Daniel and Belshazzar in History

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The party was in full swing, the wine flowed freely, and everyone felt on top of the world. There was no power on earth to rival Babylon, and no gods in heaven to equal hers.

This is the setting of the famous fifth chapter of the Book of Daniel—the story of Belshazzar’s feast.

King Belshazzar, we are told, was the descendant of Nebuchadnezzar the Babylonian king, he who had conquered Jerusalem, destroyed its temple, and carried off its treasures.

Drunk with wine and power, King Belshazzar ordered the gold and silver vessels from the temple to be brought to the feast he was giving for 2,000 nobles, so that the king and his nobles, his consorts and his concubines could drink from them (Daniel 5:2). Why not show his superiority by bringing cups and dishes taken from the altars of conquered temples to use in his royal revels?

As the cups were filled, the toasts drunk, and the gods of Babylon hailed, the roisterers suddenly stopped dead in their tracks, their eyes riveted on the palace wall. A hand was writing on the whitened plaster: MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN.^a

The Biblical text tells us that “The king’s color changed, and his thoughts alarmed him; his limbs gave way and his knees knocked together.” Surely the writing must have meaning. For rulers whose lives were directed by superstition, this was an omen—and it looked menacing! The king was afraid.

He called for his wise men and diviners, and announced that whoever could explain the meaning of the strange writing on the wall would be given third place in the kingdom as his reward!

The wise men of Babylon were stumped. Daniel, the Judean exile who had interpreted the dreams and visions of King Nebuchadnezzar some years before, was called and was offered the same reward, the third place in the kingdom, if he could interpret the writing.

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Daniel did so: King Belshazzar had not humbled himself before the Lord. Instead, Belshazzar had exalted himself against the Lord and had had the vessels of the Lord’s Temple brought to the banquet to drink from, and there toasted “the gods of silver and gold, of bronze, iron, wood and stone, which do not see, or hear or know; but the God in whose hand is your breath, and whose are all your ways, you have not honored … ” (Daniel 5:23). The meaning of the strange words was clear to Daniel: “God has numbered the days of your kingdom and brought it to an end; you have been weighed in the balance and found wanting; your kingdom is divided and given to the Medes and Persians” (Daniel 5:26–28). That very night King Belshazzar was killed. (In “The Writing on the Wall,” we discuss the interpretation of omens in Babylonia and how Daniel may have interpreted Belshazzar’s writing on the wall.)

Only a little imagination is needed to re-create the scene Daniel 5 describes, for orgies are much the same everywhere. What was, apparently, unusual was for men to use sacred vessels from a temple in this way. Even if captured and carried off as booty, the equipment of national sanctuaries was normally treated with respect. This is clear from passages in Assyrian inscriptions; it is also clear from the tone of the story as related in Daniel itself. For example, Esarhaddon of Assyria said, “I returned the plundered gods of the lands from Assyria to their shrines,” and several texts report the return to Babylon of furniture as well as the statue that Sennacherib had removed from the temple of Bel-Marduk in 689 B.C.¹

Controversy has raged around the Book of Daniel for centuries. Pious Jews of the first century A.D. believed its prophecies were the inspired word of God, as texts among the Dead Sea Scrolls and in the New Testament show. Fragments from several copies of the Book of Daniel were among the Dead Sea Scrolls. Moreover, the imagery of the Book of Daniel permeates the writings of the Qumran sectarians. For the use of Daniel in the New Testament see, for example, Matthew 24:15 (“So when you see ‘the abomination of desolation,’ of which the prophet Daniel spoke, standing in the holy place … then those who are in Judea must take to the hills.”) and the Book of Revelation 1:13, 4:9 and 9:20.

As early as the third century A.D., however, a Phoenician philosopher named Porphyry argued that Daniel was written about 165 B.C., long after the events it supposedly describes in the sixth century B.C. With the rise of Biblical criticism in the 19th century, this view became standard. The Book of Daniel was judged a product of the second century B.C., concocted to encourage nationalism and faith. Its stories of Babylon, Daniel and various kings were believed to be fiction, or, at best, old folktales, historically worthless.

Nebuchadnezzar had, of course, ruled over Babylon, but Belshazzar’s name was nowhere to be found outside the Biblical text. The Greek chroniclers who had preserved lists of ancient kings identified Nabonidus, a successor to Nebuchadnezzar, as the last native ruler of Babylon; Belshazzar was not even mentioned. Belshazzar, declared one commentator named Ferdinand Hitzig in 1850, was obviously a figment of the Jewish writer’s imagination.²

Then, in 1854, a British consul named J. G. Taylor explored some ruins in southern Iraq on behalf of the British Museum. He dug into a great mud-brick tower that was part of a temple of the moon god that dominated the city. Taylor found several small clay cylinders buried 075in the brickwork, each about four inches long, inscribed with 60 or so lines of cuneiform writing. When Taylor took the cylinders back to Baghdad, he showed them to his colleagues.³ Fortunately, his senior colleague was Sir Henry Rawlinson, who was one of those who had deciphered the Babylonian cuneiform script. Rawlinson was able to read the writing on the clay cylinders.

