Daniel’s Four Kingdoms Schema: A History of Re-writing World History

Introduction: Seeing Brexit from Babylon

In a recent national referendum on the proposed British withdrawal from the European Union, nicknamed “Brexit,” a majority of voters decided that the United Kingdom should leave. Many Christian fundamentalists around the globe interpreted the Brexit vote in light of the book of Daniel, particularly chs. 2 and 7. ¹

This apocalyptic interpretation of Daniel 2 and 7 follows the lead of nineteenth-century dispensationalist John Nelson Darby, who wrote that the formation of a pan-European state signaled the end of the world, ² and Isaac Massey Haldeman, a Baptist minster, who preached in 1917 that a German kingdom—sounding suspiciously like the Central Powers then fighting in the First World War—would conquer Europe and create a ten-nation satanic empire. ³ Christian speculation about the apocalyptic significance of supranational political unions has continued to grow. ⁴ These fears found their most popular expressions in the 1970 book, The Late, Great Planet Earth, and in the Left Behind series of the 1990s and 2000s. ⁵ Change in the fabric of the European Union has sparked wild, apocalyptic speculation in the social media platforms of the Internet.

Dispensationalists base their interpretation on Daniel 2 and 7, where the world’s history is divided into four parts, each associated with the reign of a subjugating gentile kingdom. (In Daniel, these four kingdoms are the Babylonians, the Medes, the Persians, and the Greeks.) In its ancient Near Eastern context, Daniel’s “fourth kingdom” signifies the vast Hellenistic (Greek) empire of Alexander the Great and the various successor states that arose after his death in 323 BCE (Dan 2:41–43). Some modern Christians have made an exegetical leap from Daniel’s four kingdoms to contemporary pan-European government.

The discipline of reception history is exceptionally helpful in showing how Jews and Christians have speculated about the identity of Daniel’s four kingdoms in their own time and place. ⁶ In fact, over the last two and a half millennia, the four-kingdom pattern found in Daniel 2 and 7 has been a common tool for explaining and making sense of history. In what follows, I will use the tools of biblical criticism, reception history, and cognitive psychology to explore the history and consequences of the “four kingdoms” schema.

Schema Theory and Historiography

Perhaps the best place to start is with a phenomenon psychologists call schemas. ⁷ Humans have an astounding skill for pattern recognition, and we are attracted to tools (like schemas of world history) that help us organize information into patterns. ⁸ In large part, Daniel’s “four-kingdoms schema” has maintained its explanatory power precisely because it offers people a way to organize the chaotic flux of history into a meaningful and relatively simple system. ⁹

As Carol Newsom has shown, ancient Israelite and Second Temple Jewish scribes often wrote historical texts as a means of thinking about their own contemporary situations. ¹⁰ These scribes discerned patterns from the events of the past in order to make sense of the present and to project a potential future. They retold history’s most important moments in what Newsom calls “historical résumés.” These résumés emphasize patterns in Israel’s history that provide wisdom for their present circumstances. One example can be found in Judges 2:6–3:6, which articulates a cyclical pattern of Israelite unfaithfulness, oppression, prayer, and deliverance. This pattern then structures the events that follow in the book of Judges, and it continues to frame the remainder of the Deuteronomistic History. ¹¹ As Newsom points out (following literary theorist Paul Ricoeur), the historiographical “emplotment” of events creates an apparent order, including an ending, from which the whole story means something. ¹² Throughout most of the Hebrew Bible, the singular subject of history is the relationship between Yhwh and Israel (cf. Josh 24; 1 Sam 12; Pss 105–106). But as Newsom argues, Daniel 2 and 7 are unusual because they review the history of world sovereignty and address Israel directly only at the end.

In the disciplines of psychology and cognitive science, a schema generally refers to an organizational structure of knowledge that influences one’s perception, thought, and action. ¹³ People create schemas as they generalize and abstract more or less stable components from their experience. For example, when people walk into a cafeteria, they usually have a rough idea of what to do: everyone gets a tray and some utensils, walks through a line in order to select food, then pays and finds a seat. ¹⁴ People know what to do because they have already abstracted the general components of cafeterias.

