RadixJournal - July 06, 2026


Daniel 7 & Revelation 4-9

Hosted by
Richard Spencer
Mentioned
Daniel Aramaic Judaism Judas Maccabeus Orthodox Bibles Antiochus IV Koine Greek Alexander Hanukkah Gospels Gentile Deutero Joseph John
Skywalkers The Rape of Graham Platner

Episode Stats


Length

9 minutes

Words per minute

136.53

Word count

1,364

Sentence count

59

Harmful content

Toxicity

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

6

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, we continue our series on the Book of Daniel, the seventh book of the Hebrew Bible, and look at how it relates to the story of the captivity of the Jews by the Babylonian kingdom, and the events leading up to their release from captivity.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 My thought was to start somewhere else today.
00:00:06.060 So in last week's session, we read the first three chapters of Revelation.
00:00:13.860 These are basically John's letters to these other churches in Asia.
00:00:19.720 And I hope we can get through a lot more.
00:00:24.220 I thought it would be useful to go to Daniel for a couple of reasons.
00:00:36.680 Showing that this type of writing is definitely present in the Old Testament or the Hebrew Bible, I think, is one good thing to nail down.
00:00:48.420 Also, and more importantly, Daniel, particularly the seventh book of Daniel, Daniel's Visions of the Four Kingdoms, this is a classic sort of like early version prototype experiment to what will be put forward in the book of Revelation later.
00:01:08.740 uh thirdly it also gives you an idea of how these function books like the book of revelation
00:01:17.340 function within history and how understanding just a little bit of context really opens up
00:01:27.020 quite a bit uh as we mentioned before we we sort of are taking the we're adopting a thesis that
00:01:35.740 this book of revelation is sort of like the turner diaries of the ancient world it is meant to be
00:01:44.940 bloody and extreme it is directed at particular enemies and we can later on maybe not even today
00:01:52.620 but later on we'll discuss who those enemies might be um and it's it's an incitement it's a piece of
00:01:59.600 incitement literature in effect. And I think Daniel really opens up a lot if we just look
00:02:09.340 at this one passage from Daniel. It's quite famous. Now, just a little bit of context on Daniel. So
00:02:16.600 Daniel is, it's very interesting because it's a quite late addition to the Hebrew Bible. It was
00:02:25.520 written in the uh 160s uh bc so it's a relatively recent book but it's not set in the 160s it's set
00:02:37.160 in the 6th century actually and it in fact is a uh narrative of daniel's time in captivity this
00:02:46.940 is the time of the babylonian captivity so the first temple has been destroyed by babylon
00:02:52.300 And certain select Jews are kept in the Babylonian kingdom, and Daniel, a little bit like Joseph, works as a dream interpreter and does some other things.
00:03:06.800 And also fascinating that this is one of these books that's written in multiple languages.
00:03:12.640 It's not just written in Hebrew.
00:03:15.000 It's also written in Aramaic.
00:03:16.960 The middle portions, including this dream that we're going to read, is not written in Hebrew.
00:03:22.040 It's written in Aramaic, and that can even give you a sense of the timing of these things, because Aramaic was the lingua franca of the Near East in the 160s, much like Greek, Koine Greek was the lingua franca.
00:03:44.380 When the Gospels were written, you have a recourse to Aramaic as a way of reaching the most people.
00:03:52.560 The fact that there is this language change within this book of the Hebrew Bible is fascinating in many ways,
00:04:00.340 might even suggest some other things.
00:04:02.840 But what was going on in the 160s?
00:04:06.420 So the 160s, so you can look at the story that is being told in Daniel about the Babylonian
00:04:15.720 captivity, the destruction of the first temple, et cetera, but then you can kind of think
00:04:20.300 about what's going on in the 160s.
00:04:22.780 This comes way after Cyrus the Great liberated the Jews from the Babylonian captivity, rebuilt
00:04:32.680 the temple, the second temple, sent them back to Jerusalem, and so on. And what they're dealing 0.69
00:04:39.580 with is the Seleucid Empire, which is a Greek empire, ultimately derived from Alexander's
00:04:50.520 conquest, his conquest of the known world at the time. This was sort of the eastern part.
