Daniel was one of the greatest prophets of the Israelite people. About 597 BC, together with other noble inhabitants of Jerusalem, he was taken to Babylon by King Nebuchadnezzar who conquered Judea and enjoyed considerable authority here as an interpreter of the secret meanings of various events and dreams. Here, in Babylon, the Lord revealed to Daniel some of the secrets associated with His forthcoming coming into the world.
"He saw the Father," St. Cyril of Alexandria interprets this passage from the book of the prophet Daniel, "who appeared as if in old age, covered with gray hair and shining with clothes like snow." And like the son of man is, of course, the Son of God, our Lord Jesus Christ. “When the Only Begotten appeared in an image similar to us, then the Father also opened the books, stopped judging those guilty of sin, and left, finally, courageous people to be included in the census, enrolled in heavenly faces and kept in the memory of God.”
The image of a river of fire or a lake of fire (as in the book of Revelation of John the Theologian) is often used by biblical writers to denote a place of torment where unrepentant sinners go. Another version of the interpretation of this image is offered by the professor of the St. Petersburg Theological Academy Alexander Pavlovich Lopukhin: fire is a symbol of the holiness of God Himself (hence the fiery throne, for example), and the river of fire is God's actions aimed at sanctifying everything He has created.
Obviously, the prophet Daniel speaks in this prophecy about the Last Judgment (hence the mention of the books in which the testimonies of the participants in the court session were recorded) and about the Divine authority that the Son receives from the Father as being equal to Him in everything.
However, those who have read these lines of Holy Scripture have the right to ask: why, then, in the Orthodox tradition, there is a ban on the image of God the Father? Why does the Church not bless the painting of the icons of the "New Testament Trinity", when God the Father is depicted as an old man with snow-white hair and a beard, God the Son as a young man or adult man, and God the Holy Spirit as a white dove? After all, it is said: "The Ancient of Days sat down …"
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How to explain it
First, not all the holy fathers unanimously interpreted this image as an indication of God the Father. The Monk Ephraim the Syrian, for example, believed that Daniel was portraying the Son of God here, and “Ancient of days” says, “making this mean His eternal birth from the Father”.
Second, strictly speaking, the prophet Daniel does not say that he saw an old man. He calls the Son of God “as it were the Son of man,” that is, at least outwardly similar to man; Obviously, he mentions this precisely because he cannot compare the Ancient of Days with a man. The prophet does not specify exactly what the Father looked like, but only points to the whiteness of His clothes (which can be considered an image of holiness) and says that His hair was like a “pure wave” (an indication of eternity). These are symbols rather than an accurate description of the appearance. St. John Chrysostom says: “Do not understand here … anything bodily and do not think that the infinite God is embraced by the throne. Who exists before all ages? How can He be old? How could the Infinite and the Incorporeal have clothes? How was He clothed in human clothing and the fire did not consume it?.. How did the hair not burn in the fire?
And, thirdly, the words of the Apostle John do not lose their relevance: No one has ever seen God; The only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, He has revealed (John 1:18). The vision of God in human form always refers us to the Son of God incarnate, recalls Archpriest Gennady Yegorov, vice-rector for academic work at the Orthodox St. Tikhon University of Humanities, it is not for nothing that Christ says: He who has seen Me has seen the Father (John 14: 9).
Why this prophecy matters
Here, for the first time in the Bible, the image of the Son of man appears, again it is clearly said about the future incarnation of God. In addition, this is one of the first attempts to express the idea that God is more than a single Person, that in God we meet with several Persons. Subsequently, this thought will be cast in the coined formulation of the most important dogma of the Christian Church: "God is one in Three Persons: Father, Son and Holy Spirit, He is the Trinity, consubstantial and indivisible."
Where else can you find images from the prophecy?
We find very similar images in the Revelation of the Holy Apostle John the Theologian - the book that closes the New Testament (and the entire Bible as a whole). For example, the author of the book of Revelation describes the Lord Jesus Christ as similar to the Son of Man, clothed in a podir and girded with a golden girdle around the feathers: His head and hair are white, like a white wave, like snow; and His eyes are like a flame of fire; and His feet are like the Chalcolibans, as red-hot in a furnace, and His voice is like the sound of many waters (Rev. 1: 13-15). There are in these two books, created with a difference of many hundreds of years, and many other similarities, which can be explained by the similarity of their content: both of them speak about the last destinies of the world.
Author: TSUKANOV Igor
The editors would like to thank the Associate Professor of the Department of Biblical Studies of the Orthodox St. Tikhon University for the Humanities, Candidate of Theology Mikhail Anatolyevich Skobelev for help in preparing the material.
