Daniel 7:1: "Then he wrote down the dream. and here his account begins."
	Daniel 7:28: "...as for me, Daniel, my thoughts dismayed me greatly...."
	Daniel 8:1: "...a vision appeared to me, Daniel, following my earlier vision."
	Daniel 9:2: "I, Daniel, was reading the scriptures..."
	Daniel 10:2: "At that time I, Daniel, mourned for thee whole weeks..."
	Daniel 12:5: "I, Daniel, looked and saw two others standing..."

Jesus verified that the book was written by Daniel. In Matthew 24:15, he states "So, when you see the 'abomination of desolation,' of which the prophet Daniel spoke, standing in the holy place...then those who are in  Judea must take to the hills."

The early Christian church generally accepted the authorship of Daniel in the 6th century BCE without question. Essentially all Fundamentalist and other Evangelical Christians believe the same today.

1. Babylon (represented by the lion/eagle symbol and gold)
2. Medo-Persia (considered as a single empire; represented as the bear, and silver)
3. Greece (represented as the leopard and bronze)
4. Rome (represented as the terrible beast, and iron). Since the end of the world and resurrection of the dead in Daniel 12 has not happened yet, then it must be in our future. Most conservative Christians look upon the fourth empire as existing in two parts:

   	the first is the historical Roman Empire;
   	the second phase has not yet risen to power. It will be the Kingdom of the Antichrist. Many conservative Christians believe that the Antichrist will be a European and that the revived Roman Empire will evolve out of the European Community.

"Pre-millenialist Christians" believe that this second phase of the Roman Empire will come to an end at the second coming of Christ and the war of Armageddon. Many  conservative Christians interpret the book of Daniel and describe the end of the world as happening in our immediate future, Many assumed 2000 or 2001 CE. - perhaps about 2000 CE. This book is one of the most important sections of the Hebrew Scriptures because of the prophecies based on 4 earthly kingdoms.

1. Babylon (represented by the lion/eagle symbol and gold). They attacked the Southern Kingdom in the 580's BCE.
   
   
2. The Median empire under (bear and silver). Daniel 5-31 records how "Darius the Mede" conquered Babylon and killed king Belshazzar. This belief probably arose out of many predictions in Isaiah and Jeremiah that Babylon would fall to the Medes. In reality, the Median and Babylonian kingdoms coexisted until the Medians were conquered about 550 BCE and the Babylonians were conquered in 539, both by the Persians. Darius was not a Median king. Apparently the later Persian king "Darius the Great" was confused by the author(s) with Astyages, the last Median king.
   
   
3. The Persian empire (symbolized by a leopard and bronze).
   
   
4. The Greek empire (terrible beast and iron). They conquered Judeah in 332 BCE. Daniel 2:41 and 11:3 described it as a kingdom ruled by a warrior king that is divided into 4 sections after his death. None of the 4 sections will be ruled by  his descendents. This fits precisely with the structure of the Macedonian-Greek empire of Alexander the Great. After his death, it was divided among four of his generals, none of whom were his sons. Daniel 2:43 refers to the mixing of families by intermarriage, and mentions that these arrangements would not be stable. Again, this fits well with the attempts that the Seleucid (the King of the North in Daniel 11:7) and Ptolemaic (the King of the South in Daniel 11:5) dynasties to achieve peace and stability through intermarriage. The attempts were unsuccessful.

At the time of the writing of the book of Daniel, circa 164 BCE, the Greek empire occupied what is now Palestine. Since the book was written after the rise of the final empire, the author had the advantage of hindsight. The book is mainly a history of past events, not a prophecy of the future. The author wrote the book almost a century before the Roman Empire invaded what is now Palestine. Since he had no knowledge or expectation of this invasion, it was not mentioned in the book.

In the final chapter of Daniel, the author describes the "end of history" - a resurrection of the dead, judgment and transfer the resurrected dead to heaven or hell. According to Daniel 12:12, these events would happen during approximately three years following the "abomination of desolation" (the erection of a statue of Zeus in the Jewish temple in 167 BCE). Some Bible scholars have interpreted this period of time as occupying many millennia. But this is clearly not a valid interpretation, because Daniel 12:12 refers to people who "wait and live to see the completion of the interval."