All schemas are comprised of more permanent “slots” arranged in a particular structure, which are occupied by variable “fillers.” ¹⁵ In the example of the cafeteria, the spot where one selects food is a “slot.” It may be located differently from cafeteria to cafeteria, but every cafeteria has such a spot. Each slot can be occupied by a diverse array of “fillers.” A cash register is a filler that occupies the slot of “the spot where one pays for the food” in the cafeteria schema. No two cash registers are exactly the same, but they occupy the same structural space and function. We can walk into two very different cafeterias and know intuitively how to use them. Schemas are incredibly useful. Our minds are thoroughly structured with schemas, because they help us navigate the world without having to experience every situation as entirely new.

In the case of Daniel 2 and 7, we find an example of a historiographical schema that organizes the history of the world into a series of sequential slots, each filled by an empire. According to Anathea Portier-Young, this schema is a “historical review, cast in the form of a prophetic prediction, that at the same time interprets past and present, asserts the transience and finitude of temporal power, affirms God’s governance of time and the outworking of God’s plan in history, and gives hope for a transformed future.” ¹⁶ In short, Daniel’s four-kingdoms schema transforms a chaotic mass of events involving subjugation and brutal oppression into a logical, divinely ordained sequence that would result in the redemptive transformation of the world. As a schema, it helped persuade Jews that God had not abandoned them, and that history was not an inexorable series of meaningless brutalities.

In Daniel 2:31–35, the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar dreams of a statue made of four metals of declining value. ¹⁷ Daniel interprets this as a progression of four successive kingdoms that ends in a decisive moment of divine intervention, symbolized by a large rock smashing the statue, and the establishment of a kingdom ruled by the holy ones. In Daniel 7:1–28, an apocalyptic vision describes four increasingly terrifying beasts that emerge from the sea, representing four empires that subjugate the Jewish people in turn, the last of which assaults even the divine world before its destruction results in a kingdom ruled by the pious Jews who withstood persecution. In its biblical guise, this four-kingdom schema serves as a historiographical tool that communicates the Jewish God’s universal sovereignty through the periodization of history.

For centuries, this four-kingdoms schema has been adapted to explain world events in vastly different times and places. The following discussion suggests reasons for this schema’s enduring usefulness.

Four Kingdoms, Original Texts, and Reception History

The multiple-kingdoms schema found in both Daniel 2 and 7 does not originate with the Bible, but was appropriated by Jewish scribes from a Persian schema of multiple kingdoms. ¹⁸ The Persian schema consisted of three slots. Each slot represented a single kingdom that held—for a time—dominion over the entire world (at least “the world” as known to the peoples of the ancient Near East). For the Persians, the “fillers” were Assyria, then Media, and then Persia.

The Persians constructed this schema in order to explain—both to themselves and others whom they now controlled—that their domination was meant to be. ¹⁹ Only a few generations beforehand, the Persians had been unknown on the world stage. The Persian three-kingdoms schema—“Assyria, then Media, then Persia”—is a propagandistic attempt by the Persian Empire to promote continuity and inevitability by situating themselves last in a series of world empires, such that the Persians function as history’s natural telos.

From available evidence, it appears that this schema was astoundingly effective. The Greek historians Herodotus and Ctesias borrowed the schema to structure sections of their own Greek histories of the region. ²⁰ Jews were also familiar with this precise order (cf. Tobit 14:4). It is surprising that Greek historians who knew about Babylon’s period of sovereignty would nevertheless avoid naming Babylonia in a historical résumé of Near Eastern and Mediterranean political powers. That they simply used the schema as constructed by the Persians suggests that it was effective throughout the Persian-dominated world.

Centuries later, Roman historians such as Polybius, Tacitus, and Appian adapted the schema to justify Rome’s rapid ascendancy to regional sovereignty. ²¹ Yet unlike the Greek historians, the Romans did not simply re-apply the exact same schema, because the three-kingdoms pattern did not explain the state of affairs any more.

Researchers have found that individuals tend to distort their perception and interpretation of the world to fit their own schemas, reinforcing their own cognitive frameworks (this is often called “confirmation bias”). ²² Likewise, people usually explain away, or simply ignore, data that seems to conflict with their schemas (“disconfirmation bias”). But when an overwhelming amount of data challenges a schema, people can either let their schema collapse—or manipulate the slots and fillers to make the dissonance tolerable.

