On through the centuries, travellers hurried across the deserts of Syria and Iraq little knowing that, only a few yards off the beaten track the cities of Mesopotamia had once loomed over a green, fertile landscape now buried under blank, enigmatic mounds of earth. To the uninformed eye the skeletons of glittering palaces and temples would have been barely detectable in the glare of the punishing sun. French archaeologist Andre Parrot, however, was not such an oblivious passerby. Tramping through these wind-scoured wastes in the 1920s, Parrot heard, as he put it, the 'overtones' of humanity's earliest achievements, 'an orchestration of mighty names: Hammurabi, Nebuchadnezzar,' that evoked for him not only such giants of ancient history but also whole scenes out of the Bible. On a scorching day in January 1934, on a mound called Tell Hariri in Syria, a dozen miles from the Iraqi border, he gazed down at the small white statue he cradled in his hands and saw in it affirmation that all the travail had been worthwhile.

The prophecy presented in chapters 11 and 12 of the book of Daniel is indeed grand and covers 2,500 years of human history. It reveals the rise and fall of earthly political powers in relation to God's people to the end of the world. This prophetic revelation teaches us the power, the glory, and the love of our omniscient and omnipotent God, who has determined the outcome of the cosmic conflict between good and evil. However, there has not yet been a standardized opinion regarding the interpretation of this prophecy within the Seventh-day Adventist organization. Instead, there have been many objections brought forward in regard to this interpretation as a complicated, hard-to-solve issue.