Now the angel explained to Daniel that after the Jewish exiles returned to their ancient homeland, conditions would develop which would once again call God’s anger down upon them. As has been pointed out, the immediate fulfillment of this prophecy came in the years 175–164 B.C., when Antiochus Epiphanes tyrannized the Jewish people. Daniel’s vision points out that this was a judgment of God, a “time of wrath.”
But what Daniel could not see, what only God’s messenger could reveal, was that the unpleasant details of this more immediate future were symbolic of another, much later, period of history. In other words, two frightening eras were ahead for God’s people. Gabriel’s statement that a time of God’s wrath lay ahead refers also to another period when God would judge the unfaithfulness of his people by allowing an enemy to wreak havoc on the church. And the damage this second enemy will cause will be even greater than that caused by Antiochus. The second enemy, typified by Antiochus, is the Antichrist.
He identifies the two-horned ram with the Medo-Persian Empire. The goat with the horn between its eyes is the Greek Empire. Such explicit political references are rare in the Bible. The “first king” is Alexander, appropriately named not because he was the first king Greece had but because he was the first ruler of what we know as the Greek Empire. The four kingdoms into which Alexander’s empire would be divided after his death would not be as powerful as Alexander’s had been. It was not to be expected that his successors could match his record.