The inscriptions had been written at the command of Nabonidus, king of Babylon from 555 to 539 B.C. The king had repaired the temple tower, and the clay cylinders commemorated that fact. The inscriptions proved that the ruined tower was the temple of the city of Ur. The words were a prayer for the long life and good health of Nabonidus—and for his eldest son. The name of that son, clearly written, was Belshazzar!

Here was clear proof that an important person named Belshazzar lived in Babylon during the last years of the city’s independence. So Belshazzar was not an entirely imaginary figure. This prayer, however, speaks of Belshazzar only as the king’s eldest son, not as king.

What, exactly, was Belshazzar’s position? Since 1854 several more Babylonian documents have been unearthed that mention Belshazzar.⁴ In every case, however, he is the king’s son or the crown prince; he is never given the title “king” in Babylonian. Although most scholars now admit that the author of the Book of Daniel did not invent Belshazzar, they still assert that, nevertheless, the Biblical author made a major mistake in referring to him as king.

Yet even that may not be quite right. In legal deeds from the sixth century B.C. the parties swear oaths by the gods and the king, according to a well-known and longstanding practice. In some of these deeds from the reign of Nabonidus, we find that the parties swear by Nabonidus and by Belshazzar, the king’s son. This formula, swearing by the king and his son, is unattested in 076any other reign in any documents yet uncovered. This suggests that Belshazzar may have had a special status. We know that during part of his father’s reign, Belshazzar was the effective authority in Babylon. The Babylonian texts reveal that Nabonidus was an eccentric ruler. While he did not ignore the gods of Babylon, he did not treat them in the approved way, and gave very considerable attention to the moon god at two other cities, Ur and Harran. For several years of his reign, Nabonidus did not even live in Babylon; instead he stayed at the distant oasis of Teima in northern Arabia. During that time, Belshazzar ruled in Babylon. According to one account, Nabonidus 077“entrusted the kingship” to Belshazzar.⁵

A very recent discovery may throw additional light on Belshazzar’s status. In 1979, a farmer in northern Syria, while plowing, accidentally uncovered a life-size statue of a king of ancient Gozan.⁶ On the skirt of the statue are two inscriptions, one in Assyrian and the other in Aramaic, both written at the same time, probably about 850 B.C. The inscriptions, in two different languages, are parallel, nearly identical, and each helps to interpret the other. The Assyrian text describes the ruler on whose statue the inscription is written as the “governor of Gozan”; the Aramaic text describes him as “king” (mlk). Each inscription was aimed at a different audience, the Assyrian version to the overlords, and the Aramaic to the local people. What to the Assyrian-speaking overlords was the governor was to the local Aramaic-speaking population the equivalent of king. The texts on this statue may well indicate that Belshazzar’s title in the Aramaic in which Daniel is written was not a literal rendering of his Babylonian title, which was crown prince.

In the light of the Babylonian sources and of the new texts on this statue, it may have been considered quite in order for such unofficial records as the Book of Daniel to call Belshazzar “king.” He acted as king, his father’s agent, although he may not have been legally king. The precise distinction would have been irrelevant and confusing in the story as related in Daniel.

This proposal, as has long been realized, could also solve a puzzle relating to the reward offered both to the Babylonian wise men and to Daniel if any one of them could interpret the writing on the wall. The successful 078interpreter would be made “the third ruler in the kingdom” (Daniel 5:16). Why the third ruler in the kingdom? If Belshazzar was king, why couldn’t Daniel become second to him, as Joseph had been second to Pharaoh in Egypt (Genesis 41:40, 44)? The answer may be that Belshazzar was himself the second ruler in the kingdom. If Belshazzar’s father, Nabonidus, was actually king, then Belshazzar was second to him. Thus, Belshazzar could offer only third place to Daniel.

Neither the cylinders from Ur nor the other Babylonian texts have anything to say about “Belshazzar’s Feast.” For that, there is only the testimony of the Book of Daniel, although we also have the more general report of Herodotus that a festival was in progress when Cyrus’s army captured Babylon in 539 B.C. Archaeological discoveries like these cannot, of course, prove that the narratives in Daniel report events that actually occurred in the sixth century B.C., but they, and other finds like them, do indicate that those narratives preserve correct information about Babylon at the time they were supposed to have occurred. To discard the evidence of Daniel as fiction or to belittle it as folklore is to run the risk of ignoring a unique source for a vital moment in human history—when the Persian Empire replaced the power of Babylon.

The party was in full swing, the wine flowed freely, and everyone felt on top of the world. There was no power on earth to rival Babylon, and no gods in heaven to equal hers.