"destroys many and stands up against the Prince of princes," shall be utterly destroyed.

The Kingdom of God is at hand, but catastrophic days must first come. It has to be preceded by this "abomination of desolation"; sin, oppression, tyranny, anti-God, must do their worst for a short season, but only to be crushed very soon by the Most High. Daniel already sees the Ancient of Days on His throne, judgment set and the books opened, and "One like the Son of Man1 coming with the clouds of heaven, to whom is given dominion, and glory, and a kingdom, that all peoples, nations and languages should serve Him; His dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and His kingdom that which shall not be destroyed” (vii. 13 sqq.); "And many that sleep in the dust of the earth (lit. "the land of dust"= Sheol, see p. 90 sup.) shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.

On Daniel's model all following apocalyptic writers shaped their predictions; roughly speaking, they take this form :

The present evil age is ending and the new glorious age all but here. The Day of the Lord is at hand and will come suddenly when evil is at its height and anti-God triumphing; for the Day is always preceded by an epoch of unparalleled wickedness, like

"

"Son of Man" has commonly been interpreted of the Messianic King. But to-day it is mostly viewed as a personification of Israel, for two main reasons: (1) Like the four beasts (lion, bear, leopard, he-goat), he is not an individual but represents a kingdom of the world, viz. Israel. (2) vii. 27 is decisive for this view; there the Kingdom is given to "the people of the saints of the Most High; his (= the people's) is an everlasting Kingdom, and all dominions shall serve and obey him.' "Coming with the clouds of heaven,' said of the Son of Man, is an evident contrast to the heathen kingdoms, "rising out of the sea "—that is, of earthly origin.-See Driver's admirable article "Son of Man," in Hastings' D. of B. iv. 579–589, proving "Son of Man" (a) poetical synonym of " = man ; (b) in Ezek. to mark man's insignificance in the presence of God's majesty; (c) in Dan. vii. "one like unto a son of man a personification of Israel in human form (in heavenly places); (d) in Enoch's "Similitudes " (see inf.) "Son of Man" an august superhuman being enthroned beside the Almighty; (e) in N.T. "Son of Man" = the ideal type or representative of the human race. Most scholars (p. 586) question its application as a title of the Messiah in the Gospels, e.g. Westcott,

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Daniel's "abomination of desolation," and there is great tribulation. Then God (or Messiah, if there is one; often a superhuman Being kept in store in heaven for the fateful day) acts, overthrows the world-kingdom and crushes all foes, angelic or human. Next comes the Judgment, and the righteous Israel (cf. Dan. vii. 27) is given an everlasting kingdom with dominion over the nations, and God dwells with His people. The righteous dead arise to share in the Kingdom; and often the wicked dead, too, to be judged and cast into the pit. As Dr. Burney also reminds me : Notice that Dan xii. 2 interprets the last verse of Isaiah as referring to the future punishment of the wicked. Out of this there was developed the conception of a penal Gehenna."

These are the general lines of pre-Christian apocalypses, but they vary in details, e.g. :

The Judgment sometimes comes before, sometimes after the Kingdom, and at times there are two judgments. The judgment may be also on Israel only; at times it is universal and (cf. Is. xxiv.) even fallen angels are judged.

The Kingdom is either (1) on a transfigured earth, (2) in a new Jerusalem brought down from heaven, or (3) in heaven itself. It is at times everlasting, at times only a millennium of prosperity, peace, and righteousness. It may be material, or spiritual,' in character. Its members live for ever, or else to a patriarchal age. Its inheritors are only Israelites, or they are all righteous men. When heaven is the scene of the Kingdom, the righteous are "as the angels."

The Resurrection is (1) of the righteous only; (2) of many of both sorts; (3) of all men. It is (1) of the body; (2) of the spirit only.

Sheol is (1) an intermediate place of moral retribution for good and bad; (2) a prison for wicked men and angels (cf. Is. xxiv.); (3) divided into compartments for saints, bad men, bad angels; (4) Hell.

