Panel essay · Daniel · November 9–15, 2026 · Six outlooks · the Parry method
Written by an AI persona applying Donald W. Parry's six-outlooks framework. Professor Parry did not write, review, or endorse this essay, and no words are attributed to him that are not cited to a published source.
I saw in the night visions, and, behold, one like the Son of man came with the clouds of heaven, and came to the Ancient of days, and they brought him near before him. And there was given him dominion, and glory, and a kingdom, that all people, nations, and languages, should serve him: his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom that which shall not be destroyed. (Daniel 7:13–14)
Donald W. Parry, a professor of Hebrew Bible at BYU, wrote a short chapter called "Ways to Read Isaiah: Six Outlooks" in his book Search Diligently the Words of Isaiah. His point is that a prophetic text can be read through more than one lens, and that reading it well usually takes several of them. He names six: historical context (the near view), prophecy (the distant view), dual or multiple fulfillment, likening the text to ourselves, reading for personal reasons, and reading for doctrine. He wrote the framework for Isaiah. This essay applies it to two verses of Daniel. The application is mine, not his.
Daniel 7:13–14 suits the method because every one of the six lenses has real work to do there. The verses have a datable historical setting that critical scholarship takes seriously. Jesus took them up as prophecy about himself. Latter-day Saint scripture adds a further fulfillment. And they carry one of the weightiest doctrinal titles in the Bible.
Parry's advice is to begin with the near view: what the passage meant in its own time. For Daniel that starts with an honest question about when its own time was.
The book sets chapter 7 "in the first year of Belshazzar king of Babylon" (7:1), in the sixth century BC. Most critical scholars place the book's final form much later, during the persecution of the Jews under the Seleucid king Antiochus IV Epiphanes, roughly 167–164 BC. The Encyclopaedia Britannica's survey of biblical literature gives the standard argument. The visions track the history of the Hellenistic kingdoms accurately up to the desecration of the temple in 167 BC. Then they become inaccurate about how Antiochus's reign ends. On that reading, the visions are written up to the author's present and become genuine prediction only at that point. Traditional Jewish, Christian, and Latter-day Saint readers have kept the sixth-century setting.
On the critical reading, the fourth beast, "diverse from all the others" (7:19), is the Greek kingdom of Alexander and his successors. The "little horn" with "a mouth speaking great things" (7:8) is Antiochus. When the angel says the horn "shall think to change times and laws" and "shall wear out the saints of the most High" (7:25), the critical reader thinks of 1 Maccabees 1:41–50. There the king outlaws the sabbath, the festivals, and the temple sacrifices. Pious Jews in the 160s BC, hearing chapter 7, would have recognized their own crisis. The vision told them the persecution had a time limit, "a time and times and the dividing of time" (7:25). The heavenly court was already seated, "the judgment was set, and the books were opened" (7:10). The kingdom would go to them.
In that near view, who is the "one like the Son of man"? The Aramaic is kebar ʼenash, "one like a son of man," which in Aramaic idiom simply means "one like a human being." The contrast is deliberate. The kingdoms of the earth rise "from the sea" (7:3) as a lion, a bear, a leopard, and a beast with iron teeth. The kingdom of God arrives "with the clouds of heaven" in human form. The chapter's own interpretation gives the kingdom to "the saints of the most High" (7:18, 22, 27), so many interpreters read the figure collectively, as a symbol of faithful Israel. Others read him as an individual heavenly being. John J. Collins, in his Hermeneia commentary (1993), identifies him as the archangel Michael, Israel's heavenly patron. Daniel itself later calls Michael "the great prince which standeth for the children of thy people" (12:1). J. A. Emerton, in a 1958 article in the Journal of Theological Studies, argued that the imagery of an aged deity enthroned and a younger figure riding the clouds has roots in older Canaanite myth. That background helps explain why a cloud-rider would be a divine figure rather than a mere symbol.
So the near view already contains a puzzle the chapter never settles: inside the vision the figure looks like an individual, but the angel's explanation points to a people.
Parry's second outlook looks past the prophet's day to far-future events: the coming of Christ, the last days, the Millennium. For Daniel 7:13–14 the distant view has an unusually strong anchor, because Jesus himself used it.
"Son of man" is Jesus' most frequent way of referring to himself in the Gospels. At his trial the high priest asked whether he was "the Christ, the Son of the Blessed." Mark records the answer: "I am: and ye shall see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven" (Mark 14:61–62). The "clouds of heaven" phrase comes from Daniel 7:13, and the high priest's reaction shows he heard the claim: he "rent his clothes" and called it blasphemy (14:63–64). Jesus had claimed for himself the throne-room figure who receives an everlasting dominion. The Come, Follow Me lesson for this week builds its section on Daniel 7:13–14 around exactly this trial scene.
Jesus was not the first to read Daniel 7 this way. Before or around his time, Jewish texts were already treating the figure as an individual end-time redeemer. In the Similitudes of Enoch (1 Enoch 37–71) a "Son of Man" stands beside the "Head of Days." In 4 Ezra 13 a man rises from the sea and flies with the clouds. The distant view, in other words, is not only a later Christian reading. It was already one way Jews read the passage.
Parry's image for this outlook is a layer cake: one prophecy, several fulfillments stacked at different moments in history. Daniel 7:13–14 may be the clearest layer cake in the Old Testament, because each layer has its own text behind it.