Roman historians understood the powerful propaganda of the Persian three-kingdoms schema and admired its justification of an upstart cultural outsider as the global political hegemon. They altered the schema by adding a fourth slot and filling it with the empire of Alexander the Great, as well as the Hellenistic states that succeeded Alexander. As a capstone, these Roman writers presented Rome as the rightful inheritor of Alexander’s fourth kingdom. As Amelius Sura wrote: “The Assyrians were the first of all races to hold power, then the Medes, after them the Persians, and then the Macedonians. Then when the two kings, Philip and Antiochus, of Macedonian origin, had been completely conquered, soon after the overthrow of Carthage, the supreme command passed to the Roman people.” ²³ By altering the schema, Roman historians provided a sense of inevitability to their brutal, tenuous rise to regional domination, while subtly making any rival claim seem to deny both history and destiny.

Biblical Criticism: Four Kingdoms in the Ancient Near East

Like Roman historians, Second Temple era Jewish scribes emended the schema to fit their own contexts. (We see evidence of this not only in the book of Daniel, but also in the Sybilline Oracles 4:49–101.) Daniel 2 updated the Persian three-kingdom version by adding a fourth slot that was, much like the Roman version, filled with a reference to the Hellenistic empire (Dan 2:40). The fourth kingdom then collapses into several pieces, represented by the statue’s feet of iron mixed with clay (vv. 33, 41–43). Unlike the Romans, the Jewish scribes did not update the schema to identify and justify the new reigning power. Instead, these Jewish scribes added a discontinuous event: a rock cut out “not by human hands” smashed the four-part statue and then filled the earth (vv. 34–35). Daniel interprets this event as the coming of a divine kingdom that will destroy all earthly kingdoms in judgment (v. 44).

As Newsom points out, changing the structure of a schema—in this case, introducing discontinuity into a schema that focused on continuity—necessarily alters the implicit message that it imparts. ²⁴ Daniel 2 introduces discontinuity into a schema that had emphasized sovereign legitimacy and effectively converts propaganda into oppositional literature. ²⁵ Daniel 2 signals the beginning of a shift towards the apocalyptic genre and worldview.

Daniel 7 represents apocalyptic historiography that attempts to organize the chaotic flow of time into rigorously ordered, clearly patterned historical time periods that end with divine intervention on behalf of the faithful. ²⁶ A later Jewish scribe wrote the apocalyptic vision in Daniel 7 as a reinterpretation of Daniel 2 (without the court narrative). It focuses on Yhwh’s disruption of earthly sovereignty and institution of a new, divinely ordained kingdom. At a later point, Daniel 7 was updated to reflect Antiochus IV’s desecration of the Jerusalem temple (vv. 20–21, 24–25). ²⁷

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A detail of the reliefs on the stairways leading to the audience hall of Darius and Xerxes. A procession of Babylonian tribute bearers bring gifts from the outlying nations of the Persian empire (ca. 510–330 BCE). Werner Forman Archive. Photo Credit: HIP/Art Resource, NY.

The Danielic scribes also altered the list of kingdoms from the Persian schema, adapting it to fit the Jewish experience of history. Instead of “Assyria, Media, Persia,” Daniel substitutes Babylon for Assyria. This is a natural place to begin for a Hellenistic Jew, since Babylon’s empire was responsible for the destruction of Solomon’s Temple and the end of the Davidic monarchy. This shift causes a chronological problem, since the empire of the Medes was contemporaneous with the Babylonians. This historiographical problem is reflected in the odd, ahistorical character of Darius the Mede in Daniel 6. ²⁸ Nevertheless, the sequence “Babylon-Media-Persia-Greece” is found in both Daniel 2 and 7 and communicates a message about divine control over temporal sovereignty.

Readers and interpretive communities throughout history who have sought to reapply this text to their own context—from medieval millennialists to modern dispensationalists—participate in the same interpretive activity that the author-redactors of Daniel used. The four-kingdom schema found in Daniel 2 and 7 has proven to be one of the most influential time-structuring devices in all of world history. This schema has been used in two conflicting ways: to promote imperial dominance, and to reject or resist imperial dominance in the hope of future divine sovereignty.

