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Description
As touched on in yesterday's blurb, the Book of Daniel is a work of apocalyptic literature composed during the Maccabean Revolt. While the episode with Nebuchadnezzar's dream of a giant statue is a fairly obvious metaphor for the events of the day, Daniel's own vision in Chapter 7 is much more elaborate. The narrative describes a scene of a raging ocean being disturbed by four horrendous beasts usurped by the kingdom of heaven. The metaphor seems to be the same as that of the statue, though. The four beasts represent the four consecutive kingdoms which oppressed Judah: Babylon, Media, Persia, and Greece. The fourth monster is a… thing with ten horns and an eleventh horn sprouting out with a mouth and ten eyes on it, which is meant to represent the Greeks, so I figure I should use this as a jumping off point to discuss this period in the history of Judaism.

It is vanishingly rare that a single man can turn the entire course of human history, but I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that Alexander the Great was one of those forces of nature. When Alexander died in 323 BCE, he left behind an empire which stretched all the way from the gleaming Mediterranean cliffs of his Macedonian homeland to the deepest jungles of India. Alexander was the Heir of Macedon, Pharaoh of Egypt, Shah of Iran, and King of the World, but he was no administrator. Often he just copied the practices of whoever owned the territory previously so he could not worry about it and find new lands to steamroll. He was mostly personality, and a damned powerful one at that. It was practically inevitable that when he died, and the shoes he left were as big as they were, his generals would jump to each other's throats to try to be the one that came out as the next Alexander. The geopolitics of the Mediterranean, Mesopotamian… and really the World would be permanently altered forever. This conflict was known as the Wars of the Diadochi, and sadly the details are beyond the scope of this blurb. For our purposes today, we'll focus on the Seleucid Dynasty, which emerged as the dominant power in the former territories of Persia, including the province of Judah.

Initially, the Seleucids and the Jewish people got along, as the Seleucids were too preoccupied with securing their borders to really crack down on regional politics. In this period of stability, many Jews began to assimilate into Greek culture, a process known as Hellenization. On the one hand, this was totally normal, neighboring cultures always mix and match like this. On the other hand, this was an existential crisis for the Jewish people, who worried that increased Hellenization would lead to the abandonment of their god. This struggle dominated the politics of the day, and was perhaps nowhere embodied better than within the priesthood, and this is at last where we get into the famous timeline prophesied in the Book of Daniel. By 175 BCE, during the reign of the tyrannical madman Antiochus IV, the largely traditionalist High Priest of Israel, Onias III, was deposed by his extremely Hellenist brother Jason. Jason was radical in his policies, allowing idols of foreign gods to be placed in the Temple and even giving sacrificial tribute to Heracles. Even still, this was not enough for Antiochus, so to speed up the process of converting the Jews, the king replaced Jason with the even more radical Menelaus. While Jason and Menelaus squabbled for control, Onias III was assassinated by Seleucid agents in 171 BCE, 434 years after the starting point of Jeremiah's prophesy which Daniel's is based off of. As Onias is considered the last legitimate priest from the original dynasty, this matches up to the "anointed one disappearing" as the Book of Daniel puts it.

Following this, 3 and a half years after the murder of Onias, the most "appalling abomination", as Daniel describes it, took place. Antiochus IV, returning from an embarrassing defeat in Egypt, was furious to see that Jason had tried to usurp his puppet Menelaus, and decided to take his anger out on the whole of Judah. In 167 BCE, Antiochus had the Temple of Jerusalem shut down, converted into a pagan shrine, and there he personally sacrificed a pig to Zeus. To the Jewish people, nothing could be more sacrilegious, and the fuse was ignited. The first to take up arms against the Seleucids was Mattathias, of the Hasmonean dynasty, but it would be his son, Judah, who would lend the rebellion its name. "Maccabee" is not a family name, but rather his personal nickname. It literally means "the Hammer" because hell yeah it does. The Maccabees spent the better part of three years countering Antiochus's terror with their own, and as such the Maccabees have much more of a mixed legacy than we may like. Regardless of the methods, when Antiochus died in 164 BCE, the military commanders in Judah were forced to pull out and focus on the king's succession. Judah was, for the first time in centuries, an independent kingdom, just as the author of the Book of Daniel was hoping for. Side note, this is also the context of the famous Hanukkah story where Judah Maccabee marches into Jerusalem and finds the sacred menorah unlit, with only enough oil for one night, though miraculously it stays lit for eight days while more oil is retrieved.

