falling from nowhere might be Cyrus, God’s means of putting Babylon down. His empire will indeed last for way longer than the Babylonian Empire, but it will be just another human empire, and Daniel’s talk of a regime that lasts forever and never gives way to another suggests that the vision has in mind something more radical. “The time of those kings” will turn out to cover more than the Babylonians; it covers the Persians, the Greeks, and the Romans, and the Turks and the British and the Americans.