MANY were bad enough, violent or corrupt. Sons did not mind marrying their sisters or other nearest relations. Some led deplorably abominable lives, and were a curse to their subjects and neighbors, even more than to their enemies. God had said that Egypt was to be a base kingdom, and no ruler of their race was to reign any longer. No wonder that those kings of the south failed; for instead of raising up Egypt to their own fancied superiority as foreigners, they sunk it to the uttermost, naturally turning to most unnatural evils. Such was the race of Ptolemy.
The worst of the Seleucidæ was Antiochus Epiphanes, called by others Epimanes or the madman. This man went far in his endeavors to stamp out not only the Jews but also the Jewish religion. He placed a statue of Zeus Olympius in the most holy place, and did what none but the most profane men would have thought of—put swine's flesh and blood in the sanctuary of God. The consequence is that his history is dwelt on with greater minuteness than anyone's. But the resistance to his aim at the close of his history led to a famous revival amongst the Jews. The Maccabees, as the Jewish heroes were called, resisted his generals, which is what is meant by “arms shall stand on his part” —a sufficiently definite way of describing a general acting for him against the Maccabees. Their history is given among the uninspired books that compose the Apocrypha. These Maccabees were no models of piety or long-suffering; but, as Daniel says, they were strong and “did [exploits].” No phrase could more accurately characterize them (verse 32). “The people that do know their God shall be strong and act.” They were far from possessing the martyr spirit in their ways, such as will be found in the godly remnant by-and-by at the end of the age. Then indeed none but those willing to lose their lives for the truth's sake will be owned by the God of Israel. Their strength will be in their weakness, they themselves ready to suffer—yea, even unto death for Him Who died and, little known by them, is now in glory. It is needless to say that such suffering is a far harder thing, and entails more blessing from God than anything of power displayed in the theater of the world.
Here then we have those that were persecuted by their enemy—Antiochus Epiphanes. “And they that understood (or, are wise) among the people shall instruct many” (ver. 33). The phrase means “the” many. It is to be regretted that the article is not conveyed in English where it stands in the Hebrew. For there are the two varieties: the word “many” sometimes with, and sometimes without, the article. The Revisers have taken no notice of the difference, any more than the A. V. “And they shall fall by the sword, and by the flame, by captivity, and by spoil, [many] days. Now when they shall fall, they shall be holpen with a little help; but many shall cleave to them with flatteries” (vers. 33, 34). So it came to pass that Antipater, the Edomite father of Herod, got in. For the family had not a shadow of right to reign over the Jews. Only he stood with the last unworthy scion of the Maccabees, and through Roman help also slipped into power. But such retributions were allowed in God's providence, in order to the humiliation of His guilty people.
“And [some] of them of understanding shall fall, to try them and to purge, and to make [them] white, [even] to the time of the end; because [it is] yet for the time appointed” (ver. 35). Just here it is where the text itself shows an interruption of the history till we come to “the time appointed” “the time of the end.” Throughout the prophecy will be found a similar break. Even this remarkably successional chapter discloses such an interruption both at the beginning and at the end. The first undeniably occurs at the end of verse 2, after the defeat of Xerxes, and before Alexander the Great. What left room for it is Xerxes stirring up all against the realm of Greece. After a century and a half this entailed the return blow by Alexander. All the intervening history was passed over.
In the same way the Spirit of God has brought us down to the time that follows Antiochus Epiphanes. No notice is here taken of the successive kings that reigned in the north and south; for the next we shall see to be king in the land between the two countries, a king who had not yet come to the throne. After Antiochus Epiphanss we do hear of certain Jews making a bold stand to maintain their law against the apostates, and with trials of all kinds till “the time of the end.” That time is still future; but it shall assuredly come, the great crisis for the Jew, which the wise and prudent ignore, and therefore count all the rest of the chapter “too fabulous for a contemporary historian.” The truth is that it is all future, but will surely be fulfilled in its season. There is a perfect answer in the past history to all we have seen up to ver. 35, but to nothing more.
Yet it is not to be allowed that the words from ver. 36 are indeterminate in the least degree. The only appearance of it (and this is intentional vagueness, if such a phrase be permitted here) is in the words, “until the time of the end.” It already covers an intervening space of something like 2000 years. The blank at any rate occurs there.
(To be continued D.V.).