Page 223 - Daniel

—symbolically represents the single leadership he provided.
Daniel then watched the goat attack the ram, the Medo-Persian

Empire, that he had seen by the Ulai canal. An unusual feature of the
goat’s attack was its fury, borne out by history. The Persians had
attacked Greece earlier. Now it was time for Greek retaliation. The
Medo-Persian Empire disintegrated to the point that it had no power to
stand before the goat, Alexander, who crushed it into the ground.

All of this was fulfilled dramatically in history. The forces of
Alexander first defeated the Persians at the Granicus River in Asia Minor
in May 334 B.C., which was the beginning of the conquest of the entire

Persian Empire. A year and a half later, the battle of Issus occurred
(November 333 B.C.) near the northeastern tip of the Mediterranean Sea.
Persia’s power was finally broken at Gaugamela near Nineveh in October

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331 B.C.

Illustration of what the goat in Daniel 8 might have looked like in Daniel’s vision.

There is no discrepancy between history, which records a series of
battles, and Daniel’s representation that the Medo–Persian Empire fell
with one blow. Daniel was obviously describing the result rather than
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the details. That the prophecy is accurate, insofar as it goes, most
expositors concede. Here again, the correspondence of the prophecy to
later history is so accurate that liberal critics attempt to make it history
instead of prophecy. 22

The divine view of Greece is less complimentary than that of secular
historians. Tarn says of Alexander: “He was one of the supreme

fertilizing forces in history. He lifted the civilized world out of one
groove and set it in another; he started a new epoch; nothing could
again be as it had been…. Particularism was replaced by the idea of the