In a vision the prophet Daniel saw four beasts rising out of the sea: a Liom, a Bear, a Leopard with four heads, and a Fourth Beast that was more terrible than all the other beasts. These four beasts represent a succession of kingdoms that will hold dominion on earth. Each animal represents a different nation. The Leopard represents Greece (Javan) and has four heads because out of Javan shall come forth four Javanic kingdoms. Revelation informs us that the seventh kingdom, which is represented by the Fourth Beast, will fall and then be restored. This restoration is signified by the mortal wound which is then healed.
| HEAD | BEAST | KINGDOM | NATION | STATUE |
| 1 | Lion | Babylon | CHESED | gold (head) |
| 2 | Bear | Medo-Persian | MADAI, PARAS | silver (upper body) |
| 3 | Leopard | Macedonia | JAVAN | bronze (thigh and upper legs) |
| 4 | Syria | |||
| 5 | Egypt | |||
| 6 | Pergamum, Rome, Ottoman | |||
| 7 | Fourth Beast | USSR (Beast "that was") | MAGOG, TUBAL | iron (lower legs) |
| 7 (Healed) | USSR (restored) | Iron and clay (feet) |
This calls for a mind with wisdom: the seven heads are seven mountains on which the woman is seated; they are also seven kings, five of whom have fallen, one is, the other has not yet come, and when he comes he must remain only a little while. As for the beast that was and is not, it is an eighth but it one of the seven….. (Rev. 17:9-11)
The heads (Rev. 17:10) refers to kingdoms or empires, not individual kings. Many commentators misinterpret the seveh heads as a succession of Roman emperors. The Beast of Revelation does however represent both the eighth kingdom and a man, the Son of Perdition (2 Thess. 2:3-12).
The interchangeability of kings for kingdoms is also made explicit in Daniel:
As for the fourth beast, there shall be a fouth kingdom on earth. (Dan. 7:23)
The Chaldeans were a Semitic people, descendants of Chesed, son of Nahor, Abraham's brother (Gen. 22:22).
King Nebuchadnezzar dreamed of the metallic image of a Statue of a man. The gold head represented the kingdom of Nebuchadnezzar, the Babylonian Empire. The lower parts of the body represented successive empires.
Not only does the statue represent various kingdoms, but it actually represents the Antichrist as well, for it symbolizes the same things as the Beast of Revelation. The Statue can also be seen to represent Satan, as the seven heads of the Beast represent the seven heads of the great Red Dragon.
After this Daniel dreamed of four beasts rising from the sea: a Lion, a Bear, a Leopard, and a fearsome Fourth Beast with iron teeth and Ten Horns.
The Leopard has four heads, the other beasts have only one head. The seventh head, must therefore belong to the Fourth Beast These seven heads are represented by the seven heads of the Beast (Rev. 13:1).
We can infer from the previous vision of the Statue that the first beast, the Lion, represents the Babylonian Empire.
Like the Beast of Revelation, Daniel’s Fourth Beast has ten horns.
The third vision was of a Ram (with two horns) being trampled on by a He-goat. The interpreting angel tells us that the large horn from which spring out four more is the King of Greece, and that the Ram with two horns represents the kings of Media and Persia. From this vision we can infer that the Bear of the previous vision was therefore the Medo-Persian Empire, and that the Leopard represents the four subsequent Javanic (Greek) empires.
The two horns of the Ram indicate two kingdoms, but is represented by only one of the heads of the Beast because the Medo-Persian Empire was essentially a united kingdom.
Further confirmation that the He-goat (Greece) represents the same nation as the Leopard is found in the repetition of the number four in the description of both the Leopard and the He-goat. As the leopard of the earlier vision has four heads and four wings, so the four horns which take the place of the broken horn reach to the four winds of heaven. The four wings of the Leopard represent the four winds of heaven:
the great horn was broken, and in its place there came up four prominent horns toward the four winds of heaven. (Dan. 8:8)
The great horn is Alexander the Great. After defeating Darius at the battle of Gaugamela in 331 BC, Alexander went on to capture the Persian capitals of Babylon, Susa, and Persepolis. His rule over this vast empire only lasted around ten years (332-323 BC) as he died very young, having conquered most of the known world. His heirs were murdered shortly after his death.
