SRR #59 | The Single Frame Hypothesis (Eschatology And The Danielic Imperative Part 4)

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Daniel 11 and the Single Frame of Reference

Battle. And now, I will show you the truth. Behold, three more kings shall arise in Persia, and a fourth shall be far richer than all of them. And when he has become strong through his riches, he shall stir up all against the kingdom of Greece.

And a mighty king shall arise, who shall rule with great dominion and do as he wills. And as soon as he is risen, his kingdom shall be broken and divided toward the four winds of heaven. But not to his posterity, nor according to the authority with which he ruled, for his kingdom shall be plucked up and go to others besides these.

Daniel 11, 2 -4.

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Welcome back, everybody. My name is Tim Shaughnessy and you are listening to Semper Referendum Radio. So I want to say thank you for checking us out. Be sure to like and share our podcast if you're getting something out of it.

I want to say thank you to the listeners that we have. We've gotten some feedback on this series. Apparently people are liking it so I am very grateful for that. We are going to be continuing today in our series on eschatology.

We're looking at the book of Daniel and we've titled this series the Danielic Imperative. Now before we get to that I just want to let everybody know about some things that are coming up. We've got an interview with Jason Peterson who is a Clarkian.

We're going to talk to him a little bit about apologetics, a little bit about Clarkianism, what's going on in his ministry, and also talk to him about his book. Then we also have an interview that is set up where we're hoping to record next week or sometime after that sometime soon with Tom Gioditis, the president of the Trinity Foundation.

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He's a wealth of knowledge so we are looking forward to that. So let me go ahead and transition now into today's topic. We are continuing in Daniel chapter 11 and first I want to say how grateful I am that Timothy Kaufman has come on our podcast.

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I really have nothing to offer to the series that you are doing except maybe to ask questions which I think the teachings have been so thorough that I really haven't had any questions. I've been able to understand everything that you've been saying.

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Well thank you Tim. I appreciate the introduction and glad to be back. We're glad to be doing this series. We hope people are enjoying it. We know that a lot of information in this series of podcasts is tedious.

We want people to be able to revisit the podcast, hear the references, look them up for themselves, and confirm what it is that we're saying. But we've called this Eschatology and the Danielic Imperative because Daniel establishes a timeline for us and that timeline is something that Jesus refers to when he talks about the coming kingdom and he even refers to the abomination of desolation that Daniel foretold when he's talking about the signs at the end of the age.

When Jesus sends an angel to John to help him understand what's about to happen, he invokes a Danielic timeline as you can see by the references in chapter 12, 13, and 17 of Revelation where the beasts in their aggregation are depicted as having seven heads and ten horns, which is basically a compilation or aggregation of the beasts of Daniel chapter 7.

When we approach Eschatology, we absolutely have to have a grasp of the Danielic timeline. And what we've been focusing on for the first few episodes is to identify a timeline but also to identify some of the problems that have occurred when we tinker with that timeline.

And one of the ways that that timeline has been toyed with a little bit is in Daniel chapter 11. And what we talked about last week is that not only has the church historically been awaiting a 10-way division of the Roman Empire based on Daniel chapter 7, and the problem with that is that it's not sufficiently harmonized with Revelation chapter 17, which shows that there are still ten horns remaining when the lamb returns and the beast and the ten horns make war against the lamb.

The historical interpretation of Daniel chapter 7 is that the little horn removes three of the ten horns so that seven would remain, when in reality what we've explained for the last three weeks is that Daniel was seeing each of those four beasts in its final configuration just before the next empire came to power.

And what we saw with the Roman Empire at the latter part of the fourth century, that there were 13 dioceses. Roman Catholicism claimed three of those and came up among the remaining ten, Roman Catholicism being the little horn that we were warned about in Daniel chapter 7.

Now the reason this has caused some confusion is that the little horn historically has been presumed to come up among ten and remove three of the ten, leaving seven, and that of course has never actually occurred.

The Roman Empire never divided ten ways, and Roman Catholicism didn't, or nobody came along and took three of the ten, but the Roman Empire was divided 13 ways, and Roman Catholicism came up and took three of the 13 for itself, in what we are calling, what has historically and inaccurately been called the cradle of Christianity, which is the three apostolic seas of Rome, Antioch, and Alexandria, when in fact those are the three metropolitan cities of three of the 13 dioceses of the Roman Empire.

