How should Christians read the king of the north and the king of the south in Daniel 11?

Question 10165.

The king of the north and the king of the south dominate Daniel 11, a chapter so detailed that critics have long insisted it must have been written after the events it describes. I take the opposite view, and I think the chapter is one of the strongest pieces of evidence for predictive prophecy anywhere in Scripture.

The question for a Christian reader is how to handle a passage that begins in the Persian empire, runs through the wars of Alexander’s successors, and then, somewhere around verse 36, seems to lift off the page of ancient history altogether.

Who the king of the north and king of the south were

The terms are geographical, and they are relative to Israel. The king of the north is the Seleucid ruler based in Syria and Mesopotamia. The king of the south is the Ptolemaic ruler based in Egypt. Both dynasties descended from generals of Alexander the Great, and for over a century they fought each other across the land bridge that lay between them, which happened to be the land God had given to Abraham.

Daniel 11 traces those wars with astonishing precision. Marriages, betrayals, campaigns, retreats, a treaty sealed by a daughter given in marriage who fails to secure her father’s interests, all of it maps onto the recorded history of the third and second centuries before Christ. Anyone reading with a history of the period beside them can follow it almost year by year.

The chapter reaches its ancient climax in Antiochus IV Epiphanes, the king of the north who desecrated the temple in 167 BC, stopped the daily sacrifice and set up an idolatrous altar. That episode gave the Jewish people the Maccabean revolt, and it gave later readers a working model of what desecration of the sanctuary looks like.

Why the chapter changes gear

Somewhere around verse 36 the description stops fitting Antiochus. The king who now appears does as he wills, exalts himself above every god, and speaks astonishing things against the God of gods (Daniel 11:36). He prospers till the indignation is accomplished, which is a phrase Daniel uses for the completion of God’s dealings with Israel, not for a Syrian king’s death in Persia.

He also honours a god of fortresses whom his fathers did not know, divides land for gain, and comes to his end with none to help him at a point tied to the time of the end in the next chapter. Antiochus never claimed to be above every god, and his career did not conclude the indignation against Israel.

So I read verses 36 to 45 as describing a future ruler, the man Paul calls the man of lawlessness and John calls the beast. That is not an arbitrary jump. Daniel himself signals it, and the shift from a king of the north in conflict with a king of the south to a king who exalts himself above all deity is a change in kind, not degree.

Antiochus as a picture of the Antichrist

This is where typology earns its keep. Antiochus is not the Antichrist, but he is a working model of him. He entered the sanctuary, stopped the sacrifices, set up an abomination and demanded conformity on pain of death. Jesus, speaking long after Antiochus was dead, still told his hearers to look for the abomination of desolation as a future event.

That double pattern, an ancient fulfilment and a greater one still to come, runs right through the prophets. I have looked at how it works when asking about prophetic double fulfilment, and Daniel 11 is one of the clearest examples of it in the whole canon.

It also explains why so many honest readers disagree about where the chapter turns. If the earlier king is deliberately drawn to resemble the later one, the seam will not be obvious. What settles it for me is the language of the end, which Daniel reserves for the final period rather than the Maccabean crisis.

The final king of the north

If verses 40 to 45 are future, then the last days will see a coalition attacking from the north and a power pressing from the south, with the wilful king sweeping through countries and pitching his tents between the sea and the glorious holy mountain. Jerusalem is the fixed point around which all of it moves, as it has been throughout the chapter.

Many students of prophecy connect this northern movement with the coalition of Ezekiel 38 and 39, and there is an obvious attraction in doing so. I am cautious about welding the two passages together, because the timings and the outcomes differ, but the geography certainly overlaps and the same regions keep reappearing in the prophetic word.

What I will not do is assign modern nation states to these titles with confidence. The territory of the ancient king of the north takes in modern Syria, Iraq, Turkey and Iran, and the territory of the king of the south takes in Egypt and beyond. Beyond that, naming next week’s leaders is guesswork dressed in Scripture.

Predictive prophecy and the critics

Because Daniel 11 is so exact, critical scholarship has generally dated the book to the second century, after the events. That conclusion is not driven by the evidence of the manuscripts. It is driven by the assumption that no one can foretell the future in that kind of detail.

Once you allow that God knows the end from the beginning, the argument collapses. Isaiah stakes God’s very claim to deity on the ability to declare the end from the beginning. A book that predicts three centuries of Near Eastern politics is exactly what you would expect from the God who says that about himself, and the discovery of Daniel manuscripts at Qumran has made the late dating rather more uncomfortable than it used to be.

The Hebrew word for the end in this chapter, qets, is worth tracing through Daniel. It consistently marks the appointed conclusion of a period rather than a vague future, which is another reason the closing verses read as something more than Maccabean history.

How to read Daniel 11 without losing your footing

My advice is to read the chapter with a decent historical note beside you for the first thirty five verses, and with the New Testament open for the rest. Watch how God’s people fare in the middle of superpower conflict, because that is the pastoral thread running underneath the politics.

Notice also that the wise among the people make many understand, though they stumble by sword and flame and captivity for some days. Faithfulness in Daniel is not rewarded with immunity. It is rewarded at the resurrection, which is exactly where chapter 12 goes next, a passage I take up when asking about the resurrection of the just and the unjust.

If you want the wider framework, my article on Daniel’s seventy weeks sets out the timeline that Daniel 11 assumes, and the two chapters are best read together.

Why the geography still matters

One of the quiet features of biblical prophecy is how stubbornly local it is. The king of the north is not a symbol of northerly evil in general. He is a ruler operating from a particular region, moving along particular roads, towards a particular city. Prophecy is given in the language of maps, and that is one of the reasons I read it literally rather than as a set of moral pictures.

The same corridor that carried the armies of the king of the north and the king of the south has carried armies ever since, and it carries tension now. Scripture keeps drawing our attention to that piece of ground because God keeps drawing his purposes through it. Jerusalem is described as being set in the centre of the nations, and Zechariah calls it a cup of staggering to the peoples round about (Zechariah 12:2).

This is where I want to be careful, though. Recognising the region is not the same as identifying the man. Every generation has produced confident charts naming the final king of the north, and every one of those charts is now a curiosity. The text gives us direction, not identity, and the difference between those two things is the difference between sober prophecy teaching and the sort that ends in embarrassment.

The verb Daniel uses for the northern king’s advance carries the sense of storming or sweeping through, and readers who want to trace it can follow shataph through the prophets, where it is used of flooding water as well as invading armies. It is a picture of something unstoppable meeting the one limit it cannot pass, which is the appointed end that God himself has decreed.

So, now what?

Daniel wrote for people who were about to live through centuries of being fought over by larger powers. God gave them the outline in advance so that they would know, when the armies came, that history had not slipped out of his hands. That is what prophecy is for.

The same applies to us. You will not find your own name in Daniel 11, but you will find the God who names kings before their grandparents are born. If he can chart the wars of the Seleucids and the Ptolemies in advance, is your unresolved situation really beyond him?

And the king shall do as he wills. He shall exalt himself and magnify himself above every god, and shall speak astonishing things against the God of gods. He shall prosper till the indignation is accomplished; for what is decreed shall be done.

Daniel 11:36, ESV