| Daniel 7:7, The Ten Horns Daniel 7:7 After this I saw in the night visions, and behold a fourth beast, dreadful and terrible, and strong exceedingly; and it had great iron teeth: it devoured and brake in pieces, and stamped the residue with the feet of it: and it was diverse from all the beasts that were before it; and it had ten horns. Daniel 7:24 And the ten horns out of this kingdom are ten kings that shall arise: and another shall rise after them; and he shall be diverse from the first, and he shall subdue three kings. On the generic level a horn in the Bible may stand for strength or power - either personal, political or religious. A horn may also represent honor on one hand (1 Samuel 2:1; Ps 112:9), or sinful pride on the other (Psalm 75:5). Here in these texts the horns are clearly defined as political powers that arise out of the 4th beast or kingdom. From the earliest times Christians have associated these ten horns with the ten toes of iron and clay in Daniel 2. Hippolytus, who lived 160-236 AD, speaking of both the toes and horns write: “The golden head of the image and the lioness denoted the Babylonians; the shoulders and arms of silver, and the bear, represented the Persians and Medes; the belly and thighs of brass, and the leopard, meant the Greeks, who held the sovereignty from Alexander’s time; the legs of iron, and the beast dreadful and terrible, expressed the Romans, who hold the sovereignty at present; the toes of the feet which were part of clay and part of iron, and the ten horns, were emblems of the kingdoms that are yet to rise;" These early Christians were very well aware of where they stood in prophetic history. They understood from the prophecies of Daniel that they were then living under the rule of the iron kingdom of Daniel 2 which was also the iron beast of Daniel 7. And they understood that in due time the iron empire of Roman would become weakened by the “clay�?spoken of in Daniel 2 and crumble and fall apart into ten kingdoms, the horns of Daniel 7. And as mentioned in a previous post, these early Christians were so well aware of their place in prophecy that they were able to recognize this dividing of Rome as it was under way for what it was. In the late 4th and early 5th centuries, a number of Christian writers recognized that the clay was already being mixed with the iron and that the empire was losing its iron strength. Theodoret (c 386-457), bishop of Cyrrhus asserted that Rome’s iron strength was already weakened by the clay. Likewise, Sulpicius Severus, of Aquitaine, declared that the clay was already being mingled with the iron in his day. “This, too,�?he wrote, “has been fulfilled.�?Likewise Jerome (c 340-420) taught that the progressive partitioning of the Roman Empire into fragments as something already “most manifestly acknowledged�?/FONT> in his day, and goes on to name various barbarian tribes as the dividers of Rome. In the year 376 a large population of Visigoths (one of the barbarian tribes) received official permission to cross the River Danube into the territory of the Roman Empire. A contemporary historian, Ammianus Marcellinus quoting Virgil, wrote: “They poured across the stream day and night, without ceasing, embarking in troops on board ships and rafts, and in canoes made of the hollow trunks of trees�?“The man who should wish to ascertain their number might as well �?attempt to count the waves in the African Sea, or the grains of sand tossed about the the zephyrs.�?Ammianus Marcellinus, History. And the Visigoths were but one of over a score of barbarian tribes, some large, some small, that found their way into the empire over a course of some 125 years. And by 476, exactly a hundred years after the Visigoths first received official permission to cross over into Roman territory the carving up of the Roman empire was in complete. And when all was said and done and the dust had settled, ten of those tribes had succeeded in carving up the empire and dividing it up among themselves. These ten initial divisions are the roots of what would in time become the modern nations of Europe that we know today. Rome obviously had immigration problems. And these immigrants changed Rome at a fundamental level. The clay mixed with the iron and the kingdom could no longer hold together. Daniel 2:41 "Whereas you saw the feet and toes, partly of potter's clay and partly of iron, the kingdom shall be divided; yet the strength of the iron shall be in it, just as you saw the iron mixed with ceramic clay. 42 "And as the toes of the feet were partly of iron and partly of clay, so the kingdom shall be partly strong and partly fragile. 43 "As you saw iron mixed with ceramic clay, they will mingle with the seed of men; but they will not adhere to one another, just as iron does not mix with clay. From this initial division into ten parts the resulting fragments were sometimes more, sometimes less than ten, (the iron was mingled with the clay) but rarely stable for long. Of this William Newton writes: "And yet if, as the result of these alliances, or of other causes, that number is sometimes disturbed, it need not surprise us. It is, indeed, just what the prophecy seems to call for. The iron was 'mixed with the clay.' For a season, in the image, you might not distinguish between them. But they would not remain so. 'They shall not cleave one to another.' The nature of the substances forbid them to do so in the one case; and the word of prophecy in the other. Yet there was to be the attempt to mingle ... " The barbarian immigrants into Rome succeeded in carving up the empire into ten parts. These were the: -
Lombards -
Alemanni -
Anglo-Saxons -
Ostrogoths -
Burgundians -
Franks -
Suevi�? -
Vandals -
Visigoths -
Huruli Of these original ten tribes who divided the empire among themselves, seven still exist today. Those tribal divisions are the roots European nations, and even after over 1500 years of mingling and mixing it is still in many cases possible to trace European national origins to these tribes. -
The Lombards have become the Italians -
The Alemanni are the Germans -
The Anglo-Saxons are the English -
The Franks are the French -
The Suevi are the Portuguese -
The Visigoths are the Spanish -
The Burgundians are the Swiss As for the other three, the Ostrogoths, the Vandals, and the Heruli, their horns have, just as the prophecy specified, been uprooted from the pages of history. These are the three horns that were uprooted by the little horn on its rise to power. The first to go were the Heruli in 493 AD. The last were the Ostrogoths in 552 AD. A fragmented, broken kingdom. Partly strong, partly broken - too weak to hold together, yet strong enough to resist all attempts to reunite them. Such has been the history of Europe from the time this division took place to this present day. next:
The 11th Horn | 
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