00:04:56.240 And Antiochus IV is the leader of this sort of declining empire, and maybe due to its decline, he is a man who's engaging in serious persecution of the existing territories. 0.61
00:05:16.660 So he is the villain who's persecuting Judaism and in some ways trying to destroy Judaism.
00:05:26.980 In fact, he is banning circumcision, forcing Jews to eat pork and so on. 0.67
00:05:35.900 So you have this Greek, Gentile, Arian, let's say, leader overtly oppressing the Jews.
00:05:44.900 And one of the aspects of Daniel, Daniel is literature, but literature is a weapon, is to look back in history and imagine a scenario that is in parallel but very different.
00:06:01.340 So imagining a scenario of being captive in some sort of Gentile or even Aryan empire and kind of how you navigate the court and talk to the king and do certain things and so on and so forth.
00:06:16.200 They're in a bit of a different situation. 0.89
00:06:19.080 They are under hegemonic rulers.
00:06:22.140 In this case, we're not in 70 AD with Rome.
00:06:25.720 were earlier this is a greek empire but a lot of the antagonisms are very similar and so if you
00:06:34.760 again it's like if you if you simply read this traditionally and think of it as you know oh
00:06:42.340 daniel he was captive in babylon and he just wrote this about his time there and you don't
00:06:48.880 understand the context, it's just a fundamentally different book. And I think this also helps
00:06:56.320 understand a lot of the meanings of the dreams. And we can get at that when we read it. So does
00:07:03.960 anyone have any questions or additions to? Oh, I probably didn't finish the story. So the Jews
00:07:12.020 sort of one basically uh this is the time of the maccabees uh particularly judas maccabeus
00:07:18.880 and the revolt against the greek world this is the uh period that is memorialized in the book
00:07:25.420 of maccabees which is a non-canonical work it's actually isn't it in the catholic bible
00:07:31.800 though actually yes it is it's yeah it's part of the uh what what protestants call the apocrypha
00:07:37.440 what Catholics call the Deutero canon. And that's also true of the book of Daniel, by the way,
00:07:42.520 parts of the book of Daniel, for the reason that you gave involving the languages, parts of the
00:07:46.360 book of Daniel are in the Apocrypha slash Deutero canon, and therefore they're in the Catholic and
00:07:52.240 Orthodox Bibles, but not in Protestant or Jewish Bibles. Interesting. Yes, it's funny that they're
00:07:59.300 not in the Jewish Bible, but they're in the Catholic Bible. And then at least in the modern 0.69
00:08:04.660 age, Hanukkah, which is the celebration of a revolt against Antiochus, seems to be this
00:08:14.540 central element of Jewish identity, but it's not collected in the Hebrew Bible. Fascinating.
00:08:21.480 Does anyone else have any additions or questions that we can start reading, Daniel?
00:08:29.540 Okay. Oh, wrong book.
00:08:34.660 Yeah. Oh, sorry. Oh, sorry. I was going to speak up. The reason they're not written, by the way, is because the people that we know as like rabbinic Jews and things like that, they had this allergic reaction to Greek and keeping documents and writing in Greek.
00:08:48.500 So there was a long period of time where they basically refused to preserve anything written in Greek. And what ends up happening is entire ideologies and strains of Judaism get wiped out because of this. 0.61
00:08:58.560 so like you know we talk about philo and how philo is he has a lot of the same uh ideas as
00:09:03.760 christianity and he's kind of like this he's like miss mixing uh platonism and alexandrian
00:09:08.760 judaism together and things like that i think he sits at like the tail end of a long tradition
00:09:13.420 of what could be called like hellenized judaism basically right where they're mixing a lot of
00:09:18.760 whatever's popular in the hellenized world at that time with judaism and the reason that we
00:09:22.660 don't have any of those you know preserved like maccabees and things like that anything that's
00:09:26.420 written in Greek is because as a reaction against that group, that's the rabbinic Judaism that we
00:09:31.740 have, right? So just like by definition of who they are and their identity, that's why we don't
00:09:36.100 have those things. Yes. And Maccabees was written largely in Greek. Yeah. Let's begin with Daniel.
00:09:45.520 It's interesting also because you have just a clear vision of a Christ-like figure. Now,
00:09:53.760 is it jesus you know of course the christians would say yes yes is what he's talking about but