Page 349 - Daniel

be assailed by the catastrophic judgments from God portrayed in
Revelation 6–18, and the inherent difficulties of ruling the entire globe
come to their fruition in a final world war of which the closing portion
of Daniel 11 furnishes a description.

THE FINAL WORLD WAR ERUPTS (11:40–43)

11:40–43 “At the time of the end, the king of the south shall attack
him, but the king of the north shall rush upon him like a whirlwind,
with chariots and horsemen, and with many ships. And he shall come
into countries and shall overflow and pass through. He shall come into

the glorious land. And tens of thousands shall fall, but these shall be
delivered out of his hand: Edom and Moab and the main part of the
Ammonites. He shall stretch out his hand against the countries, and
the land of Egypt shall not escape. He shall become ruler of the
treasures of gold and of silver, and all the precious things of Egypt,

and the Libyans and the Cushites shall follow in his train.”

The “time of the end” introduced in verse 35 is again mentioned to
make clear that the military struggle here is that which will characterize
the end of the age. The general nature and location of the warfare is also
specified. The king mentioned in verses 36–39 is now attacked by kings
from the south and the north. Earlier in this chapter, the king of the
south uniformly referred to Egypt and to the warfare of the third and
second centuries B.C. that has already been fulfilled. Here the king of the

south is clearly the leader of a political and military force that comes
from south of the Holy Land, but the probability is that it involves much
more than only Egypt and can be identified as an African army. There is
no mention whatever of such campaigns in the Maccabean books or by

Livy, Polybius, and Appian. No such warfare is described in history.
The king of the north, identified as Syria in the prophecies fulfilled in
the second and third centuries B.C., is obviously more than the small

territory possessed by Syria at that time and probably includes all the
political and military force of the lands to the north of the Holy Land. 62

A natural question is the relation of this struggle to the battle
described in Ezekiel 38–39, where a great military force coming from the