I came to these chapters again this week, reading through Daniel, and stopped at the same place I always stop. The question came before the verses did: how am I supposed to read this?
Not what does it mean. How do I read it. That is a different question and I have been asking it a long time.
The Commonwealth Games are on, and Australians have been doing what Australians do in a pool. You watch a race, and you know how to watch it. Eight lanes, everyone visible, and at the end the touchpad decides it.
It is very easy to read Daniel like that. Four readings in four lanes, and somewhere ahead of us a wall where the times go up. Except the numbers never resolve, and the lights never come on, and the people leaning over the rail have been arguing about who is ahead for two thousand years.
The water is genuinely deep. That is not the problem. The pull to work it out is not a low instinct — it is the instinct of someone who wants to know, and wanting to know is the right want.
The trouble is that most of us are not swimming. We are in the seats with a favourite.
I know how that happens, because it happened to me.
I came to faith among people who had an explanation. The chapters opened; the days counted out; the kings had names and the names were in the newspapers. It was not a dry thing. It excited me. I was young and I had been given a key that turned in every lock, and I could not understand why anyone would decline it.
What unsettled me, in the end, was not that other Christians read it differently. It was what our reading did between us and them. There were people I could not sit with. Conversations I could not have without wanting to win them. We believed the same thing about the resurrection and could not talk about the days.
It took me years to see what was wrong, and when I saw it, it was not a matter of chronology. A chapter about knowing God had become a chapter about knowing better.
Which is where the second half of the verse gets you out.
They that understand among the people shall instruct many: yet they shall fall.
The exploit is the instructing. Not the solving. The wise in Daniel 11 are not the ones who worked it out — they are the ones who kept teaching, and who paid for it.
I have known men like that. They all had views about these chapters. None of them held a view more tightly than they held a person.