It waxed great

With reference to Daniel 8:9-12—This use of the sun, moon, and stars as representative of persons constituting a domestic circle, and differing from each other in social position, came afterwards to symbolize gradations of powers in the same circle, when it had become sufficiently enlarged to enclose a nation of twelve tribes. Hence, the Spirit in addressing the Zion of the Holy One of Israel now in the days of her mourning, saith in Isa. lx. 20, "Thy Sun shall no more go down; neither shall thy moon withdraw herself." Here the sun and moon represent the civil and ecclesiastical authority in Zion before they were abolished. And speaking of her destruction by the Chaldeans, the Spirit in Jer. xv. 9, says, "Her sun is gone down while it is yet day." Her royalty was suppressed; yet her moon and stars continued to shine under the Persian administration. But, a greater calamity was predicted in Joel ii. 10, when the earth should quake, and the heavens tremble; in other words, when "the sun and the moon should be dark, and the stars withdraw their shining." This would be a total eclipse of Israel’s Commonwealth by "the host given to the Little Horn of the Goat;" as foretold in Dan. viii. 9-12: "It waxed great to the host of heaven; and it cast down of the host and of the stars to the ground, and stamped upon them;" which in the interpretation given in verse 24, is explained to signify, "He shall destroy wonderfully, and shall prosper and practice, and shall destroy great ones (the stars) and the people of the Holy Ones" -- or the host. Powers on earth do not literally pluck the stars from their spheres and stamp upon them; but they sometimes make sad havoc among the sun, moon, and stars of a political organization. The Lord Jesus reproduced Daniel’s prophecy in his discourse on the destruction of the city that killed the prophets, in saying: "Immediately after the tribulation of those days shall the sun be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven, and the powers of the heaven (symbolized by these orbs) shall be shaken" (Matt. xxiv. 29). These were the lights in which there were to be "great signs and fearful sights," indicative of the parousia, or presence, though invisible, of the Son of Man when the Greco-Roman army should be sent by him to destroy the city of his murderers (Matt. xxii. 7). In the same style, Peter speaks of the rapidly approaching fulfilment of the prediction, when the heavens being on fire should be dissolved and should pass away with a great noise, and their elements melt with fervent heat (2 Peter 3).