The Night Belshazzar Read His Death Sentence on the Wall

The hand appeared while the party was still going.

Belshazzar of Babylon had taken the sacred vessels of the Jerusalem Temple, the golden cups and bowls that had been captured from the House of God, and served wine in them to his princes, his wives, his concubines. He was drinking out of the holy vessels of a people he had defeated and toasting his own gods with them. It was, even by the standards of ancient imperial theater, a deliberate act of desecration.

A hand appeared on the plaster wall and wrote in Hebrew characters. The party stopped. Belshazzar's knees knocked together. He offered the purple robe and a gold chain and the position of third ruler in the kingdom to whoever could read it. None of his wise men could. His queen suggested sending for Daniel.

According to the Chronicles of Jerahmeel, the twelfth-century Hebrew chronicle compiled by Jerahmeel ben Solomon and translated by Moses Gaster in 1899, Daniel's interpretation was not the message the king was hoping for. The words were Aramaic but written in Hebrew script: Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin. God had numbered the years of Belshazzar's kingdom and found them complete. The seventy years of Israel's exile had ended. The king had been weighed and found wanting. His kingdom would be taken and given to the Medes and Persians.

Daniel did not soften this. He reminded Belshazzar that his grandfather Nebuchadnezzar had been driven from his throne and forced to eat grass with the animals until he acknowledged that heaven ruled, not kings. Belshazzar had learned nothing from this. After defeating Darius and Cyrus in battle, he thanked his idols of silver and gold rather than the God who had let him win. Then he compounded it by drinking from the Temple vessels at the feast.

When the court heard the interpretation, terror seized the room. The princes fled and trampled each other at the gates. Belshazzar collapsed onto his bed and fell into a death-like sleep. That night, a doorkeeper who had served Nebuchadnezzar drew the king's own sword from beneath his pillows and severed his head. He carried it through the darkness to Darius and Cyrus. They prostrated themselves before the God of heaven, vowed to free the Jewish people and rebuild the Temple, then marched into Babylon and reduced it to wasteland.

The speed of the collapse is the detail the chronicle emphasizes. Not weeks of siege warfare. One night. The same night Daniel delivered the verdict, the sentence was executed with the sword that had been sleeping under the condemned man's pillow.

Not long after, Daniel's enemies arranged his own trial. They crafted a decree making it illegal to pray to any god but the king for thirty days and got Darius to sign it without realizing it had been written for one man. The conspirators found a girl playing outside Daniel's house who told them exactly what they needed to know: upper chamber, three times daily, window facing Jerusalem.

They seized him and brought him before Darius, who argued for him until the princes threatened rebellion. The king surrendered Daniel to their hands, saying only: the Lord God of the heavens shall close their mouths. The lions had been starved. The stone was rolled over the pit and sealed.

That same day, the prophet Habakkuk was somewhere in Judah, carrying food to his workers in the field. An angel appeared and commanded him to bring the meal to Daniel in Babylon. Habakkuk protested the impossible distance. The angel seized him by the lock of his hair and carried him bodily across the sky, food and all, setting him down in the lions' den. Daniel ate. The angel returned Habakkuk before his reapers even noticed he was gone.

The physical absurdity of the detail, the prophet arriving by his hair, delivering lunch to a man sitting with starving lions who are wagging their tails like dogs, is exactly the kind of image the apocryphal tradition preserves with complete seriousness. The Chronicles of Jerahmeel is not a text given to whimsy. When it records that Habakkuk flew to Babylon and back during a single workday, it is asserting that the normal constraints of space are subordinate to the requirements of sustaining the righteous. The lions did not eat Daniel. The distance did not stop the food. The sealed stone did not prevent the singing Darius heard at dawn.

The princes and their families were thrown in after Daniel emerged. The same lions that had been sitting peacefully crushed their bones before they hit the ground.

Belshazzar had read his verdict on the wall and died the same night. Daniel read his verdict in the faces of the conspirators who brought him before Darius and kept singing anyway. Two men in the same empire, both sentenced. One sentence was deserved. One wasn't. The chronicle records both outcomes with equal precision, and makes no comment about the difference except to note that Daniel emerged without a scratch and Darius rushed to the pit at dawn so fast he must not have slept at all.