5 While I was observing, behold, a male goat ( The greek empire,it is remarkable, that the arms of Macedon, or the ensigns carried before their armies, were a goat, ever since the days of Caranus; who following a flock of goats, was directed to Edessa, a city of Macedon, and took it; and from this circumstance of the goats called it Aegeas, and the people Aegeades, which signifies "goats"; and put the goat in his arms {q}). was coming from the west over the surface of the whole earth without touching the ground; and the goat had a conspicuous horn between his eyes. 6 And he came up to the ram that had the two horns, which I had seen standing in front of the canal (6. standing before the river --Ulai. It was at the "river" Granicus that Alexander fought his first victorious battle against Darius, 334 B.C. After this battle, the Medo Persian empire lost all power (the horns shattered) . A year and ½ later 333bc, the battle of Issus occurred which threw the Persian empire to the ground, and in Octo. 331 bc at Gaugamela near Nineveh, the Greeks took contole of the Medo - Persian empire.
, and rushed at him in his mighty wrath. 7 And I saw him come beside the ram, and he was enraged at him; and he struck the ram and shattered his two horns, and the ram had no strength to withstand him. So he hurled him to the ground and trampled on him, and there was none to rescue the ram from his power. 8 Then the male goat magnified himself exceedingly. But as soon as he was mighty, the large horn was broken; and in its place there came up four conspicuous horns toward the four winds of heaven.
The ram had its day in the sun. There was a time when it could do as it wished, when no one could be rescued from his power. When the Medo-Persian kingdom had served its purpose, it was overcome by Greece, represented in Daniel’s vision by the male goat (see verse 21). This goat had only one horn rather than two. It is generally agreed that this horn represented Alexander the Great.
As 8:21 tells us, the Goat is Greece under Alexander the Great.
5-7 Verse 5 foretells coming disaster for Cyrus in the figure of an amazingly swift, one-horned goat that with one mighty charge shatters the horns of the Medo-Persian ram.
First, the goat is described as coming from the west, that is, from the region of Macedonia and Greece (as Alexander the Great did in 334 B.C., when he won the Battle of Granicus in Asia Minor).
Second, he moves so fast that his hooves barely touch the ground as he charges all the way to the eastern limit of the Persian domain ("crossing the whole earth").
Third, this irresistible invading force is to be under the leadership of one man, rather than under a coalition of nations, as the Persians had been. In vain the ram attempts to withstand the charge of the goat (v. 6), as the goat hurls himself against the ram--an implied prediction that the Macedonian-Greek forces would launch an unprovoked invasion such as took place in 334. The completeness of Alexander's victories at Granicus (334), Issus (333), and the final contest at Arbela (331) is fittingly prefigured by this crushing attack on the ram, who is unable to resist (v. 7).
Alexander's conquest of the entire Near and Middle East within three years stands unique in military history
Despite the immense numerical superiority of the Persian imperial forces and their possession of military equipment like war elephants, the tactical genius of young Alexander, with God’s allowance, won the battle.
Alexander was just a young man in his twenties with an army of about 35000 men - and he conquered the world.
This was nothing short of a miracle!!!
The goat (the bronze in the statue and the Winged Lepard (it did not touch the ground) in Daniels vision) is now the dominant world power from whose grasp none can be delivered. Like the ram before him, he magnified himself exceedingly, and with power came pride and oppression. Coming to an early demise at the pinnacle of his power, his “horn was broken” (verse 8).4
8 This verse may suggest Alexander's thrust beyond the borders of the empire he had conquered--"the goat became very great" even into Afghanistan and the Indus Valley, as he did in 327 B.C. Or else higdil ("became great") may suggest the growth in arrogance that led him to assume the pretensions to divinity that distressed his Macedonian troops, who finally mutinied against any further advances into northwest India.
In support of his pretensions to descend from Zeus-Ammon, which had been solemnly announced by the Egyptian priesthood after his liberation of Egypt from Persian tyranny, Alexander had required even his comrades-in-arms to prostrate themselves before him, in conformity with Oriental custom. In accord with his newly conceived imperial policy of granting equality to his Persian subjects along with his victorious Macedonian-Greek supporters, he went so far as to take the Persian princess Roxana as his queen and to designate his future son by her, Alexander IV, as his successor to the Greco-Persian Empire.
Yet, as v. 8 goes on to predict, "at the height of his [the goat's] power his large horn was broken off"; i.e., he died of a sudden fever brought on by dissipation (though rumor had it that he was actually poisoned by Cassander, the son of Antipater, viceroy of Macedonia) at Babylon in 323, at the age of thirty-three.
Although it took a number of years, eventually four kings rose to take control of his empire.5
Although efforts were made to hold the empire together--first by Antipater himself as regent for little Alexander IV (and for Philip III Arrhidaeus, his half-witted uncle), and then, after Antipater's death in 319, by Antigonus Monopthalmus, another highly respected general--the ambitions of such regional commanders as Ptolemy in Egypt, Seleucus in Babylonia, Lysimachus in Thrace and Asia Minor, and Cassander in Macedonia-Greece made this impossible. By 311 Seleucus asserted his claim to independent rule in Babylon, and the other three followed suit about the same time. Despite the earnest efforts of Antigonus and his brilliant son Demetrius Poliorcetes, to subdue these separatist leaders, the final conflict at Ipsus in 301 resulted in defeat and death for Antigonus and the validation of the claims of the four Generals to complete independence from all central authority.
Verse 8 goes on to say that "in its [the large horn's] place four prominent horns grew up toward the four winds of heaven." This was fulfilled when Cassander retained his hold on Macedonia and Greece; Lysimachus held Thrace and the western half of Asia Minor as far as Cappadocia and Phrygia; Ptolemy consolidated Palestine Cilicia, and Cyprus with his Egyptian-Libyan domains; and Seleucus controlled the rest of Asia all the way to the Indus Valley.
The initial division of Alexander's empire was unquestionably fourfold, as this verse and also 7:6, with its reference to the four-winged leopard, indicate.
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