The Hand That Wrote on Belshazzar's Wall

The Vessels

Belshazzar knew what the vessels were. His grandfather Nebuchadnezzar had taken them from the Jerusalem Temple sixty-five years earlier, and the family had held them in storage ever since, too sacred to use, too valuable to discard. When Belshazzar decided to hold a feast for a thousand of his lords, something moved him to bring the vessels out.

He drank from the golden cup consecrated to the God of Israel. He handed cups down the table to his lords, his wives, his concubines. The feast was lit with the particular arrogance of a man who believes his empire is permanent and that the gods of the peoples he has conquered have no reach over him. He had survived everything so far. He was the king of Babylon. The city walls were thick enough that armies could turn around without making a dent. He could drink from whatever cups he found in his treasury.

The Hand

The fingers appeared on the plastered wall near the lampstand, where the light was best. Not a figure. Not a voice. Not a vision that could be attributed to wine or imagination. A hand, with no arm attached to it, writing on the wall with what appeared to be ordinary deliberate motion, the way you write something you have decided to write.

Belshazzar's face changed. The brightness went out of it. His knees knocked against each other. His legs stopped supporting him. He called for all the wise men of Babylon, the enchanters, the astrologers, the diviners, the men whose professional function was exactly to interpret unusual phenomena. He promised the first one who could read the writing purple robes and the third position in the kingdom. They looked at the writing and could not read it.

What Daniel Said

The queen mother remembered there was a man who had served Nebuchadnezzar, a Jewish captive brought from Jerusalem in the first wave of deportations. Belshazzar summoned Daniel. He offered the same reward: purple, gold, third place in the kingdom.

Daniel said he did not want the gifts. He would read the inscription and interpret it.

The inscription read: Mene Mene Tekel Ufarsin. Daniel stood before the king and a thousand lords and their wives and delivered what the words meant. Mene: God has numbered your kingdom and finished it. Tekel: you have been weighed in the balances and found wanting. Peres: your kingdom has been divided and given to the Medes and Persians.

He said this in the banquet hall with the sacred vessels still on the table.

What Had Brought This On

The midrashic tradition traces the mechanism by which Belshazzar reached this moment. Nebuchadnezzar, whatever his crimes against Judah, had at least treated the Temple vessels with a kind of reverence born of fear. He had humiliated the people but respected the objects. Belshazzar had gone one step further. He had calculated that he was safe. The Temple was destroyed. The God of Israel had clearly been defeated. Therefore the vessels were inert, trophies from a settled campaign, and he could drink from them at a feast.

That calculation was the error. The vessels were not inert. They had been consecrated to something that was not defeated and did not accept the premise that destruction of the Temple constituted a verdict on God's existence or power. Drinking from those cups was not merely impolite toward a foreign people's traditions. It was a theological assertion, and the hand that appeared was the response to the assertion.

The Mekhilta's reading of this event frames it explicitly as measure for measure: Belshazzar used the sacred as the profane, and was immediately weighed and found to have no substance.

That Night

They dressed Daniel in purple and gave him the chain of gold and proclaimed him third in the kingdom. These honors lasted hours.

That same night Belshazzar king of the Chaldeans was killed. Darius the Mede received the kingdom. The Chronicles of Jerahmeel, a twelfth-century Hebrew chronicle, records that God had been working through both the Median and Persian lines for this purpose: two powers raised simultaneously to converge on Babylon at the moment the writing appeared. The feast had been the last act of a dynasty that had already been weighed. The hand wrote what was already true. The night confirmed it.