The Three Kings Of Daniel 11

Jack Kelley 

“The king will do as he pleases. He will exalt and magnify himself above every god and will say unheard-of things against the God of gods. He will be successful until the time of wrath is completed, for what has been determined must take place.

(Daniel 11:36)

“At the time of the end the king of the South will engage him in battle, and the king of the North will storm out against him with chariots and cavalry and a great fleet of ships. He will invade many countries and sweep through them like a flood.”(Daniel 11:40)

Three separate kings are in view in Daniel 11:36 &40 and their identities must be discovered to fully understand what will happen in the days leading up to the End of the Age. They are the King who exalts himself, the King of the North, and the King of the South. All of Daniel 11:4-35 has been taken up with a discussion of various generations of the King of the North and the King of the South. The King who exalts himself is neither, and yet subdues them both. Let’s see if we can identify these three kings as to their roles in the world’s final drama.

First, the King who exalts himself. The angel told Daniel this king would exalt and magnify himself above every god (Daniel 11:36). In 2 Thes. 2:4 Paul said the anti-Christ will exalt himself over everything that is called god or is worshiped. The angel also told Daniel he would say unheard of things against the God of gods. In Rev. 13:6 John said the anti- Christ will blaspheme God and slander His name. So it looks like the king who exalts himself is the anti-Christ.

Now for the other two. The vision of Daniel 11 was given in 536BC and begins with an angel telling Daniel what would happen to the Persian Kingdom then in power. The angel said that after 3 more Persian Kings, a fourth one would arise, an especially rich and powerful king. This Persian King, who we know as Xerxes I, took as his queen the Jewish woman Hadassah, called Esther in the Persian language (Esther 2:16-17). He put together a mighty army and mounted an unsuccessful attempt to conquer Greece in 480BC. But after that a mighty king would appear who would rule with great power and do everything he pleased (Daniel 11:2-3). This prophecy was fulfilled about 150 years later by Alexander the Great whose driving ambition was to first conquer the Persian Empire, and after that the rest of the known world.

The angel then said that Alexander’s Kingdom would be divided into four parts according to the four winds of heaven, not going to his offspring. (After Alexander’s death his four generals divided up the Kingdom among themselves.) The next 30 verses are devoted to the families of two of the four, Seleucus, known in Daniel 11 as the first King of the North and Ptolemy, the first King of the South. 135 historically confirmed prophecies are contained in the first 35 verses of Daniel 11, most having to do with the descendants of these two men. The other two generals, Cassander and Lysimachus are not mentioned here, but history shows they both eventually lost their portions to Seleucus, the King of the North.

So the first kings of the North and the South were Seleucus and Ptolemy. For territory Seleucus eventually got control of what we now know as Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and parts of Turkey. Reigning for a time from Babylon in modern Iraq, he built a new capital city 20 miles to the south east on the Tigris river and named it Seleucia. Eventually he moved his capital to Antioch, where it remained. Ptolemy took Libya, Egypt, the Sudan, Israel and Jordan, and chose Alexandria in Egypt as his capital.

The descendants of these two kings fought each other for control of the known world for the next several hundred years. Then Daniel 11:33-35 brings us to the Maccabean revolt when the last important King of the North, Antiochus IV Epiphanes, was defeated (165 BC).

The angel didn’t tell Daniel anything about the King of the South’s future, since it didn’t directly involve Israel. But history shows that over time the Ptolemys became weaker and weaker. The last King of the South was actually a queen named Cleopatra, famous for her romantic involvements with Julius Caesar and then Mark Antony. Upon her death in 30BC what was left of the Ptolemaic Kingdom was absorbed into the Roman Empire.

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