The Four-Kingdoms Schema and Imperial Dominance

Starting with Roman domination in the Mediterranean basin in the last century BCE, almost all Jewish and Christian readers identified imperial Rome as the fourth kingdom (cf. Exod. Rab. 35:5; Hippolytus, Comm. Dan. 4.3–4). This required condensing Media and Persia into a combined role in the second kingdom’s slot, and moving the Hellenistic empires into the third kingdom’s slot. With Rome’s destruction of the Jerusalem temple in 70 CE, Daniel’s four kingdoms schema helped structure Jewish theological responses to the ensuing trauma. For example, 4 Ezra, a Jewish pseudepigraphal text initially composed soon after the temple’s destruction, depicts a series of visions that include a twelve-winged eagle. “The eagle which you saw coming up from the sea is the fourth kingdom, which appeared in a vision to your brother Daniel, but it was not explained to him as I now explain or have explained it to you” (12:11–12; cf. 2 Baruch 39).

Josephus, a Jewish historian and apologist, explained Rome’s dominance through the four-kingdoms schema. Unlike 4 Ezra, however, Josephus emphasizes Roman dominance: “Daniel…wrote concerning the Roman government and that our country should be made desolate by them” (Ant. 10.276).

The book of Revelation borrowed imagery from Daniel 7 to shape its depiction of Rome as the new beast from the sea (13:1–10) and rejoices in the prospect of Rome’s fall to the hosts of heaven (Rev 18–19). Irenaeus, the second-century CE bishop of Lyon, interpreted Daniel 7:20–25 in light of 2 Thess 2:8–12, which describes the “lawless one,” a figure that Christians commonly associate with “antichrist” in 1 John (Haer. 5.26.1). Yet there were other points of view: Origen, for example, saw Rome’s cosmopolitan empire as a necessary condition for the global spread of Christianity, and so he claimed that the fourth empire was a divinely ordained gift that was not in imminent danger (C. Cels. 6.46). ²⁹

In the early fourth century CE, as Constantine gained control over the fractured pieces of the Roman empire and extended imperial support to Christianity, many Latin and Greek-speaking Christian leaders re-examined their theological conception of Rome. What they once feared, they now celebrated. The massive inertia of cultural schemas makes them more amenable to small alterations than extreme shifts or disavowal. ³⁰ Christian exegetes in the Roman Empire, for example, could have adopted the view of Syriac Christians who believed—as did the third century pagan philosopher Porphyry—that the Hellenistic kingdoms were the fourth kingdom in the book of Daniel, with the Hasmonean victories in 164 BCE. ³¹ But instead, Christians living in the Roman Empire looked for a re-reading of the four kingdoms.

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Coin depicting Antiochus IV Epiphanes (175–163 BCE), Seleucid king of Syria, who imposed Greek law and customs on Judea, resulting in the Maccabean revolt (167 BCE). Location: Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel. Photo Credit: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY

Daniel is comprised of two halves—chs. 1–6 and 7–12—that differ strikingly in both genre and theological perspective. Each half includes one version of the four kingdoms schema (ch. 2 and ch. 7). Chapters 1–6 tell tales of righteous and successful Jews who miraculously thrive in the midst of hostile foreign courts, while chs. 7–12 depict apocalyptic visions of divine salvation for Jews living in a besieged Jerusalem. The climax of chs. 1–6 appears in ch. 4, where Nebuchadnezzar accepts Yhwh’s sovereignty. Daniel 4 encapsulates the theology of the biblical court tale that preaches Yhwh’s global sovereignty in order to explain Jewish subjugation by human rulers and teaches that Yhwh allows the diasporic Jews to remain under foreign control because they are slowly transforming the world around them, as a part of Yhwh’s plan. ³²

Chapters 7–12, on the other hand, narrate Yhwh’s radical destruction of the foreign oppressor and transformation of time and space. This alternate narrative suggests that the “accommodationist” theology of chs. 1–6 did not function in the context of Antiochus IV’s persecution. ³³ Yet this dual theology found in the book of Daniel—hope in the transformation of the foreign king, and hope in divine destruction of the foreign king—allow the four-kingdoms schema to function as both support for the empire and a critique of the empire, depending upon the social location and interests of the interpreter.

