HOME | DD

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 second monster is a "lopsided" bear with three ribs in its mouth, which is meant to represent the Medes, so I figure I should use this as a jumping off point to discuss this period in the history of Judaism.

The Medes were an Iranian people who are often overlooked in the course of ancient history, situated as they were between the larger and more prominent empires of Babylon and Iran. The Median state was no less crucial to the politics of the Mesopotamian world starting from the 7th century BCE onwards. It was an alliance between the Medes of Cyaxares and the Babylonians of Nabopolassar which finally managed to overthrow the tyrannical grip the Assyrian Empire held over the region, sacking their capital, Nineveh, in 612 BCE. While the Babylonians were primarily responsible for taking on the Assyrian juggernaut proper, Cyaxares was more preoccupied with bringing the Scythian raiders employed by the Assyrians into check. After bringing down Mesopotamia's biggest bully, the winners emerged as good friends who secured their joint rulership over the Mediterranean world with an exchange of marriages.

The Median state never held the former kingdom of Judah within its borders. Generally speaking, the southwestern side of the region went to Babylon while the Medes expanded into the northeast. Still, Biblical sources decry the Medes as an equally corrupt partner in crime to their Babylonian overlords. Without the Medes, the political groundwork for the Siege of Jerusalem in 587 BCE and the following Exile of her people would not be possible. Ironically though, the Medes would also serve as the backbone for the saving grace of the Jewish people: the rise of Cyrus. Cyrus was of course the grandson of Astyages, the son of Cyaxares, and his rebellion against his grandfather would culminate in his usurpation of all Median lands under the Achaemenid dynasty by 550 BCE. This is likely why the Book of Daniel assigns such a strange visual of a "lopsided" bear to represent the Medes. They were powerful in their own right, but a much greater power "rose up" as it were from within their own Eastern frontier.

Strangely, there is a king named as "Darius the Mede" in the Book of Daniel who was supposedly ruler of Babylon when Cyrus marched in to conquer the city in 539 BCE. This Median Darius has zero archaeological context and even in the book is kind of awkwardly jammed in between the reigns of the historical Belshazzar and Cyrus. He's only brought up in the Book of Daniel, and no one seems to know what his deal is. The most logical theory I've seen is that he's just the author's OC do not steal inserted into the narrative to make the prophet Jeremiah's prediction that the Medes would usurp the throne of Babylon align with actual history. The insurmountable and unpredictable flow of time has this annoying habit of throwing egg on the faces of people who claim they can see the future. From the standpoint of literary analysis and Occam's razor, that makes the most sense to me, but this is by far not the only theory.

Design notes, this is probably the weirdest out of all the monsters in Daniel's visions. Okay, not from a biological standpoint, the fourth beast is certainly the most egregious acid trip, but just from trying to figure out what the actual hell a "lopsided" bear is supposed to be. The specific verse in Daniel 7 words it as a bear who was "raised up on one side", which some have depicted to mean the thing just has one leg held up, while others have taken it to mean some kind of malformity like in the shoulder or something. I don't know, I tried to find the middle ground between these two, but bears are hard enough to draw as is. No one seems to agree what it means to have "three ribs in its mouth" either. Some have tried to spin this as it having literal ribs in place of its teeth, and while I like that idea in theory, it turned out to be too wonky to actually draw in a way that looked good on paper. So, instead I went the boring route and just had the thing chomping on a big ol Fred Flintstone special order. For the bear itself, I decided to take inspiration from the grolar bear, a hybrid between a polar bear and a grizzly. They aren't very common in nature, and they have unique fur colors and texture, so I thought it fit well for a mythical monster bear. Of course, I also looked through way too many reference images of polar bears with their faces just turned the reddest shade of red after going all in on a seal carcass. It's a striking visual but man, I do not have the stomach for that. I prefer to have as few reminders that my food was once alive as possible, thank you very much.

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 second monster is a "lopsided" bear with three ribs in its mouth, which is meant to represent the Medes, so I figure I should use this as a jumping off point to discuss this period in the history of Judaism.

The Medes were an Iranian people who are often overlooked in the course of ancient history, situated as they were between the larger and more prominent empires of Babylon and Iran. The Median state was no less crucial to the politics of the Mesopotamian world starting from the 7th century BCE onwards. It was an alliance between the Medes of Cyaxares and the Babylonians of Nabopolassar which finally managed to overthrow the tyrannical grip the Assyrian Empire held over the region, sacking their capital, Nineveh, in 612 BCE. While the Babylonians were primarily responsible for taking on the Assyrian juggernaut proper, Cyaxares was more preoccupied with bringing the Scythian raiders employed by the Assyrians into check. After bringing down Mesopotamia's biggest bully, the winners emerged as good friends who secured their joint rulership over the Mediterranean world with an exchange of marriages.

The Median state never held the former kingdom of Judah within its borders. Generally speaking, the southwestern side of the region went to Babylon while the Medes expanded into the northeast. Still, Biblical sources decry the Medes as an equally corrupt partner in crime to their Babylonian overlords. Without the Medes, the political groundwork for the Siege of Jerusalem in 587 BCE and the following Exile of her people would not be possible. Ironically though, the Medes would also serve as the backbone for the saving grace of the Jewish people: the rise of Cyrus. Cyrus was of course the grandson of Astyages, the son of Cyaxares, and his rebellion against his grandfather would culminate in his usurpation of all Median lands under the Achaemenid dynasty by 550 BCE. This is likely why the Book of Daniel assigns such a strange visual of a "lopsided" bear to represent the Medes. They were powerful in their own right, but a much greater power "rose up" as it were from within their own Eastern frontier.

Strangely, there is a king named as "Darius the Mede" in the Book of Daniel who was supposedly ruler of Babylon when Cyrus marched in to conquer the city in 539 BCE. This Median Darius has zero archaeological context and even in the book is kind of awkwardly jammed in between the reigns of the historical Belshazzar and Cyrus. He's only brought up in the Book of Daniel, and no one seems to know what his deal is. The most logical theory I've seen is that he's just the author's OC do not steal inserted into the narrative to make the prophet Jeremiah's prediction that the Medes would usurp the throne of Babylon align with actual history. The insurmountable and unpredictable flow of time has this annoying habit of throwing egg on the faces of people who claim they can see the future. From the standpoint of literary analysis and Occam's razor, that makes the most sense to me, but this is by far not the only theory.

Design notes, this is probably the weirdest out of all the monsters in Daniel's visions. Okay, not from a biological standpoint, the fourth beast is certainly the most egregious acid trip, but just from trying to figure out what the actual hell a "lopsided" bear is supposed to be. The specific verse in Daniel 7 words it as a bear who was "raised up on one side", which some have depicted to mean the thing just has one leg held up, while others have taken it to mean some kind of malformity like in the shoulder or something. I don't know, I tried to find the middle ground between these two, but bears are hard enough to draw as is. No one seems to agree what it means to have "three ribs in its mouth" either. Some have tried to spin this as it having literal ribs in place of its teeth, and while I like that idea in theory, it turned out to be too wonky to actually draw in a way that looked good on paper. So, instead I went the boring route and just had the thing chomping on a big ol Fred Flintstone special order. For the bear itself, I decided to take inspiration from the grolar bear, a hybrid between a polar bear and a grizzly. They aren't very common in nature, and they have unique fur colors and texture, so I thought it fit well for a mythical monster bear. Of course, I also looked through way too many reference images of polar bears with their faces just turned the reddest shade of red after going all in on a seal carcass. It's a striking visual but man, I do not have the stomach for that. I prefer to have as few reminders that my food was once alive as possible, thank you very much.