In a vision, the prophet Daniel sees Alexander the Great represented as a great horn between the eyes of a He-goat. This horn is broken and in its place four horns arise which represent the four Hellenic kingdoms that will divide up Alexander's vast empire between them. By the end of the Wars of the Successors (323-281 BC), the main Hellenistic powers were Macedonia, the Ptolemaic kingdom, and the Seleucid kingdom. All three kingdoms were eventually defeated by Rome, which inherited the fourth Javanic kingdom, the kingdom of Pergamum.
The four heads of the Leopard (Dan. ch. 7) equate to the four horns of the He-Goat (Dan. ch. 8).
Out of one of them came another horn, a little one, which grew exceedingly great towards the south, towards the east, and towards the beautiful land. (Dan. 8:9)
The four horns of the He-goat, which replace of the great horn of Alexander the Great, come up toward the four winds of heaven (Dan. 8:8). These winds correspond to the four wings on the back of the Leopard. Wings and wind are often associated together in the Bible.
The Little Horn of Daniel chapter 8 signifies Rome and should not be mistaken for the Little Horn of Daniel chapter 7 which represents the Beast (the USSR).
The Attalid dynasty of Pergamum is one of the four Javanic horns that arise in place of the horn that represent Alexander the Great. By inheriting this kingdom, Rome becomes the sixth head of the Beast.
The Attalid dynasty was a Hellenistic dynasty that ruled the city of Pergamon in Asia Minor after the death of Lysimachus, a general of Alexander the Great. Pergamum emerged as an autonomous city-state in 262 BC after King Eumenes I defeated the Seleucid king Antiochus 1 near Sardis in western Anatolia. At its height, Pergamum embraced most of Asia Minor. The last Attalid king, Attalus III, died without issue and bequeathed the kingdom to the Roman Republic in 133 BC. Rome defeated Eumenes III, a pretender to the throne, in 129 BC and the former kingdom of Pergamon was made the Roman provice of Asia.
they are also seven kings, five of whom have fallen, one is… (Rev 17:10)
The interpreting angel tells John that one of the heads is and that five have fallen. (Rev. 17: 10). This can only mean the Roman Empire, the dominant empire at the time of the prophecy.
The identification of Rome as the sixth head rules out any possibility that Rome is the Fourth Kingdom. It also proves beyond any doubt that Rome must be reckoned as one of the four horns of the He-Goat (or head of the Leopard).
The Ottoman Empire was a continuation of the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire and is thus represented by the sixth head.
The Ottoman Empire must belong to the sixth kingdom, for Revelation informs the reader that the Roman Empire is the kingdom that is (Rev. 17:10). If the Ottoman Empire was represented by the seventh head, then the Ottoman Empire would have to be identified as the Fourth Kingdom and the Beast, for all four kingdoms are represented by the seven heads of the Beast. The Ottoman Empire is not associated with Ten Kingdoms (the Ten Horns). The Ottoman Empire endured for many centuries and did not remain for only a little while (Rev. 17:10).
After the fall of Constantinople in 1453 AD, Mehmed II declared himself Kayser-i Rum, Caesar of Rome. The claim was recognized by the Orthodox Patriarch of Constantinople, but not by the Roman Catholic Western Europe. Gennadios (Georgios Scholarios), a staunch enemy of the West, had been enthroned Patriarch of Constantinople with all the ceremonial attributes of Byzantium by Mehmed himself acting as Roman Emperor and in turn Gennadios recognized Mehmed as successor to the throne.