Though victorious, like all freshly independent nations, the new Hasmonean kings spent most of their reigns fighting off foreign invaders and civil strife. Judah Maccabee died in battle in 160 BCE, leaving his brothers and their descendants to fend off a dying Seleucid Empire. Dynastic politics, and Roman intervention, eventually led to the Hasmoneans being replaced by an up-and-coming commander named Herod in 37 BCE. You've probably heard of him from his alleged insanity and murder of babies towards the end of his life in 4 BCE. After his death, the territory was split into four bickering factions led by his sons. When the Romans saw just how pathetic the Herodian kings were at keeping order in the region, they at last abolished the monarchy in 6 CE, turning it into the Roman province of Judea. The Jewish people lost their independence once more, and they never would govern their own independent kingdom again. The earliest Christian authors went back and recontextualized the prophesy in Daniel as referring instead to the ministry of Jesus, inserting the Romans in as the final beast instead of the Seleucids and just kinda awkwardly cramming the Medes and Persians together. The imagery was so compelling to your average Jew that when it came time to write the Book of Revelation and they needed something to represent the Romans as the worst of them all, the author literally just combines all four of the beasts of Daniel into one horrid freak of nature, which I for one am dreading having to draw some day-

Design notes, this one is certainly the most abstract monster described in the Daniel 7. It's just kind of described as a hulking monstrosity with iron teeth and ten horns, each representing the ten Seleucid kings who had reigned before the Maccabean Revolt. An eleventh horn with a mouth and ten eyes then sprouts out between three of the ten horns, which collectively represents Antiochus IV. There's a lot going on here, and I had to figure out how to fit it all into one cohesive creature. A lot of modern depictions like to portray this beast as some sort of draconian dinosaur, usually a ceratopsian. Normally, I try to avoid using prehistoric animals as the base, since the original authors of these texts obviously had no clue what a dinosaur was. Indeed, most medieval depictions tend to just draw it as some sort of extremely vague thing strutting around like it owns the block. Still, the only thing that comes to mind when I try to think of a creature with that many horns is styracosaurus, so I did take a little inspiration from that. I tried to shape the horns to resemble the wiggly sun crown motif often seen in Greco-Roman art, as I thought it would be a nice nod to how it's meant to represent the Seleucids and their culture. It's that sprouting horn that really gave me the most trouble. Generally speaking, eyes are squishy and don't grow on hard parts. Unless of course you're a mollusk, so I actually took inspiration from the texture of eyes along the ridges of clams and chitons, and I quite like the effect. It's mouth was a little tricky, but ultimately I decided to form it out of what should be the nostrils, which isn't perfect, but I think it fits well into the composition of the rest of the face. The body and head themselves are some weird amalgamation of scutosaurus and dimetrodon. I don't really have any deep justification for this beyond I just think it looks pretty sick and draconic. Sometimes the rule of cool is all the excuse you need.

Description
As touched on in yesterday's blurb, the Book of Daniel is a work of apocalyptic literature composed during the Maccabean Revolt. While the episode with Nebuchadnezzar's dream of a giant statue is a fairly obvious metaphor for the events of the day, Daniel's own vision in Chapter 7 is much more elaborate. The narrative describes a scene of a raging ocean being disturbed by four horrendous beasts usurped by the kingdom of heaven. The metaphor seems to be the same as that of the statue, though. The four beasts represent the four consecutive kingdoms which oppressed Judah: Babylon, Media, Persia, and Greece. The fourth monster is a… thing with ten horns and an eleventh horn sprouting out with a mouth and ten eyes on it, which is meant to represent the Greeks, so I figure I should use this as a jumping off point to discuss this period in the history of Judaism.

It is vanishingly rare that a single man can turn the entire course of human history, but I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that Alexander the Great was one of those forces of nature. When Alexander died in 323 BCE, he left behind an empire which stretched all the way from the gleaming Mediterranean cliffs of his Macedonian homeland to the deepest jungles of India. Alexander was the Heir of Macedon, Pharaoh of Egypt, Shah of Iran, and King of the World, but he was no administrator. Often he just copied the practices of whoever owned the territory previously so he could not worry about it and find new lands to steamroll. He was mostly personality, and a damned powerful one at that. It was practically inevitable that when he died, and the shoes he left were as big as they were, his generals would jump to each other's throats to try to be the one that came out as the next Alexander. The geopolitics of the Mediterranean, Mesopotamian… and really the World would be permanently altered forever. This conflict was known as the Wars of the Diadochi, and sadly the details are beyond the scope of this blurb. For our purposes today, we'll focus on the Seleucid Dynasty, which emerged as the dominant power in the former territories of Persia, including the province of Judah.