Many Christians in the era of Constantine hoped that the foreign king could become a follower of Yhwh, thus transitioning the empire to a kingdom of the “holy ones.” Eusebius, a major theological proponent of Constantine’s vision for Christianity, proclaimed that Constantine was the “first Christian emperor,” and that he “alone of all the Roman emperors has honored God the all-sovereign with exceedingly godly piety; he alone has publicly proclaimed to all the word of Christ” (Vit. Const. 75). In praise of this newly-converted emperor, Eusebius once preached a sermon about the theological necessity of supporting Constantine’s sons as rightful inheritors of the throne, as they were prophesied in Daniel 7:18: “the holy ones of the Most High shall receive the kingdom.” ³⁴ As Eusebius saw it, Constantine’s conversion transformed Rome from its fourth-kingdom status into the righteous kingdom of the saints. For many centuries, Latin Christian theologians almost unanimously followed Eusebius’ lead (cf. Lactantius, Inst. 7.16, Victorinus of Pettau, Comm. Apoc. 17.9).

When the city of Rome fell, however, Latin Christians faced another difficulty. Constantine’s heirs no longer held Italy, Gaul, or Spain: what had happened to the supposedly eternal kingdom of the holy ones? Instead of abandoning the four-kingdom schema, Christians altered its slots and fillers to fit the situation. ³⁵ For Christians in the Eastern Roman empire (today referred to as the Byzantine Empire), Constantinople took Rome’s place as the “New Rome,” and Byzantine theologians often referred to it as the fourth and final world empire. ³⁶ For Christians in the Latin West, however, there were several successful attempts to find a different replacement for the Roman Empire—one that received its world sovereignty in a transfer, as a king would transfer rule to a rightful heir (referred to in Latin as translatio imperii). ³⁷ The most famous example of this transfer occurred on Christmas day in 800 CE, when Pope Leo III gave Charlemagne, king of the Franks, the title “Emperor of the Romans.” This kept the fourth kingdom alive, allaying fears that the antichrist would come when Rome declined and established a close ally of Pope Leo at its head.

Not long after his death, Charlemagne’s empire split into several distinct kingdoms. Throughout the Middle Ages, Western European monarchs who ruled over these various kingdoms attempted to show that their lands were the legitimate inheritors of the status of the fourth empire, that of the Romans. This explains the title “Holy Roman Empire” given to a group of semiautonomous states that existed in Central Europe—often not including the city of Rome itself—until the modern era. Other kingdoms, such as France and England, also traced their lineage as the rightful inheritors of the fourth kingdom’s political sovereignty. Some Roman Catholic theologians in the Middle Ages, argued that the Roman pontiff ruled over the fourth kingdom, which had become a spiritual kingdom—the Latin church. ³⁸

By the sixteenth century, the political and religious turmoil of the Reformation combined with the Turkish siege of Vienna sparked a new round of speculation concerning the identity of the fourth kingdom. In 1532, Protestant Johannes Carion traced the fourth kingdom through Charlemagne to the German Kaisers (a name taken from the Roman name/title “Caesar”) of the sixteenth century. ³⁹ Protestant historians, including Johannes Sleidan and Philip Melanchthon, used Carion’s foundation to build a Protestant theology of history that continues to influence the self-conception of several modern European states. ⁴⁰ The Reformers cast the Muslim peoples, in particular the Turks, as the “lawless ones” who threatened to destroy the fourth kingdom and usher in a period of chaos (cf. 2 Thess 2:7). ⁴¹ This strain of Protestant historiography developed a series of visual depictions of the schema that divided the four kingdoms in chronological or geographic terms, which eventuated in the organizers of apocalyptic sects in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. ⁴²

This brief survey illustrates how interpreters have used the four-kingdoms schema to help them structure their experience of time, space, and power. The schema helped them claim that God assigns sovereignty. In a hierarchical, monarchial social system, the schema is helpful propaganda: of course, people think that they are the ones who should be sovereign and that God ordains their sovereignty.

