Tool Beta
The Gods of the Bible
Every named divine being in Scripture, what the text calls it, and what the ancient world thought it was.
The princes of Persia and Greece
Spirit figures in Daniel who rule nations and can hold up a messenger from God for weeks.
Daniel 10:13, in every translation this tool compares.
A messenger is sent to Daniel and turns up three weeks late. He was held up, and the thing holding him up was the prince of Persia, with the prince of Greece already waiting behind it. In this chapter nations have beings set over them, and those beings push back.
A messenger is held up twenty-one days by the prince of Persia, needs Michael's help to get through, and warns that the prince of Greece comes next. The nations have beings set over them, and those beings resist. Heiser argues the princes of Daniel 10 are the real background for Paul's language of hostile cosmic authorities: the Septuagint and Theodotion both render the Hebrew sar as archon, and archon, with cognates like arche and exousia, is the vocabulary Paul uses for "the rulers of this age" (1 Corinthians 2:6,8), "the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places" (Ephesians 3:10), and "the ruler of the power of the air" (Ephesians 2:2). Scholars agree the idea in Daniel 10 goes back to Deuteronomy 32:8-9, where Elyon divided the nations among the sons of God at Babel (in the Qumran and LXX text) and kept Israel for himself. Paul's reasoning for the mission in Acts 17:26-27, that God set the nations' boundaries so they would seek him and find him, reads as a direct answer to that arrangement, with the disinherited nations to be reclaimed and not merely individuals converted.
H8269 (שַׂר, sar)
- Daniel 10:13,20-21
- Deuteronomy 32:8-9
- Acts 17:26-27
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- Clifford, "History and Myth in Daniel 10-12," BASOR
- Ronn Johnson, "The Old Testament Background for Paul's Principalities and Powers," PhD diss., DTS, 2004
- Heiser, *Unseen Realm*, 119-121, 157