Notice what the latter-day layer does with Collins's Michael. In critical scholarship Michael is a candidate for the "one like the Son of man." In Restoration scripture Michael is Adam, and Adam is the Ancient of Days, the one who receives the Son of man rather than the Son of man himself. The two traditions agree that Michael belongs in this throne room. They put him in different seats. A reader who keeps the layers distinct, instead of mashing them together, can see both clearly.
The layer-cake model also handles the collective-versus-individual puzzle from the near view. It need not be one or the other. In 7:14 the dominion is given to "him." In 7:27 it is given to "the people of the saints of the most High." The prophecy can be fulfilled first in a people, then in a person, then in the person sharing his kingdom with the people.
Parry draws this outlook from Nephi, who "did liken all scriptures unto us" (1 Nephi 19:23). Asking how a passage describes us is old practice. The Qumran community wrote whole commentaries, called pesharim, that read the prophets as being about their own sect and their own last days. The Habakkuk Pesher applies Habakkuk's Chaldeans, almost line by line, to the Kittim, a gentile power of the commentators' own era. Daniel stands near the source of that word. Pesher is the Aramaic word Daniel uses again and again for "interpretation," of dreams in chapters 2 and 4, of the writing on the wall in chapter 5, and of the vision itself in 7:16, where the angel "made me know the interpretation of the things."
Likening, then, is a cousin of pesher, but with a guardrail. Qumran's pesher treated the original context as largely irrelevant. Likening as Parry describes it keeps the near view and then asks what it means for us. Read that way, chapter 7 has an obvious application. We too live among beasts, systems of power that "devour" and "break in pieces" (7:7). We too can feel "worn out" by them (7:25). The passage does not promise that the beasts will leave. It promises that real dominion is not theirs to keep: "they had their dominion taken away" (7:12). The lesson's own likening of Daniel 2 is close by. D. Todd Christofferson, in "Why the Church" (October 2015), likened the latter-day Church to the stone "cut out of the mountain without hands." Daniel 2:44 says that kingdom "shall never be destroyed." Daniel 7:14 says the Son of man's kingdom "shall not be destroyed." The book itself links the two promises, so a reader is on solid ground in likening the one to the other.
This outlook is the one most easily misunderstood, so it is worth being precise. Parry ties it to an article by Elder Dallin H. Oaks, "Scripture Reading and Revelation" (Ensign, January 1995). Oaks argued that the scriptures "can be a Urim and Thummim" for the reader. Reading them can open the way to revelation "on whatever else the Lord wishes to communicate to the reader at that time." The prompting may have little to do with what the passage meant to its author. Exegesis does not produce it, and it does not need to be defended as exegesis.
This lens is therefore personal, and anything written about it can only be an example. One reader of this week's verses might be stopped by the passive clause in 7:13: "they brought him near before him." Even the Son of man is presented; someone else brings him into the presence. A reader who has been praying about whether she is welcome before God might find an answer there that no commentary would offer. Another reader might be caught instead by the end of the chapter: "my cogitations much troubled me... but I kept the matter in my heart" (7:28). He might feel permission not to resolve something yet. Neither of these is what Daniel 7 is about. Both are the kind of thing Parry's fifth outlook expects, and both should be held as personal rather than taught as the meaning of the text.
The last outlook asks what the passage teaches about God, Christ, and salvation. For Daniel 7:13–14 the answer starts with a title.
The first doctrine is the name itself. Moses 6:57 gives "the language of Adam": "Man of Holiness is his name, and the name of his Only Begotten is the Son of Man, even Jesus Christ." In Restoration teaching, then, "Son of Man" is not mainly a statement of Jesus' humanity, though it is that. It is a statement of his parentage: he is the Son of the Man of Holiness. The lesson pairs Daniel 7:13 with Moses 6:57 for this reason, under the heading "Jesus Christ is the Son of the Eternal Father." Read this way, the near-view meaning, "one like a human being," and the doctrinal meaning, "Son of the Man of Holiness," do not compete. The figure is human in form because God is, in the Restoration's understanding, the exalted Man whose Son he is.
The second doctrine is about how the kingdom is held. In 7:14 the Son of man does not seize dominion as the beasts do. It "was given him." He comes before the Father's throne and receives the kingdom there. This is the pattern of the Son throughout scripture: he does nothing of himself, and he holds authority by conferral. Joseph Smith's reading of the chapter adds a priesthood order to the scene. The keys pass upward from Adam to Christ, from the patriarch of the human family to its Redeemer, in a council (D&C 107:53–57; D&C 116).
The third doctrine is about who shares the kingdom. The kingdom given to "him" in 7:14 is given to "the saints" in 7:18 and 27. In Latter-day Saint terms, that is the doctrine of joint heirship. The lesson points readers to D&C 121:46, where the faithful are promised that their own "dominion shall be an everlasting dominion," in nearly the words of Daniel 7:14. The beasts' kingdoms are taken by force and taken back by judgment. The Son of man's kingdom is received from the Father and then shared. What makes it everlasting is the way it is held.
Whether a reader dates chapter 7 to the sixth century or the second, the doctrine is the same: the beasts' dominion is "prolonged for a season and time" (7:12), and the Son of man's is given and permanent.