Yet over time, so many problems emerged in the four-kingdoms schema’s ability to explain the world that it began to crumble. The epistemological shifts in Europe brought about by the Renaissance, Reformation, and Enlightenment allowed scholars to question the usefulness of many schemas, including the four kingdoms. For example, in 1591, the French scholar Jean Boudin ridiculed the attempt to trace the translatio imperii from Constantine to Charlemagne, and he pointed to the rise of the Ottoman Empire as a failure of the schema to account for non-Christian empires. ⁴³ Some Protestant theologians, such as Johann Heinrich Alsted, tried in vain to account for newfound knowledge of ancient empires in the Americas and in South and East Asia. ⁴⁴ In all, the new knowledge in science, history, and geography challenged the ability for the four kingdoms schema to explain the perception of the world for European Christians.

While fundamentalists and apocalyptic thinkers of the early modern period held fast to the schema, many others abandoned it. And yet, its influence can still be felt strongly today. Vladimir Putin’s description of Moscow as “Third Rome” draws on the medieval tradition that Russia’s Tsars (another title taken from the Roman “Caesars”) as heirs to the Byzantine Empire’s status as the fourth empire after the fall of Constantinople in 1453. ⁴⁵ Meanwhile, the United States developed its “manifest destiny” ideology in response to nineteenth-century English beliefs that the fourth kingdom had passed over the Atlantic to the New World, from which it would continue to move westward across the globe. Modern Brazil, as well, inherited a strong apocalyptic legacy of Portuguese self-interpretation as the final, fifth empire that would usher in the global age of peace. ⁴⁶

The Four-Kingdoms Schema and the Marginalized

People who are excluded from positions of power have tended to interpret the four-kingdoms schema as a promise of God’s eventual rule over earthly sovereigns. In the Mekilta de-Rabbi Ishmael, an early rabbinic anthology of interpretation, Abraham’s dream in Genesis 15 foretells the four world kingdoms that will inevitably “oppress his children.” In this interpretation, the four-kingdoms schema gives Jews faith that they will persevere with divine aid, even while they are politically subjected to gentile dominion. ⁴⁷ Other rabbinic texts emphasize that Rome—and Roman Christians, comprising all of medieval Christendom—will someday be subjected to God’s judgment for what they have done to the Jews (b. Šeb. 20; b. ‘Abod. Zar. 2b; b. Yom 77a; b. Meg. 11a; b. Qidd. 72a; Lev. Rab. 13:5).

After the sharp rise in Muslim persecution of Judaism in the centuries following the Arab conquests, Jewish thinkers turned again to the four-kingdom schema for assurance that they would survive. The medieval rabbinic text Pirqe Rabbi Eliezer interprets Abram’s sacrifice of turtledoves (Gen 15:7–21) as a reference to the fourth kingdom of the “Ishmaelites,” or Arab Muslims. ⁴⁸ In this version, the schema begins with Rome, and then moves to Greece—(Byzantium, the Greek-speaking Roman East), and then to the Sassanian Persian empire that conquered parts of Southwest Asia in the fourth cent. CE. By the seventh cent. CE, the schema includes “Ishmael” in reference to the succession of empires that ruled over Jews in the Middle East from late antiquity to the medieval period.

In the eighth cent. CE, Pinhas the Priest wrote a poem about God’s authority over the cruel empires of the world, grouped into four pairs (corresponding to the four empires), ending with a prediction against both Muslim and Christian oppressors: “Your people [the Jews] will break the bars of their yoke.” ⁴⁹ Likewise, the seventeenth cent. Egyptian Jewish chronicler Sambari wrote a series of polemics directed at the Muslim rulers of Egypt in the guise of historical narratives laced with allusions to the four-kingdom schema. He wrote that Babylon, Egypt, and Constantinople emerged “after our magnificent temple had been destroyed,” a reference to the Muslim caliphates of the Abbasids, Fatimids, and Ottomans, the Muslim powers who occupied those cities in his day. ⁵⁰

The four-kingdoms schema gave hope to Monophysite Christians, who were often persecuted by Byzantine monarchs. ⁵¹ John Wycliffe, a fourteenth-cent. English critic of the religious authorities of his day, accused rulers of using the images of the four beasts as a defense of the bloody means they use to secure power. ⁵² Wycliffe notes that many kingdoms have used similar justifications: “This principle is a nest of heresy for men of arms, inculcating rapacious and predatory attacks against their weaker brethren.” ⁵³

