The Feast Is Weighed, and the Kingdom Is Wanting

Belshazzar, Bel-shar-usur, “Bel, protect the king”, was the son of Nabonidus and ruled in Babylon while his father spent years at Teima in Arabia. Outside this book he was unknown until cuneiform texts naming him were read in the nineteenth century. He drinks “before the thousand”, on display.

“Whiles he tasted the wine” is literally under the taste of the wine, and te’em is the word for judgment and decree; the wine is giving the orders. Belshazzar was not Nebuchadnezzar’s son, but “father” in Aramaic can mean predecessor or forebear. The wives and concubines are missing from the old Greek version.

Verse 2 asked for the gold and silver vessels; this verse names only the gold. The phrase “the temple of the house of God” doubles the ownership, as if the Book of Daniel wants the reader to hear whose cups these are before anyone drinks from them.

Six materials, and the first four are the metals of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream image in 2:32–33, in the same order: gold, silver, bronze, iron. Wood and stone are added at the end. The gods being toasted are made of the same stuff as the kingdoms that will be ground to chaff.

“The same hour” is the instant, sha’ata. The “plaister” is lime plaster, and Robert Koldewey’s excavation of Babylon’s southern palace found a great throne hall with white plastered walls. “The part of the hand” is the palm or the hand up to the wrist, seen by the king alone of the guests.

“Countenance” is literally his brightness, ziw, the word for the dazzle of the image in 2:31. The “joints of his loins” loosed may be a coward’s collapse; some readers take it as a loss of bladder control. Knocking knees are the body saying what the king will not.

“Scarlet” is argewan, purple, the colour of royalty. The “chain” is a torque, a Persian-style neck ring. “Third ruler” may be exact: if Nabonidus was first and Belshazzar second, third was the highest rank Belshazzar had in his gift.

In chapter 2 the experts could not produce a dream; here they cannot even read. The script may have been unvocalized consonants, or the words so terse that reading them was no help. The problem is no longer missing information but sealed information.

The king’s face changes a second time, and the panic spreads to the guests. “Astonied” here is a word for being thrown into confusion. Three hours of banqueting have come down to a thousand lords looking at a wall.

The king’s wives are already at the table (verse 3), so “the queen” who enters is probably the queen mother, whom Herodotus might have called Nitocris; that is a guess. She alone in the room is calm enough to use the old greeting, “O king, live for ever.”

The queen insists, “the king, I say, thy father”, pressing a name that the court seems to have let slip. “Light” is the word of 2:22, “the light dwelleth with him”: she credits Daniel with the quality Daniel credited to God.

“Hard sentences” are riddles, the word for Samson’s riddle and the Queen of Sheba’s “hard questions” (1 Kings 10:1). “Dissolving of doubts” is literally loosing knots, and verse 6 used the same two words for the king’s loosened joints. The man who can untie knots is summoned for a king whose knots have come undone.

“Jewry” is the 1611 word for Judah. The king knows the facts of Daniel’s file, his people and his deportation, but does not seem to know his face. Daniel by now would be past eighty, and the question may be a statement: “You are that Daniel.”

The queen said “the spirit of the holy gods”; Belshazzar repeats her words and leaves out “holy”. What he has heard, he says, not what he has seen. It is the only time in the book that phrase is shortened.

Before the man he has summoned, the king admits the failure of the whole guild. The admission is also a claim: if Daniel fails too, no one can say it was for want of trying the proper channels first.

Belshazzar has picked up the queen’s phrase, to “dissolve doubts”, loosen knots. The offer of purple, gold and third rank is repeated exactly as he made it in verse 7, a sum that has not grown for the better candidate.

“Rewards” is nebizbah, the same rare word Nebuchadnezzar used when he offered prizes in 2:6. Daniel waves them off and then says he will read the writing “unto the king”, speaking of Belshazzar in the formal third person even while refusing him.

“O thou king” opens a sermon to a king about another king. The four gifts, kingdom, majesty, glory and honour, mirror the four Daniel listed to Nebuchadnezzar himself in 2:37. The first word of the history lesson is the Most High, and the first verb is gave.

The four “whom he would” clauses describe a power to kill and keep alive, to raise and bring down. Hannah’s song gives exactly those powers to God: “The LORD killeth, and maketh alive... he bringeth low, and lifteth up” (1 Samuel 2:6–7). Nebuchadnezzar held them on loan.

“Hardened in pride” is literally his spirit grew strong to act proudly. “Deposed” is brought down, the reverse of “lifted up” at the start of the verse. Daniel describes the episode of chapter 4 with no mention of the letter the king himself wrote about it.

One detail is new: his dwelling was with the wild asses, arodaya, the onagers of the desert. Job 39:5–8 describes that animal as the one no man can tame or drive. Daniel supplies a fact the king’s own letter did not mention.

“Humbled” is from shefal, the root of “basest” in 4:17 and “abase” in 4:37. Nebuchadnezzar was abased and learned; Belshazzar was told and did not stoop. The accusation is personal, and it uses his name: “O Belshazzar.”

Gods “which see not, nor hear, nor know” echoes Deuteronomy 4:28 and Psalm 115:5–6, where idols have eyes and ears that do nothing. Silver is now listed before gold, perhaps to suit the order of the cups. The breath in Belshazzar’s body is the one thing in the room not made of metal, wood or stone.

“Written” here is reshim, inscribed, the verb of setting down an official document. In 6:8–10 the same word is used for Darius signing the decree against prayer. A king’s signature and heaven’s inscription use one verb.

The four words are Aramaic weights: mene a mina, tekel a shekel, and parsin halves, with u meaning and. Read as nouns they sound like a merchant’s tally, a mina, a mina, a shekel and two halves, which may be why the experts could read the letters and find no meaning.

Daniel reads mene as a verb, mena, to number, and adds that God has “finished” it, shalam, which can also mean paid in full. A mina was sixty shekels; the reign is counted to its last coin.

Tekel is read as tekil, weighed. A shekel was a sixtieth of a mina, and some readers see Nebuchadnezzar as the mina and Belshazzar as the shekel, a lighter coin from the same purse; that is an interpretation. “Wanting” is chassir, underweight.

Daniel now gives the singular peres, a half-mina, and hears three things in it: peris, divided; and Paras, Persia. The empire that takes Babylon is named in the pun. Medes and Persians appear together, as they will as the two-horned ram of 8:20.

“Made a proclamation” is the verb of the herald of 3:4. The book’s last royal herald announces an office in a kingdom with hours left. Daniel accepts it without a recorded word, which after verse 17 is its own kind of comment.

The Nabonidus Chronicle dates the entry of Cyrus’s army into Babylon to October 539 BC, without a battle. Herodotus and Xenophon both say the city was feasting when it fell, and Xenophon’s Cyropaedia (7.5) has the king killed that night. Belshazzar’s title here is simply king of the Chaldeans.

In Aramaic Bibles this verse is 6:1. Darius “took” the kingdom, qabbel, received, which fits “given” in verse 28. He is known only from Daniel, and his age, sixty two, is one of the few personal details the book records about any king.