God’s Word for You
Daniel 8:5 The ram
by Pastor Timothy Smith on Sunday, November 30, 2025
5 While I was thinking about this, I saw a goat coming from the west, crossing the whole earth without touching the ground. The goat had a very large horn between his eyes.
Later in the chapter, Gabriel the angel will explain that this goat is the king of Greece; it is a symbol for Alexander the Great. It came out of the west (literally “toward the sunset”), which describes the coming of Alexander exactly. Very little was known about Greece or its people to the Old Testament believers. The people of Javan were descended from Noah’s son Japheth (Genesis 10:2,4) and became the “maritime peoples” spreading out around the sea to the west of Israel’s coastline. When Isaiah talks about the far-flung islands, he still calls some of them by the name “Javan” (the “Greece” of Isaiah 66:19).
After a war lost to history apart from legend and few artifacts, the “Greeks” who made war on Troy in the time of Israel’s judges were from a collection of cities that were independent of one another; they were “city-states.” Achaeans, Danaans, Argives, Hellenes, Spartans, Athenians; there were six thousand islands in the Aegean Sea, some just rocks and navigational hazards, but many hundreds with fresh water became their own realms, fighting, colonizing, and (by far the greatest of the Greek pastimes) pursuing philosophy. In the sixth century BC, the city-states of Greece were so weakened from fighting one another that they were subjugated by an ambitious and capable commander from the north, Philip of Macedon. He conquered Greece in its golden age. A philosopher named Socrates had passed on his ideals to students including Plato (who wrote down almost everything we know about Socrates). One of Plato’s students was Aristotle, and King Philip made Aristotle the tutor of his son Alexander.
Virtually everything that the Bible says about Alexander is contained in the prophecies of this chapter of Daniel. His movements stunned the nations. No wonder the vision shows the goat “crossing the whole earth without touching the ground.” He came out of the west, but he traveled here and there at will.
A curious point in this verse is the description of the goat in Hebrew. It is a tsaphir-ha-izzim, “a he-goat of a she-goat.” Together the words imply a son-and-mother relationship. It is true that Alexander’s mother, Olympias, was an Epirote princess. He was also a true son of Macedonia and of the Hellenes or Greeks. As we have pointed out, he was instructed in the philosophy of the Greeks by the great Aristotle. There are so many possible explanations for this curious word-pair that the head spins. But since the term is not explained later on and doesn’t seem to affect our understanding of the passage, we can assume that it isn’t essential for us to understand; it may simply have been an idiom for describing a goat, perhaps because it looked more like its dame than its sire, or that the color of the goat Daniel saw was dark, for according to Aeneas (and with no intention to offend anyone), “the Grecian dames are sunburnt.”
This verse, like many in Daniel, shows the way that God governs and rules over his creation. Remember that after God created the world, he rested (Genesis 2:2). This rest has continued ever after; it was not just a single day off for God. But it doesn’t mean that God stopped working, only that he had finished creation. Jesus says, “My Father is always at work to this very day, and I, too, am working” (John 5:17). But the Father withdrew from the work that he had finished, the same way that a carpenter does not keep working at the chair he just finished making, or a painter does not keep painting the same ceiling day after day after day. A poet does not keep working on the poem he has published. Instead, the Father let the work of procreating fall to the people, plants, and animals he had made. He let the work of providing fall to the earth, the weather, the seasons, and the way that mankind tills the soil and brings out a harvest year upon year. He let the work of guarding and protecting and governing fall mostly into the hands of parents and other authorities. But he still intervenes when he wills it and we know from the miracles performed by Moses and the prophets and especially by our Lord Jesus and his Apostles that he may choose to work supernaturally through many signs in wonders.
To this day, he chooses to create faith in the hearts of his people through the miracle of the sacrament of holy Baptism, and through a miracle he offers the body and blood of Jesus our Lord in and with and (in a philosophical manner of speaking) under the bread and the wine, but truly and really present, since we participate in the blood of Christ, and in the body of Christ (1 Corinthians 10:16). They are for us to consume, his sacrifice, once for all, on the cross, for our forgiveness. And these miracles continue to this day. We are witnesses of them; we are participants, and celebrants. We receive what he offers, and what he offers is everlasting life. Praise his holy name forever.
In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith
Pastor Smith serves St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in New Ulm, Minnesota. To receive God’s Word for You via e-mail, please visit the St. Paul’s Lutheran Church website.