Broken. — The shortness of the king’s reign is implied; the moment that he has arisen he will come to nothing. As in Daniel 8:8, the great horn was broken, so here the kingdom is broken and dismembered. This has been explained to mean the sudden collapse of the Greek empire after the death of Alexander.
Not to his posterity. — The kingdom disappears without the members of the king’s family reaping any benefit from it. It is “plucked up for others besides these” — i.e., to the exclusion of his lawful heirs — and strangers shall possess the fragments of his empire. This is explained of the partition of Alexander’s empire among his generals, and of the murder of his two sons, Hercules and Alexander, but the language is too indefinite to make any such identification certain. The revelation directs our attention to a self-willed king, whose large empire is to come to a sudden and unexpected end; the ruins of it are not to benefit his posterity, but apparently two strangers, who are designated king of the north and king of the south respectively.