Image Details
By permission of the British Library (ADD 11695, Folio 240)
Daniel envisions “one like a son of man” given “an everlasting dominion” by God (Daniel 7:13–14)—in this illumination from a 12th-century C.E. edition of a commentary on the Apocalypse by the 8th-century Spanish monk Beatus of Liebana. The Book of Daniel (mid-second century B.C.E.) is one of a number of apocalyptic Jewish texts from the Hellenistic period in which semidivine figures appear alongside Yahweh. Later, in early Christianity, Jesus was to be identified as the Son of Man. The existence of such angelic or quasi-divine beings asks us to reflect on what is meant by the term “monotheism.”