And as I was considering, behold, an he-goat came from the west on the face of the whole earth, and touched net the ground: and the goat had a notable horn between his eyes. The Septuagint, when completed from Paulus Tellensis, agrees in the main with the Massoretic, omitting only "whole" before "earth."
The Christian MS. omits the clause, "and touched the ground," but it is in Paulus Tellensis. As I was considering. "Was" is here used much as an auxiliary verb—an Aramaic usage. "Considering" really suggests "meditating on."
He-goat. The word here used does not elsewhere occur in the Hebrew Scriptures. It is really an Aramaic word, though vocalized here after the analogy of Hebrew. On the face of the whole earth. The writer had probably in his mind the negative idea expressed in the next verse; hence the word kol.
A notable horn; "a horn of sight;" a horn that no one could fail to remark upon. No symbol could express in a more graphic way the rapidity of the conquests of Alexander the Great than this of the goat that flew over the ground.
One can parallel with this the four wings of the leopard in Daniel 7:1-28. It is singular that Alexander should generally on his coins be figured as horned. Had this vision been due to a knowledge of this—which could not have escaped a Jew of the days of the Maccabees—the writer would certainly have made Alexander not a goat, but a ram.
as it is a ram's horn that is intended to be figured on the portraits of Alexander. As everybody knows, this refers to the fable that he was the son of Jupiter Ammon, the ram-horned. It is difficult to assign a reason why the goat was chosen as the symbol of the Grecian power, save that, as compared with the Persian power, the Greek was the more agile.