Messiah. As in the O.T., there is often no Messiah. If he comes in, he may be (1) a man; (2) superhuman; and he may be

1 We are too apt to stress the narrow, exclusive, material side of the Jewish idea of the Kingdom of God, and to forget that, in the spirit of a Second Isaiah and an Ethiopic Enoch (see inf.), very many Jews hoped and prayed for a universal and purely spiritual Kingdom in which God's will should be done, as in heaven, so on earth. Simeon's "Nunc Dimittis" was the aspiration of a large number of enlightened pious Jews long before his day.

a warrior Messiah, or highly spiritual. Thus in the Ethiopic Enoch 37-70 ("The Similitudes") he is more than a mere man or mere angel, and almost God. He is called "the Christ" (= Messiah = "Anointed"), "the Righteous One," "the Elect One," "the Son of Man"; He is revered; prayed to, created before Creation, preserved in heaven till the time of His showing, God-like, destined to be a Light to the Gentiles and the hope of those who are troubled at heart; yet He is a little below God. The date of this apocalypse is 94-64 B.C.

The Gentiles. (1) Usually they are destroyed or subjected by Israel; or (2) they are ignored; or (3) they share in the Kingdom; or (4) God has mercy on them, but gives them no honour or glory.1

Perhaps the most important new factor is the emphasis laid in all apocalypses, from Is. xxv. 8; xxvi. 19; Dan. xii. 2, onward, on individual resurrection. Here, at long last, do we find in apocalyptic vision the solution of the problem which has so long deeply exercised Old Testament saints. At length the righteousness of God is vindicated in the eyes of men. The righteous may go to the wall in this life, while the wicked prosper; but on the Resurrectionday all earth's wrongs will be righted at the Judgmentseat of God, by God, or His Messiah, who is to be the Judge of men and angels; and each man will reap as he has sown.

Moreover, this resurrection doctrine-stimulated as it may have been by Parsism-is the genuine product of Jewish inspiration, for all its factors are indigenous to Jewish thought. As already stated, along three lines of thought this belief in man's life after death was bound to arise sooner or later:(1) Israel's undying conviction of a coming Hebrew Kingdom of God was bound to lead to the resurrection of righteous departed Jews to share in its blessings, exactly as Is. xxvi. 1-19 puts it. (2) Along

1 Patriotism is apt to make good haters even to-day, far more of old. Cf. even Plato congratulating the Athenians on the fact that they surpassed all other Greeks in their hatred of the foreign nature.

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another and totally different line of thought, Jeremiah's and Ezekiel's revelation of the infinite value of the individual soul in God's eyes must also lead to the same goal. Since religion is a personal matter between each man and his God, wherein every man receives measure for measure according to his character and deeds, then, seeing that the righteous man's wrongs are often not righted here, God must right them elsewhere. Hence the doctrine of retribution was of necessity carried into the world beyond the grave, so that a personal blessed existence after this life-whether as a member of the Messianic Kingdom, or in heavenly glory-eventually and of necessity became part and parcel of Hebrew thought. (3) Pss. xvi. 8-11 and lxxiii. 23-26: "I have set the Lord always before me; because He is at my right hand I shall not be moved; therefore my heart is glad, my flesh also shall rest in hope, for Thou wilt not leave my soul in Sheol. Thou wilt show me the path of life; in Thy presence is fulness of joy." "Nevertheless I am continually with Thee; Thou hast holden me by my right hand. Thou shalt guide me with Thy counsel, and afterward receive me to glory"; both these psalms show how vividly men felt that not even death itself could snap the bond of intimate communion between the faithful saint and his God. In their heart of hearts they knew that nothing could separate them from the care, love, Presence of God, and that for them Sheol would stretch out his arms in vain. As truly as St. Paul were they persuaded that "neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God." This conviction, again, was in itself bound to lead to the belief in individual immortality.

But to the very end, as Is. xxvi. 19 and Dan. xii. 2 prove, the strong Old Testament corporate sense

makes national and individual resurrection go hand in hand. The righteous man has his personal claims, which must be satisfied as well as Israel's claims, but they can both be met simultaneously. Hence Is. xxvi. and Dan. xii. recompense the righteous man, not with a solitary immortality in heaven or elsewhere, but with a blessed resurrection-life shared with his brethren in the Kingdom of God. And, all said and done, this corporate sense is grand. One "our" is worth many a "my."

Is. xxv. and xxvi. and Dan. xii. are probably among the last, Dan. xii. may be actually the last, words of the Old Testament. Could anything be more apt or beautiful than their grand triumphant closing note: "Thy dead men shall live. Awake and sing, ye that dwell in the dust." "The Lord God will swallow up death in victory, and He will wipe away tears from off all faces"?