And what came up there was actually what we would consider to be modern-day Roman Catholicism with all of its trappings, which is part of the reason why we have focused before this series on all the novelties that came up at the latter part of the fourth century.

But one of the problems that we run into when we address Daniel chapter 7 is that historically, and almost universally, the little horn of Daniel 7 is identified with the northern antagonist of Daniel chapter 11.

And last week we talked about why that happens. The result of identifying the little horn of chapter 7 with the northern antagonist of Daniel chapter 11 is that the church awaits a little horn that does the things identified in Daniel chapter 7, but they're also expecting that little horn to do the things identified in Daniel chapter 11.

The problem is that Daniel chapter 7 is largely set in a Roman framework. All four of the preceding empires, all four of the empires are identified, Babylonian, Medo-Persian, Greek, Roman, and then the empire of the little horn.

But it's the fourth beast and its fragmentation and the arrival of a little horn that becomes the main antagonist of the chapter. That is set in a Roman framework, but Daniel chapter 11 is set in a Greek framework.

And Daniel chapter 11 starts with a description of the transition from Median dominance to Persian dominance, and the next big thing to happen is a transition from Persian to Greek dominance. And that Greek dominance is the focus of the entire chapter.

And Daniel explains that the king of the Greeks comes to his power, and when he is broken, four kingdoms come up in his place. And what we focused on last week is finding the time, the period of time, when the number of Alexander's successors was reduced to four.

And that happened between 294 BC and 281 BC. And what we showed is that that period from 294 to 281 BC is the last period of the successors of Alexander, where there were four remaining family lines with the claim to the throne.

And what we find is that those family lines really were the final successors of Alexander. And by 281, the reason that date is significant is because at that time, Seleucus invaded Asia Minor. That is, Seleucus from the east in Syria invaded Asia Minor in the north and killed Lysimachus.

And therefore, that was the end of the period of four successors. So it's during that period from 294 to 281 BC when we can establish the identity of the four successors to Alexander. And what we want to focus on is that unless we understand that particular aspect of the chronology of Daniel, it's just like what we saw with the division of the Roman Empire.

Unless we understand what Daniel was actually saying and what he was actually foreseeing, we will miss the proper division of the Roman Empire that was supposed to serve as an indication of when the little horn was going to arise.

And if we don't narrow down the exact moment in time when the successors to Alexander numbered four, then we're going to miss what Daniel was foreseeing in Daniel chapter 11. And as we mentioned last week, is the identification of the the little horn of Daniel 7 with the antagonist, the northern antagonist of Daniel chapter 11, has been brought about by the perceived problem that Daniel's prophecy, after identifying Alexander the Great and his downfall, the prophecy appears to diverge immediately from the historical record because Daniel chapter 11 was supposed to was foretelling a series of battles between the king of the north and the king of the south.

And it was fulfilled in a series of battles between the kings of Syria and the kings of Egypt, which were in fact east and south in the original framework. So to answer the question about why Daniel's compass could be so wrong, historians and eschatologists have typically inserted a new frame of reference.

Although Daniel established a frame of reference north, south, east, and west in chapter 11, verse 4, where Asia Minor is north, Egypt is south, Syria is east, and Macedonia is west, they say, even though Daniel never actually explicitly says it, typically, historically, we have immediately imposed a shifted frame of reference in which Syria is to the north, Jerusalem's in the middle, and Egypt is in the south.

And that is what we call the Judean frame of reference. And what happens is that only fixes Daniel and the fulfillment in the short term, because Daniel proceeds through chapter 11, and then we arrive at yet another point in the in the narrative, where there continue to be battles, but there's nothing in the historical record that shows that the king of Syria and the king of Egypt had the wars that were described, at which point historians add yet another frame of reference, which we call the eschatological frame.

So that now there's a new frame of reference, and Daniel has changes his prophecy from being something that is in the setting and framework of the Greek Empire, which is what you would expect based on the introduction that we got in the first few verses, he shifted his attention to an antagonist that is in the Roman period, or in a Roman framework.

And that's why we see so many historians and eschatologists and commentarians just assuming that at some point in Daniel chapter 11, Daniel shifts his framework yet again to an eschatological frame. As we mentioned last week, different historians and eschatologists identify the shift to the eschatological framework as early as verse 21 and as late as verse 39.

Now, as we mentioned last week, the result of this approach is absolute chaos. One writer centers the eschatological frame of Daniel 11 on Rome, and the unwelcome tidings that come from the north and the east are presumed to be from Germany and Constantinople.

