Of Beasts and Men
November 2, 2025 • All Saints’ Day • Year C
Daniel 7:1-3,15-18 • Ephesians 1:11-23 • Luke 6:20-31
When I spent a long summer working in Sequoia National Forest, I was lucky enough to see several black bears, mostly from a safe distance. I also glimpsed the tail of a mountain lion disappearing into the trees at night. The tail was long and had a black tip on the end—the sure sign of a mountain lion, not a bobcat.
For me, there was something both awe-inspiring and unsettling about the presence of a natural predator, so indifferent to human beings. That indifference can be comforting. These creatures mostly want to ignore or avoid us. But that indifference is also scary. In the face of their capacity to harm us, there’s no amount of reason or persuasion or rule of law that could protect us.
In the vision described in today’s first reading, Daniel saw four beasts. In Daniel’s vision, the natural indifference of predatory beasts signifies the brutality of some rulers toward fellow humans. The first beast was a lion with eagle’s wings, standing on its hind legs. The next beast was a bear, lying on its side and chewing some ribs. A voice said to the bear, “Arise, consume much flesh.” The third beast was a leopard with four heads and four wings on its back.
The last beast had great iron teeth. Daniel saw it devour and mangle and then trample on what it destroyed. Some scholars think this beast might resemble an elephant. According to Daniel, it had ten horns on its head. Daniel saw one little horn sprout from the beast’s head, uprooting three other horns in the process. The little horn had eyes and a mouth. From that mouth, Daniel tells us, came “the noise of . . . arrogant words.”
For the early readers of the book of Daniel in the second century BC, the winged lion rearing up on its hind legs probably signified the empire of Babylon. The Babylonians had invaded and deported the inhabitants of Israel four centuries earlier. The bear chewing the flesh off of bones signified the empire of Media. The prophet Jeremiah thought that the Lord used the Median kings to take vengeance on the Babylonians for destroying the Jerusalem Temple (Jer 51:11). The leopard probably signified the Persian Empire. Its four heads correspond to the four Persian kings mentioned by name in the Bible: Cyrus, Ahasuerus, Artaxerxes, and Darius.
The last, most vicious beast signified the empire of Greece. The Greeks used elephants in war (see 1 Macc 1:17). More specifically, this iron-toothed beast signified the Seleucid dynasty, founded by a general of Alexander the Great. The ten horns were ten Seleucid kings. The small horn probably signified Antiochus IV Eiphanes, who persecuted Jews. He tried to outlaw Israelite feasts and the sabbath, and in 167 BC, he profaned the Temple that the Israelites had rebuilt.
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In my maybe tedious recap of ancient history and listing of hard-to-pronounce names, I wonder how many minds wandered in curiosity: what might these beasts signify for us? A ravenous, flesh-eating bear. Iron teeth. A small horn popping up and spouting off.
There’s some biblical precedent for mapping these symbols onto one’s contemporary world. The book of Revelation, written over 200 years after Daniel, rolls all these beasts into one hybrid that signifies the Roman Empire—the superpower at the time. The superbeast of the Roman Empire had a leopard’s shape, a bear’s feet, a lion’s mouth, and ten horns (Rev 13:1-2).
This week, I let myself read just one modern interpretation of Daniel’s four beasts. The interpretation I found conjectured that the four-winged leopard signified the geopolitical alliance of Germany—because Germans developed the leopard tank—and France and the United States. One set of wings came from the rooster symbolizing France, and the other from the eagle symbolizing the US.
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So much for that rabbit hole. Daniel’s vision doesn’t end with these beasts. He sees an ancient-looking being on a fiery throne strip the first three beasts of their power and destroy the fourth beast completely. And then, Daniel tells us, “I saw one like a human being / coming with the clouds of heaven” (Dan 7.13).
This “one like a human being,” or “one in human form” (depending on the translation), comes to replace the lion, the bear, the leopard, and the elephantine creature and its tiny, arrogant horn. This human-like figure has been interpreted as the archangel Michael; or Judas Maccabeus, whose revolt against the Seleucids and rededication of the Temple is celebrated at Hanukkah. Early Christians saw this “one in human form” as Jesus himself.
But, if the symbol of the “one like a human being” is like the symbolic beasts in Daniel’s vision, it can’t be reduced to any one individual, whether angel or human or divine. In Daniel’s vision, this “one like a human being” seems to signify more widely what our reading calls “the holy ones of the Most High.” When dominion is taken from the beasts, these “holy ones” will “receive the kingdom and possess the kingdom for ever—for ever and ever.”
We read this passage from Daniel today, because today is the Feast of All Saints. While some readers have thought the “holy ones” mentioned by Daniel are angels in the heavenly court, or Jews persecuted by Antiochus IV, some Christian readers see these “holy ones” as the saints.
This Feast of All Saints celebrates the extraordinary people in every age who confronted the many powers that would corrupt and destroy the creatures of God. The earliest saints were martyrs, mostly killed by the Roman imperial authorities. A popular theory about saints is that they took the place of Roman gods and goddesses. Pagan Romans had Bacchus, Mars, Ceres, and Minerva; early Christians had Peter, Paul, Perpetua, and Martin. But the historian Peter Brown argues that devotion to the tombs and even body parts of dead human beings transformed religious culture more radically than that. Devotion to the saints deeply humanized what he calls our “intimate hopes for protection and justice in a changing world.”*
After seeing four beasts rise in power and lose their dominion, Daniel saw “one like a human being.” He saw dominion transferred to “the holy ones.” Maybe we glimpse the dominion of this “one like a human being” in the declaration of the self-evident truth that all humans are created equal. Maybe we glimpse the “one like a human being” in the UN declaration, in 1948, of “the inherent dignity and . . . the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family.” Maybe the “one like a human being” comes to us as we take on the baptismal promise to “strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being.”
But Christian faith isn’t primarily about correctly interpreting symbols. It’s about living in our time and place as fully as we can, inspired and encouraged and intimately helped by the victories of those whose battles are won.
*See Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (Chicago: 1982), 21-22.
~The Rev. Dr. Lora Walsh