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Daniel 11:2
And now will I shew thee the truth. Behold, there shall stand up yet three kings in Persia; and the fourth shall be far richer than they all: and by his strength through his riches he shall stir up all against the realm of Grecia. (Daniel 11:2)
Grecia.
 Heb. Yawan, transliterated “Javan” in Gen. 10:2 (see comments there). The Greeks, or Ionians, were descendants of Javan. See on Dan. 2:39.
Stir up all.
This passage may be translated in two different ways. It has usually been taken, as in the KJV, to mean that Xerxes would stir up the nations of the world against Greece. That this occurred is a well-known fact of history. By the time of Xerxes, the Greek peninsula remained the only important area in the eastern Mediterranean not under Persian domination. In 490 B.C., Darius the Great, predecessor of Xerxes, while attempting to subdue the Greeks, had been stopped at Marathon. With the accession of Xerxes, new plans on a lavish scale were laid for the conquest of Greece. Herodotus (vii. 61-80) enumerates over 40 nations that furnished troops for Xerxes’ army. Included in the vast army were soldiers from such widely separated lands as India, Ethiopia, Arabia, and Armenia. Even the Carthaginians seem to have been induced to join in the assault by attacking the Greek colony of Syracuse in Sicily.
By 480 B.C., the Greeks had the vast Persian Empire in arms against them. The Greek city-states, so often at war with one another, rallied to save their freedom. At first they suffered a series of setbacks. They were defeated at Thermopylae, and Athens was taken and partially burned by the Persians. Then the tide turned. The Greek navy, under Themistocles, found itself bottled up by superior Persian squadrons in the Bay of Salamis, on the coast of Attica not far from Athens. Soon after battle was joined it became evident that the Persian ships were in too tight formation for effective maneuvering. Under persistent Greek onslaughts many were sunk, and only a fraction of the navy escaped. With this Greek victory the Persian sea forces were eliminated from the struggle for Greece. The following year, 479 B.C., the Greeks decisively defeated the troops of Persia at Plataea and drove them forever from Greek soil.
 The reading of this text as it appears in the KJV strikingly fits the fact that Xerxes did “stir up all against the realm of Grecia.” But it is possible to translate the somewhat obscure Hebrew of this passage differently. The problem is whether the Heb. ’eth, here translated “against,” is to be understood as a preposition meaning “against,” or as a sign of the direct object of the verb. It is a fact that with certain other verbs denoting strife and warfare ’eth is sometimes so used (see Gen. 14:2). But it is also a fact that the verb here translated “stir up” occurs 12 other times in the OT followed by ’eth, in every one of which passages the context clearly indicates that ’eth is to be taken as the sign of the direct object. If ’eth is so taken here, the passage reads: “He shall rouse all the realm of Greece.”
 If this latter translation of the passage be preferred, the following interpretation is reasonable: From the long-range viewpoint of world history, the war between Persia and the Greeks constitutes one of the great historical epochs. The subsequent history of Europe, and of the world, might well have been much different had the decision at Salamis and Plataea been otherwise. Western civilization, then confined almost entirely to its homeland of Greece, succeeded in saving itself from being engulfed by Oriental despotism. The Greek states came to feel a sense of unity they had not previously known. The victory at Salamis proved to Athens the importance of sea power, and soon the city established itself as the head of a maritime empire. Viewed in this light, the last sentence of Dan. 11:2 forms an appropriate setting for ch. 11:3.
Far richer.
 Xerxes is to be identified with the Ahasuerus of the book of Esther (see Vol. III, p. 459; see also on Esther 1:1). Of him it is recorded that he was particularly proud of “the riches of his glorious kingdom” (see Esther 1:4, 6, 7). Herodotus, who wrote at length of Xerxes, leaves a vivid, detailed account of his military might (vii. 20, 21, 40, 41, 61-80).
The fourth.
Commentators generally agree that the context points to Xerxes as “the fourth” king, but differ as to the enumeration of the various kings referred to in this verse. Some hold that “the fourth” king, thus designated, was actually the last of the three who were yet to “stand up.” They reckon Cyrus as the first of the four, and omit the False Smerdis, because he was not of the legitimate line and held the throne but a few months. Others omit Cyrus as the first of the four and include the False Smerdis as one of the three that were to follow him. Either way, Xerxes is “the fourth.” However, the second of the two views seems to represent more nearly the natural sense of the text.
Three kings in Persia.
 Inasmuch as this vision was given to Daniel in the third year of Cyrus (ch. 10:1), the reference is doubtless to the three kings who followed Cyrus on the throne of Persia. These were: Cambyses (530-522 B.C.), the False Smerdis (Gaumata, whose Babylonian name was Bardiya; see Vol. III, pp. 348, 349), a usurper (522 B.C.), Darius I (522-486 B.C.).
The truth.
 The substance of the fourth great revelation in Daniel begins with this verse. All that precedes, from chs. 10:1 to 11:1, is background and introduction.