Another writer has the news coming from Bulgaria and England. Another eschatological frame is centered on the Turks, and the tidings that originate from the north and east are coming from north and east of Istanbul.

Others have the frame of reference set from the perspective of Antichrist in North Africa, and the unwelcome tidings from the north and east come from Jerusalem, which is north and east of North Africa.

Still others, keeping Antiochus in view, who's one of the line of the Seleucid kings in Syria. They have the final reference frame set in Judea, and Antiochus hearing unwelcome news from Syria to the north and from Persia to the east.

Another writer reverses even those, and having the tidings originate from Persia to the north and Syria to the east, and one writer keeps the reference frames consistent from 11 .5 to 11 .40, and yet another writer says that that's the wrong thing to do, because we don't want to hold too strictly to the literal sense and miss the prophetic sense.

That's from Ocolampadius commenting on Daniel, and he warns, don't approach Daniel from a single frame of reference, because you might hold too strictly to what the literal sense of, you know, I know that he respected the scriptures and revered them, but what he has done there is having imposed an eschatological frame of reference at the end of Daniel chapter 11, as telling us, don't, he's warning us against doing what we really ought to do, which is look at Daniel 11 as if it was written in one frame of reference.

The frame of references change from writer to writer, and even from chapter to chapter within a single writer. Melanchthon proposed as many as five different frames of reference in Daniel chapter 11, centered on Alexander, Judea, Antiochus IV, papal Rome, and the Turks, and it's impossible.

We look at this, and I don't believe that we should be constrained to have to choose between one of those interpretations, because all of them presume either that the historical record beyond a certain point in Daniel chapter 11 is not intended to conform, or actually the prophetic record is not intended to conform with the historical record, or that there are so many different frames of reference that we just lose track.

I don't think that we are obligated as Christians to go to Daniel chapter 11 and choose from one of those interpretations and camp on it. I think that what we need to do is go back to Daniel chapter 11 and evaluate the chapter in a single frame of reference from start to finish.

In spite of the confusion that has erupted because we have introduced so many extra frames of reference to Daniel chapter 11, the interpretation and understanding that we are supposed to impose these frames of reference is so universally applied in the history of Danielic interpretation that it's practically canonical, but it's just a tradition that has been applied to Daniel chapter 11 in order to make sense of the chapter because the events depicted in the chapter do not appear to conform to what actually happened.

And what we want to do is evaluate that and rethink maybe what the early church fathers and reformers and modern commentators have missed is the possibility that all of Daniel 11 is to be read continuously in one single Alexandrian frame of reference, in which north refers to Asia Minor from start to finish, and south always refers to the southern kingdom, whatever its boundaries happen to be, because we're going to be going to get into that a little bit today as well.

If we would set aside all the foreign traditional frames of reference that have been imposed on the text and stick with the one that Daniel establishes, perhaps the chaotic jumble of interpretations that the eschatological frame of references will go away haven't been caused by the fact that we introduced the Judean frame at verse 5 in the first place.

My point is that we have traditionally, for more than a thousand years, assumed that we could correct Daniel's vision by imposing a separate frame of reference that suddenly makes Syria the northern kingdom, even though in chapter 11 verse 4, Syria appears to be the eastern kingdom.

So let's think about this. Let's think about what Daniel has prophesied and how we have historically interpreted it. The answer to this question, and the question we want to ask, is what if the entire chapter is read in a single Alexandrian frame of reference, and that north refers to the same geographic territory at the end of the chapter as it does at the beginning?

Well, what would happen if we read Daniel the way it appears to be written? And the answer to these questions, it's an answer that is profound for its simplicity, is found in one of the most plainly evident, exhaustively corroborated, widely known, but chronically overlooked facts of post-Alexandrian Hellenism.

And that overlooked fact that has been exhaustively corroborated and widely known is that even though the Seleuces were kings of Syria, after the battle of Choropedium, they lived in and reigned from Asia Minor and Thrace.

For the entire period that they are called the kings of the north in Daniel chapter 11, they actually lived in and reigned from Asia Minor. It's shocking when people hear it because they have been trained by the school of eschatology to consider Syria to be the eastern kingdom, and therefore the Seleuces are the eastern kings.

But Syria is in fact the eastern kingdom. But when the Seleuces who reigned in Syria were fighting with Egypt and tussling back and forth for dominance as they fought over the remnants of the Alexandrian Empire, when they engaged in those battles, they were living in Asia Minor at the time.

