Daniel 5
Nebuchadnezzar’s long reign—exceeding 43 years—came to an end when he died in B. C. 561 or 562. The capture of Babylon mentioned in this chapter occurred about 24 years after the great king’s death. Belshazzar was a grandson of his.
It is thought that the “great feast” had been an annual event; on this occasion it took place when the powerful army of the Medes and Persians was assembled outside the walls of the city, preparing to break in under cover of night upon the inhabitants who thought the defenses perfect. God had pronounced judgment upon Babylon before ever the later empire was founded (Isaiah chapters 13, 21,16, and 47) and again during Nebuchadnezzar’s reign (Jeremiah 25), but its end and the king’s death came as God’s swift answer to a daring insult, offered to Him by Belshazzar at the banquet here told of.
Nebuchadnezzar had been permitted, because of Judah’s deeply sinful state, to take the vessels of the temple at Jerusalem to Babylon, and to place them in the house of his god (chapter 1:2). There they evidently remained, undisturbed for nearly seventy years, until his grandson ordered them brought out for use it the feast he had made. Out of the vessels the king, his princes, his wives, and his concubines drank wine and praised the gods of gold, silver, brass, iron, wood and stone.
This daring act, this crowning sin against God, brought an answer the same hour, written on the wall of the banquet hall before the king’s eyes. Terror seized him as he gazed; the joints of his loins were loosed, and his knees smote one against the other; he cried aloud to bring in the wise men of Babylon, offering a great reward for the reading of the writing and its interpretation. The words were Chaldean, and plain to all there who could read, but the wise men were baffled. Was it not because the natural mind does not receive the things of the Spirit of God? (1 Cor. 2:1414But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned. (1 Corinthians 2:14)).
The queen, really the queen-mother, now entered the scene of the feast, and spoke of the forgotten Daniel who, when sent for, at once told Belshazzar what in fact the young ruler knew concerning his ancestor (verses 18-21.) In fewer words the aged prophet told the king what his course had been; no offer of mercy, nor counsel for repentance as had been given Nebuchadnezzar (chapter 4:27) was included; the judgment of God, long withheld was about to be executed.
The words Belshazzar saw were, in English, “Numbered, numbered, weighed, divided.” Peres and upharsin have the same meaning; the former is the singular, the latter the plural form of the word.
ML 06/14/1936