The four-kingdoms schema also gave early modern revolutionaries a way to enunciate their convictions. Thomas Müntzer, a German theologian who rebelled against the hierarchical economic and social class system of early modern Europe, claimed that the “poor laity and the peasants” represented the stone that would smash the statue of lordly power. ⁵⁴ The English Puritan movement “The Fifth Monarchists,” as well as their sometimes opponent and sometimes ally Oliver Cromwell, also drew upon this motif to reject the English monarchy. These revolutionaries legitimized their violent methods by citing the metaphors of warlike struggle against the “little horn,” and the rock that smashes the statue, in Daniel 2, 7, and 8. The establishment of a democratic collective of the “holy ones” was for them a holy war for emancipation. ⁵⁵ Most influential in this movement were Mary Cary, who wrote an exegetical study of Daniel 7 and 8 titled “The Little Horn’s Doom and Downfall,” and Anna Trapnel. ⁵⁶ One can also find non-violent radical readings that seek to establish a new, holy anarchy. Gerrard Winstanley, an English Anabaptist from Surrey, who rejected the nascent market economy, claimed that buying and selling land was the third beast, whereas the others were the professional clergy, kingly power, and the judiciary. ⁵⁷

In this article, I have limited my attention to the uses of the four-kingdoms schema to either legitimate or undermine the imperialist discourse of political powers. However, as postcolonial critics consistently remind us, imperial ideology always makes use of overlapping hierarchies of social relations—not only political relations between colonizer, colonized, and enemy outsiders, but also racial and ethnic stereotypes as well as gender relations and sexualized rhetoric. ⁵⁸ Anna Julia Cooper has used the four-kingdoms schema explicitly to undermine these overlapping layers of support for imperial ideology. She addresses patriarchy and racial hierarchy as an imperial force: “The World of thought under the predominant man-influence, unmodified and unrestrained by its complimentary force, would become like Daniel’s fourth beast: dreadful and terrible and strong exceedingly, it had great iron teeth, it devoured and brake in pieces, and stamped the residue with the feet of it, and the most independent of us find ourselves ready at times to fall down and worship this incarnation of power.” ⁵⁹ Liberation theologian Pablo Richard wrote about the Nicaraguan resistance to the United States’ military and economic involvement in Latin America: “Today we live in a situation very similar to that experienced by God’s people in the times of Daniel. Today we also live in the midst of a confrontation between the Empire and the People… It is in this context that reading and re-reading Daniel helps us discern God’s Kingdom in our history.” ⁶⁰

These interpreters used the four kingdoms schema, adding their own fillers. For them, the same subtle messages about God’s faithful care in the midst of turmoil that comforted Jews thousands of years ago still bring comfort for oppressed communities today.

And now we turn back to contemporary ruminations on the Brexit, in the context of a larger story. American and European millennialists are not in imminent physical danger, like some religious communities around the globe, but they do feel that their conception of the divine is incongruent with what is happening in the world around them. Like many people before them, they look to the book of Daniel’s four-kingdoms schema for comfort in the midst of chaos.

Conclusion

As we have seen above, in many strikingly different historical situations, readers were able to apply the four-kingdoms schema to make some sense of their own context. Its flexibility has allowed for its use in such a broad array of historical and cultural situations. By tracing the trajectories of biblical reception history, we can trace the ways in which the four-kingdoms schema relates to the narrative power of historiography. The implicit logic that God is in control, history makes linear sense, and that there is hope for the future seems to outweigh the schema’s failures.

Are all such interpretations and uses of biblical texts equivalent? Certainly not— but it is crucial that we determine the criteria by which we judge readings of biblical texts. The four-kingdoms schema often functions on two levels: to support the powerful in their domination of the weak and to give hope to marginalized peoples in their quest for justice in the midst of oppression. How will we read the schema today? Will we advocate for readings that support the oppressed and resist readings that justify domination? In the current theological and political context of competing monologues, reception history provides resources for discerning common ground for those invested in the common good.