Scripture Daily

Context No. 15 of 4322 · Daniel (Greek)

Context · Reflection

Daniel (Greek) 5:18-24: in context

18“To you, king, the Most High God gave Nebuchadnezzar your father the kingdom, and greatness, and glory, and majesty. 19Because of the greatness that he gave him, all the peoples, nations, and languages trembled and feared before him. He killed whom he wanted to, and he kept alive whom he wanted to. He raised up whom he wanted to, and he put down whom he wanted to. 20But when his heart was lifted up, and his spirit was hardened so that he dealt proudly, he was deposed from his kingly throne, and they took his glory from him. 21He was driven from the sons of men and his heart was made like the animals’, and his dwelling was with the wild donkeys. He was fed with grass like oxen, and his body was wet with the dew of the sky, until he knew that the Most High God rules in the kingdom of men, and that he sets up over it whomever he will. 22“You, his son, Belshazzar, have not humbled your heart, though you knew all this, 23but have lifted up yourself against the Lord of heaven; and they have brought the vessels of his house before you, and you and your lords, your wives, and your concubines, have drunk wine from them. You have praised the gods of silver, gold, bronze, iron, wood, and stone, which don’t see, hear, or know; and you have not glorified the God in whose hand is your breath and whose are all your ways. 24Then the part of the hand was sent from before him, and this writing was inscribed.

The book of Daniel is set among the Jewish exiles in Babylon. This is the scene that gave us the phrase the writing on the wall: the feast of King Belshazzar. During a drunken banquet the king sends for the sacred vessels his predecessors had looted from the temple in Jerusalem, so his guests can drink wine from them. A hand appears and writes on the wall, and no one can read it. Daniel is brought in, and this passage is the speech he gives before he reads the words.

He starts with a warning from memory. Nebuchadnezzar, the great king before Belshazzar, had grown so proud that God broke him, drove him out to live like an animal and eat grass, until he learned that the Most High rules over human kingdoms. Then Daniel turns on the king in front of him. You knew all this, he says, and still you exalted yourself, drank from the holy vessels, and praised gods of gold and stone that cannot see or hear. That is why the hand was sent.

For a long time Belshazzar was taken for a legend, since the classical histories end Babylon with a king named Nabonidus and know no Belshazzar. Then the cuneiform tablets were read. Belshazzar was Nabonidus's son, left to rule Babylon as co-regent while his father spent years in Arabia, and he was in the city the night it fell to Cyrus in 539 BC. Daniel calls Nebuchadnezzar his father in the old sense of a royal forebear. The vessels he raised were the same temple gold carried off a lifetime before. What have I picked up and put to a common use, knowing it was never mine to spend?

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