The title Caesar of Rome fell into disuse after the death of Mehmed II, but the imperial bodies created by Mehmed II lived on for centuries to come.
The claim of Mehmed rested with the concept that Constantinople was the seat of the Roman Empire, after the transfer of its capital to Constantinople in 330 AD and the fall of the Western Roman Empire.
Christians and Muslims (many of whom themselves were converts) had worked togther to spread the Ottoman banner initially westward into the Balkans and then later east to the heartlands of Islam.
Three of the main associates of Osman (Othman) were Christians. Centuries after the founding of the Ottoman polity, the importance of the descendants of these associates was still recognized. According to Heath W. Lowry in his book The Nature of the Early Ottoman State, they were as close to hereditary nobility as the Ottomans produced. The Balkans were left in the hands of the descendants of these other founding families of the state, for they were the real conquerors of the Balkans. Lowry notes that it was as if there was an agreement between the great ruling families that Anatolia was to be ruled by the descendants of Osman and the Balkans by the heirs of Evrenos, Mihal, and Turahan.
The Ottoman court spoke Greek even a century after its foundation. There was no polygamy. Members of the former ruling elites were subsumed into the Ottoman apparatus. In the fourteenth century, the Ottoman elite were a hybrid admixture formed from Anatolian Muslims and local Bithynian and later Balkan Christians. Later, in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, Christian peasant children who had been raised as Ottomans came to monopolize the Grand Vezirate and other high-ranking state offices.
Administratively, the Ottomans were lineal descendants of Byzantium. The land-measurement., taxes, laws, the type of contract that gave a knight land in exchange for fighting, were all a continuity of Byzantine administrative practices under an Islamic guise.
A change of religion on the part of the ruling elite should not necessarily be equated with a major fault line.
Intermarriage between the Turks and the Greeks was carried on to such an extent that historians refer to the Ottoman Empire as a Greek-Turkish condominium. Sultan Orhan I, for example, had married a Byzantine princess.
The American historian Speros Vryonis wrote that the Ottoman state was centred on a Byzantine-Balkan base with a veneer of the Turkish language and the Islamic religion. The religion and language had changed, but the rulers of this new empire were still essentially Javanic. This was due to the Ottoman policy of sultans selecting wives from their subjects.
The mothers of the sultans were often of Byzantine Greek origin. These Byzantine brides are one of the main references for the view of some historians that the Ottoman Empire was basically the Byzantine Empire itself, gone through a religious revolution. Around half of these Valide Sultans (queen mothers) were born Christians, though most probably converted to Islam. Most concubines in the Ottoman Empire were technically members of the slave class because the Koran forbids the enslavement of fellow Muslims. These concubines were from Christian or Jewish families in Greece or the Caucasus.
Mehmed the Conqueror had a blood lineage to the Byzantine Imperial family; his predecessor, Sultan Orhan I had married a Byzantine princess, and Mehmed may have claimed descent from John Tzelepes Komnenos.
Only five of the thirty-six Ottoman sultans had Turkish mothers. Consequently the Turkish blood in these Ottoman sultans was diluted. They mostly had their genetic roots in Europe and the Caucasus. The mother of the third sultan, Murad I, was Greek. The mother of the fourth, Bayezid I, was also Greek, making him only a quarter Turkish (and even that assumes that the Turkish forebears of Osman (Othman), had not intermarried with the local Anatolian population). After all these generations of sultans with mothers from Greece, Poland, Venice, Russia, France and beyond, the Turkic genetic roots had been so diluted that they barely existed.
The Ottoman Empire arose out of Anatolia, a region of Javan. The Turks had no base in Central Asia as their native land had been overrun by the Mongols.
The seventh kingdom is to remain only a little while (Rev. 17:10). The Roman/Ottoman Empire lasted for two thousand years. Clearly, the Roman Empire/Ottoman Empire is not the Fourth Kingdom, the kingdom represented by the seventh head.