And as long as they live in Asia Minor, Daniel calls them kings of the north. What happens over the period of the post-Alexandrian period in Asia Minor, as we mentioned last week, between 294 and 281, Lysimachus was established as the king of Asia Minor in the north.

Ptolemy was established as the king of Egypt in the south. The Seleuces were established as king of Syria in the east, and Demetrius and his offspring ended up controlling Macedonia to the west. If Daniel has prophesied a series of battles between the king of the north and the king of the south, we should expect for there to be a series of wars between whoever's running Asia Minor and whoever's running Egypt and its territories.

Well, what happened in 281 BC is that Seleuces conquered Lysimachus at Choropedium in Asia Minor. And from that point forward, the Seleucid line actually lived in and ruled from Asia Minor in Thrace, and in fact preferred it over their other dominions.

It was the seat of the Seleucid empire until their catastrophic defeat at the hands of the Romans at the Battle of Magnesia in 190 BC. And when we finally see the king of the north introduced in Daniel chapter 11, it is only after two generations of Seleucid kings have lived in and reigned from Asia Minor in Ephesus, as it turns out.

So when we get to Daniel chapter 11 verse 6, and it says,. At the end of years they shall join themselves together, for the king's daughter of the south shall come to the king of the north to make an agreement.

What happened was Bernice had been pledged to Antiochus, who was in fact the grandson of Seleuces, and he was living in Ephesus at the time that proposal was made, and Ephesus is in Asia Minor to the north.

The reason that the Seleucids are called kings of the north in Daniel chapter 11 is not because Daniel has shifted his frame of reference from an Alexandrian frame to a Judean frame. The reason the Seleucids are called king of the north in Daniel chapter 11 is because that's where they lived.

Seleuces conquered Lysimachus in 281 BC. Lysimachus was king of the north. When Seleuces conquered him, he set up his home and hearth in Asia Minor and lived and reigned there. What happened over the course of the next hundred years is that as the Seleucids began to expand their reach beyond Asia Minor and Thrace and began to move into Greece, it got the attention of the rising Roman Republic.

They were not comfortable with the Greek Antiochus coming into Macedonia and the Greek Isles and beginning to establish a presence that was too close to the eastern frontier of the Roman Republic at the time.

They sent warnings to him. They said, you need to stop doing that, and Antiochus simply responded saying, I don't come to Rome and tell you how to run your country, and you can't come here and tell me how to run mine.

I am simply doing what my fathers did before me, and what they did is they just live and reign and conquer the adjacent kings around them. Well, when he went into Greece, Rome had had enough, and Rome sent its armies to meet him on the field of battle where he was defeated handily at the Battle of Magnesia in 190 BC, and this is depicted for us in Daniel chapter 11 verse 18, and this is the verse that says, after this he shall turn his face unto the Isles, and here the Isles are the Greek Isles.

After this he shall turn his face to the Greek Isles, and she'll take many, but a prince for his own behalf shall cause the reproach offered by him to cease. Without his own reproach, he shall cause it to turn upon him.

So, we're going to get into what that passage, who the prince of his own behalf is, and how the reproach turned back upon him, but the point we want to get to is that Daniel chapter 11 verse 18 is the point at which the king of the north overreaches, gets all the way to Greece.

Rome doesn't like it, and at the Battle of Magnesia, Rome defeated him, and he left, having been humiliated by Rome, and basically fled to Apamea back in Syria. Now, the significance of that is at the Treaty of Apamea in 188 BC, the Romans imposed terms of surrender and required that he evacuate and remain out of Asia Minor and Thrace.

He was no longer allowed to come within the Taurus Mountains. It was no longer allowed into Europe and Thrace. Those were the terms of his surrender. And so, from that point forward, the Seleucid line was forbidden by Rome to enter into Asia Minor or into Europe.

So, essentially, Asia Minor and Thrace had been the kingdom of the king of the north, as established in the four-way division of the Greek Empire. The Seleucids moved in and conquered Lysimachus, and they therefore became kings of the north.

The entire narrative, all the way through Daniel 11 -18, refers to the Seleucids as the king of the north, so long as they occupy the northern territory. And then Rome comes in and banishes the Seleucids from Asia Minor and Europe, which is Thrace in this case, forbidding them to enter.

And from that point forward, the Seleucid line is never called king of the north again. The significance here is that we are able to look at the scriptures and look at what happened in history and identify the exact points in history that each one of these references to the king of the north occurs in Daniel chapter 11.