Initially, the Seleucids and the Jewish people got along, as the Seleucids were too preoccupied with securing their borders to really crack down on regional politics. In this period of stability, many Jews began to assimilate into Greek culture, a process known as Hellenization. On the one hand, this was totally normal, neighboring cultures always mix and match like this. On the other hand, this was an existential crisis for the Jewish people, who worried that increased Hellenization would lead to the abandonment of their god. This struggle dominated the politics of the day, and was perhaps nowhere embodied better than within the priesthood, and this is at last where we get into the famous timeline prophesied in the Book of Daniel. By 175 BCE, during the reign of the tyrannical madman Antiochus IV, the largely traditionalist High Priest of Israel, Onias III, was deposed by his extremely Hellenist brother Jason. Jason was radical in his policies, allowing idols of foreign gods to be placed in the Temple and even giving sacrificial tribute to Heracles. Even still, this was not enough for Antiochus, so to speed up the process of converting the Jews, the king replaced Jason with the even more radical Menelaus. While Jason and Menelaus squabbled for control, Onias III was assassinated by Seleucid agents in 171 BCE, 434 years after the starting point of Jeremiah's prophesy which Daniel's is based off of. As Onias is considered the last legitimate priest from the original dynasty, this matches up to the "anointed one disappearing" as the Book of Daniel puts it.

Following this, 3 and a half years after the murder of Onias, the most "appalling abomination", as Daniel describes it, took place. Antiochus IV, returning from an embarrassing defeat in Egypt, was furious to see that Jason had tried to usurp his puppet Menelaus, and decided to take his anger out on the whole of Judah. In 167 BCE, Antiochus had the Temple of Jerusalem shut down, converted into a pagan shrine, and there he personally sacrificed a pig to Zeus. To the Jewish people, nothing could be more sacrilegious, and the fuse was ignited. The first to take up arms against the Seleucids was Mattathias, of the Hasmonean dynasty, but it would be his son, Judah, who would lend the rebellion its name. "Maccabee" is not a family name, but rather his personal nickname. It literally means "the Hammer" because hell yeah it does. The Maccabees spent the better part of three years countering Antiochus's terror with their own, and as such the Maccabees have much more of a mixed legacy than we may like. Regardless of the methods, when Antiochus died in 164 BCE, the military commanders in Judah were forced to pull out and focus on the king's succession. Judah was, for the first time in centuries, an independent kingdom, just as the author of the Book of Daniel was hoping for. Side note, this is also the context of the famous Hanukkah story where Judah Maccabee marches into Jerusalem and finds the sacred menorah unlit, with only enough oil for one night, though miraculously it stays lit for eight days while more oil is retrieved.

Though victorious, like all freshly independent nations, the new Hasmonean kings spent most of their reigns fighting off foreign invaders and civil strife. Judah Maccabee died in battle in 160 BCE, leaving his brothers and their descendants to fend off a dying Seleucid Empire. Dynastic politics, and Roman intervention, eventually led to the Hasmoneans being replaced by an up-and-coming commander named Herod in 37 BCE. You've probably heard of him from his alleged insanity and murder of babies towards the end of his life in 4 BCE. After his death, the territory was split into four bickering factions led by his sons. When the Romans saw just how pathetic the Herodian kings were at keeping order in the region, they at last abolished the monarchy in 6 CE, turning it into the Roman province of Judea. The Jewish people lost their independence once more, and they never would govern their own independent kingdom again. The earliest Christian authors went back and recontextualized the prophesy in Daniel as referring instead to the ministry of Jesus, inserting the Romans in as the final beast instead of the Seleucids and just kinda awkwardly cramming the Medes and Persians together. The imagery was so compelling to your average Jew that when it came time to write the Book of Revelation and they needed something to represent the Romans as the worst of them all, the author literally just combines all four of the beasts of Daniel into one horrid freak of nature, which I for one am dreading having to draw some day-

Design notes, this one is certainly the most abstract monster described in the Daniel 7. It's just kind of described as a hulking monstrosity with iron teeth and ten horns, each representing the ten Seleucid kings who had reigned before the Maccabean Revolt. An eleventh horn with a mouth and ten eyes then sprouts out between three of the ten horns, which collectively represents Antiochus IV. There's a lot going on here, and I had to figure out how to fit it all into one cohesive creature. A lot of modern depictions like to portray this beast as some sort of draconian dinosaur, usually a ceratopsian. Normally, I try to avoid using prehistoric animals as the base, since the original authors of these texts obviously had no clue what a dinosaur was. Indeed, most medieval depictions tend to just draw it as some sort of extremely vague thing strutting around like it owns the block. Still, the only thing that comes to mind when I try to think of a creature with that many horns is styracosaurus, so I did take a little inspiration from that. I tried to shape the horns to resemble the wiggly sun crown motif often seen in Greco-Roman art, as I thought it would be a nice nod to how it's meant to represent the Seleucids and their culture. It's that sprouting horn that really gave me the most trouble. Generally speaking, eyes are squishy and don't grow on hard parts. Unless of course you're a mollusk, so I actually took inspiration from the texture of eyes along the ridges of clams and chitons, and I quite like the effect. It's mouth was a little tricky, but ultimately I decided to form it out of what should be the nostrils, which isn't perfect, but I think it fits well into the composition of the rest of the face. The body and head themselves are some weird amalgamation of scutosaurus and dimetrodon. I don't really have any deep justification for this beyond I just think it looks pretty sick and draconic. Sometimes the rule of cool is all the excuse you need.