How does Revelation 17:11 connect with Daniel's visions of kingdoms?

Revelation 17:11: “The beast that was, and is not, is itself an eighth king, which belongs to the seven and is going to destruction.”

First, picture John’s description: seven past-and-present world powers, then an “eighth” that somehow springs from the seventh yet is distinct, finally doomed. Daniel’s visions give the backbone that lets us identify those kingdoms and see how the Antichrist’s empire fits in.

Daniel’s big sweep of empires

- Daniel 2 – Nebuchadnezzar’s statue

• Gold head: Babylon

• Silver chest/arms: Medo-Persia

• Bronze belly/thighs: Greece

• Iron legs: Rome

• Iron-clay feet: a future, brittle revival of Rome, smashed by Christ’s kingdom (the stone).

- Daniel 7 – Four beasts from the sea

• Lion with eagle’s wings: Babylon

• Bear raised on one side: Medo-Persia

• Leopard with four wings and four heads: Greece

• Terrifying iron-toothed beast with ten horns: Rome—plus ten-horned end-time phase. Out of those horns rises a “little horn” (Antichrist) that uproots three (Daniel 7:8, 24-25).

- Daniel 8 – Ram (Medo-Persia) and goat (Greece) zoom in on the transition from Persia to Greece, then point to a “fierce-looking king” foreshadowing the final tyrant.

How the counts line up with Revelation 17

John says, “Five have fallen, one is, the other has not yet come” (17:10). From John’s first-century vantage point:

1. Egypt (oppressed Israel before the Exodus)

2. Assyria (conquered the Northern Kingdom)

3. Babylon

4. Medo-Persia

5. Greece ‑---- five fallen

6. Rome ‑---- “one is” (John’s day)

7. Future revived Roman-type confederation with ten kings (compare Daniel 2:41-43; 7:24; Revelation 17:12)

Revelation 17:11 then adds: the beast (Antichrist) “is itself an eighth king, which belongs to the seven.”

What that means in light of Daniel

- He emerges from the seventh kingdom’s ten-king coalition—matching Daniel’s “little horn” coming from the ten horns.

- Because the seventh kingdom is a re-constituted form of the old Roman iron, the beast can be “one of the seven” yet counted separately once he seizes absolute control.

- Daniel 7:23-25 shows that this little horn will “devour the whole earth,” persecute the saints for “a time, times, and half a time” (three and a half years), precisely the same 42-month reign given in Revelation 13:5.

- Daniel 2:44 promises that in those days “the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that will never be destroyed,” echoed in Revelation 19, where Christ returns and the beast goes “to destruction” (17:11; 19:20).

Putting it together conversationally

John sees the final world empire the same way Daniel did: a revived Roman-style power, stitched together from many nations, symbolized by ten horns/toes. From within it, a singular figure rises—first among equals, then over them all. That figure is the beast/Antichrist, the eighth king. He belongs to (springs from) the seventh kingdom but gets his own number because he personifies rebellion on a scale never seen before. Both prophets conclude the same way: his reign is brief, brutal, and broken by the visible return of Messiah, who establishes the everlasting kingdom.