And as soon as the Romans formally and finally remove the Seleucids from their territories in the northern territory and force them to remain as Syrian kings only, Daniel simply stops referring to them as king of the north.

Now, this reality that the Seleucids were actually the northern kingdom for the period that they occupied Asia Minor and Thrace has been established historically, and it is in fact a well-known fact.

But the problem is that the eschatology of Daniel chapter 11 has been interpreted historically without the knowledge and the understanding that when Daniel refers to the Seleucids as king of the north, he only does so when they actually occupy the northern territory.

Now, esteemed historian of the Seleucid dynasty, Edward, I'm sorry, Edwin Robert Vivan, arrives at precisely this conclusion in his two-volume work, The House of Seleuces. This is what Edwin Robert Vivan wrote about it.

Asia Minor, rather than Syria or the east, seems, until after Magnesia, the chief sphere of Seleucid activity. One may well believe that it was the part of their dominions to which the Seleucid kings attached the greatest value.

It is never so inappropriate to speak of the dynasty as Syrian as in those earlier reigns. That's from House of Seleuces, volume 1, pages 150 to 151. In the footnotes of the same page, he says Asia Minor was in fact considered the real home of the earlier Seleucids.

Now, that is, that's a pretty significant component of our assessment of Daniel chapter 11. Keep in mind that we have been looking at Daniel chapter 11, which prophesies a series of battles between the king of the north and the king of the south.

We have assumed the king of the south is Egypt. We've assumed the king of the north is the Seleucids, which in fact is true. But because the Seleucids have been historically identified with the eastern kingdom in Syria, eschatologists have simply assumed that Daniel had changed his frame of reference to a Judean frame in which Syria is north and Egypt is south.

But when we go back and analyze the historical record and find out that the Seleucids invaded Asia Minor and made it their home for many generations, and we also notice that the narrative of Daniel chapter 11 does not actually pick up with the north-south conflict until we get to Antiochus II, who is the grandson of Seleucus, and we're well down the line of Seleucids who have long since existed and lived and reigned from Ephesus in Asia Minor, before we actually start talking about the king of the north doing anything with the king of the south.

And the first reference, of course, is where the daughter of the king of the south comes to the north and proposes an agreement, and that agreement was between Ptolemy's daughter Berenice and Antiochus II, who in fact was married at the time.

And what he did is he left his first wife in Ephesus and moved to Antioch, but as we find out later, his heart was never far away from Ephesus, and in fact he abandoned Berenice and went back to Ephesus where he died at the hands of his first wife because she couldn't trust him not to return turn his heart back toward Antioch.

The point here is that it turns out that Daniel's prophecies of a battle between the conflicts between the king of the north and the king of the south were in fact fulfilled exactly the way we would have expected, and that is we saw a four-way division north, south, east, and west of the Greek empire after Alexander.

Lysimachus took Asia Minor within the Taurus Mountains and included parts of Europe, which was Thrace, that's the northern kingdom. Egypt, the Ptolemies took Egypt to the south, and as we'll find in a few minutes, they expanded their territories considerably, and we'll talk about what the boundary ended up being between the north and the south.

The Seleucids took Syria to the east, and yes indeed the Seleucids and the Ptolemies battled each other back and forth, and in fact those two family lines fulfill the prophecy of Daniel chapter 11, but the reason they fulfill the prophecy is not because Daniel had shifted his frame of reference, but because the Seleucids had actually moved into Asia Minor.

Two conclusions necessarily follow from this. One, north refers to Asia Minor and Thrace, and king of the north refers to its rulers. To put it another way, the title king of the north is meant in an Alexandrian frame of reference indicating the ruler of Asia Minor and Thrace, and the title attaches not to a particular dynasty, but to whomever is ruling the particular geography.

Thus the title king of the north does not follow the Seleucids, it follows the territory, and the Seleucids are only called king of the north when they occupy the northern territory. Now that particular distinction of scripture is entirely lost when modern translations continue calling the Syrian kings king of the north after Daniel 11 18.

For example, the New International Version, the New Living Translation, and God's Word Translation at Daniel 11 28 refer to the Syrian kings as king of the north, which is something that Daniel actually doesn't do in the original text.

He doesn't call them king of the north. That's simply a gloss in the text intended to help us understand the chapter when in fact it actually clouds the meaning of the chapter, because Daniel never calls the Seleucids kings of the north after they get kicked out of Asia Minor.

