God’s Word for You

Daniel 11:11-13 The Battle of Raphia

by Pastor Timothy Smith on Saturday, January 10, 2026

11 In a rage, the king of the South will go out and fight against the king of the North, who shall muster a large army, which will nevertheless be defeated. 12 When that army is carried off, the king of the South will be filled with pride, and he will slaughter tens of thousands, yet he will not prevail. 13 For the king of the North will again raise a huge army, larger than the one before, and after some years he will advance with a great army amply supplied.

Verse 11 tells, in the briefest of words, about the Battle of Raphia. This battle ended the Fourth Syrian War. Antiochus III had massed a huge army, nearly 70,000 men including 6,000 mounted cavalry and elephants. After nearly a week of skirmishing south of the city of Gaza, the Egyptians with 75,000 soldiers (but fewer cavalry and elephants) lined up for battle ten or twelve miles southwest of the River Besor (near the village of Raphia or Rapha). A charge of elephants (always used first, placed “in a single line in front of the whole army”), then a counterchange of horsemen, and then the usual mayhem ended with the Seleucids under Antiochus losing ten thousand men, ten times the losses of the Egyptians. The plural “tens of thousands” in verse 13 can include all casualties, not just the ten thousand dead.

One of the reasons the Egyptians won is that for the first time, the king (Ptolemy) used native Egyptians as spearmen for his phalanx units. The Greek phalanx was perfected by Philip, Alexander the Great’s father, a little more than a century before. This gave Ptolemy two large phalanx divisions bristling with spears, and while this proved an important part of his victory, it introduced Greek tactics and weapons to the native Egyptians (not just the Greek soldiers under the king), and this would even the sides in a rebellion by the Egyptians against the Ptolemies that was soon to erupt.

Verse 12 says that the king of the South (the Egyptian Ptolemy IV) “will not prevail.” Historically, we know that Ptolemy did not follow up his victory with any advance into Syria, and so the war ended with a fizzle. There was no definite advantage gained by Egypt, and the supremacy of the Ptolemies was at an end, altough at the time it’s possible that nobody knew this. Nobody, that is, except for Antiochus III, who soon showed the reason that he is remembered as “the Great.” He quickly turned the setback into a strategic withdrawal, and seeing that he was not being pursued, he raised another army, bigger than the last one. The one material advantage that he had gained from his loss at Raphia was that in the end, almost all of the surviving war elephants were in his possession. He collected weapons, armor, and other material as well, so that it is clear what the Angel meant when he said that Antiochus would have “a great army amply supplied” (verse 13).

There was an incident in the Temple in Jerusalem after this. Not part of the prophecy but a part of the history of God’s people, Ptolemy IV brought and offered sacrifices in Jerusalem at the temple when the High Priest in Israel was Simon II. Ptolemy decided that he wanted to enter into the holy place, when “suddenly he was seized by a stroke or a supernatural feeling of awe or horror” (Kauffeld, The Four Centuries Before Christ p. 23).

All through this chapter we see the providence of God as he cares for his people. Wars were going to pass back and forth through Judea, especially to the west along “the Way of the Sea” (Isaiah 9:1 ) and the fortresses that had once belonged to the Philistines (Obadiah 1:19), now occupied by Greeks from the north and Greeks from the south (Joel 3:6). All of the terrible six Syrian Wars and the conflicts that would follow were going to erupt and ignite the countryside of the rolling Judean foothills before the coming of Christ. The people were warned beforehand—each generation knew it would see one or two of these wars, and then there would be a time of peace, a time for recovery, rebuilding and restoring whatever was lost. Tyrants come and take what they want, but the people remain after the tyrants are gone. “Though war break out against me, even then will I be confident” (Psalm 27:3); “Rescue me, O Lord, from evil men; protect me from men of violence who devise evil plans in their hearts and stir up war every day” (Psalm 140:1-2).

God watches over us all, man, woman, child; and each and every creature. “There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow,” and he has the good of his people in mind at all times: each and every one of his people, you, me, the people of Jerusalem when Ptolemy came where he was neither wanted nor welcome with his own goat and his own knife, not knowing or caring about the will of God or the law of the sanctuary. But God gave his people this chapter of micro-prophecies to carry them through. They could breathe a sigh of relief, saying, “This has passed, and we know we are one day, one year, one generation closer to the coming of Christ.” No wonder that the common people, the ordinary people were the ones who recognized him best when he appeared, healing them, laying hands on them, eating and drinking and laughing with them, blessing them and blessing their dear little children.

“Say to the daughter of Zion, ‘See, your Lord comes!’” (Isaiah 62:11). “His reward is with him, and his compensation is out in front of him.” Come, Lord Jesus.

In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith

 

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