That gratuitous interpolation there along with the eschatologist's insistence on imposing a Judean frame at 11 5 have both worked catastrophically against us as we try to interpret the chapter. The translations have been modified and the Judean frame has been imposed extensively to help our understanding of the chapter, and yet what it does is actually cloud the chapter's meaning.

The same objection can be raised regarding the king of the south, and we're going to be talking about him in just a minute. As we demonstrated in our earlier discussion on this chapter, all manner of nationality and geography is freely used to describe everything else in chapter 11 except the two kings.

The two kings are always north and south. They are never described in their geographic territories. Just as the angelic narrator never calls Syria king of the north, the angel never actually calls Egypt the king of the south.

Although he plainly refers to Egypt multiple times in the chapter, he never actually says that Egypt is actually the southern kingdom. But to some translators, the temptation to assign a dynastic or national name to the angel's southern designation is just too great to resist.

And so what is billed as the translation of the Septuagint into contemporary English, the official title is a New English Translation of the Septuagint, at 11 .5, Daniel 11 .5, he translates this as the king of Egypt shall grow strong.

And yet in the original text, that is not what Daniel said. Daniel said the king of the south shall grow strong. And as we can see throughout the chapter, the angel never actually equates south with Egypt and provides no indication in the text that Egypt and king of the south are equivalent.

When the angel means Egypt, he actually says Egypt. But whenever he says south, he avoids saying whether he means Egypt or other possessions of the southern kingdom, which as it turns out were many. And the significance of this from an eschatological perspective is seen in the fact that the holdings of the Ptolemies, once the Diadochi had been reduced to four, actually extended well beyond Egypt's borders.

To this point, we have been just for convenience referring to the Ptolemies as being in Egypt to the south, but they actually owned much more than just what was contained within the borders of traditionally been considered Egypt's borders.

Roger Bagnell, in his book, The Administration of Ptolemaic Possessions Outside of Egypt, reminds us that before Seleucus has ever invaded Lysimachus' possessions in Asia Minor in 281 BC, Ptolemy's kingdom included not only Kolsyria, Cyprus, and Palestine, but also significant portions of Asia Minor.

He writes, to students of antiquity, indeed to the literate public, the name of the Ptolemies immediately suggests Egypt, which they ruled for nearly three centuries from the death of Alexander the Great to that of Cleopatra VII in 30 BC.

The association is not unjustified, for Egypt was in fact the first dynastic possession to be acquired. But Ptolemy had no sooner acquired Egypt in the division of Babylon in June of 323 than he began looking outside of Egypt.

At his death in 283 BC, he left to his son a collection of possessions including Cyrenaica, Cyprus, Phoenicia, Palestine, Kolsyria, and, this is the key phrase here, and various parts of Asia Minor. As we'll see momentarily, we can now add the Bay of Pamphylia on the southern coast of Asia Minor to Ptolemy's possessions.

This is absolutely critical for us, because where we're heading is showing that the boundary between north and south was not the Mediterranean Sea, but in fact was the Taurus Mountains themselves. Because, as we'll show, the Ptolemies, at the time of the division of Alexander's empire, when it was divided four ways, Lysimachus took Asia Minor north of the Taurus Mountains, and Ptolemy took Asia Minor south of the Taurus Mountains.

Now, if our listeners will just create a map, a mental image in their mind, of a map of Asia Minor, just think of it as a rectangle. Currently, Turkey, if we just look at that rectangle of land that reaches out from Asia and almost touches Europe, that rectangle of land is called Asia Minor.

It's what the Romans called Anatolia, what we call Turkey today. But along the southern coast of Asia Minor, there is a mountain range, and it is an imposing mountain range that runs along the entire southern coast, and then as it gets close to Syria, starts turning northward.

That mountain range that runs along the southern coast of Asia Minor actually is the boundary between north and south, because what we find as we examine the historical evidence, is that the Ptolemies actually possessed the entire southern coast of Asia Minor when Alexander's empire was divided four ways.

This matters to us because, as we've demonstrated in our discussion on the king of the north, that the Seleucids are only called kings of the north while they possess the northern territory, and then when they're not in possession of the northern territory, they're not called king of the north.

Later on in the chapter, we get to verse 40, where the king of north comes back, and it can't be one of the Seleucids, because the Seleucids have long since been kicked out of the northern kingdom. What we should be looking for instead is who possessed Asia Minor and Thrace at that time, and that is who is the king of the north for that part of the prophecy.