A Doorkeeper Took the Sword From Under Belshazzar's Pillow

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The Victory That Was Not One

Darius of Media and Cyrus of Persia had married into each other's houses and then turned together on Babylon, and the fighting had been going badly for both sides for a long time. Belshazzar sent out a thousand princes and the troops garrisoned at the temple, at twilight, and they marched all night and hit the enemy camp at first light. The Medes broke and ran. Cyrus held his ground and stopped the pursuit. When the counting was done in the dark, the dead were mostly Medes and Persians.

The princes came back to the palace calling it a win. The king believed them. He gave out silver and gold, sat down with the thousand of them, and kept the tables going until it was night again.

Somewhere past the point where a man stops deciding things, Belshazzar sent for the vessels. Not his own. The gold from the house of God in Jerusalem, carried out by his grandfather Nebuchadnezzar when the city fell and the people were marched east. They came up out of storage and he poured wine into them and drank, and passed them down the table to his princes, his wives, his concubines, and they sang to the gods of Babylon out of the cups of the Temple.

Red Ink Beside the Lamp

God sent a scribe down from the throne.

What Belshazzar saw was fingers. Not an arm, not a shoulder, not a face. Fingers, writing on the plaster of his own wall in red ink, right beside the lamp where the light was best, and they were terrible to look at and they were beautiful. He could not stop looking at them.

The letters were Hebrew. The words were Aramaic. There were four of them and they meant: He thought. He weighed. He separated.

Every limb the king had began to shake. His heart shook. His bones shook inside him. He shouted for the enchanters and the astrologers and the men whose whole profession was reading strange signs, and offered purple and a gold chain and the third place in the kingdom to whoever could tell him what was on his wall, and they stood in front of it and could not.

The Captive Who Read It

Somebody remembered Daniel. He had been brought from Jerusalem as a boy in the deportation, and he had once told Nebuchadnezzar the contents of a dream the king had forgotten, which no magician in Babylon had been able to do.

He came in and did not take the purple.

"You have acted like a fool," he told the king, in front of the thousand. "You defiled the vessels of the house of our God, and He is jealous for His children and for His sanctuary, so He sent an angel to write those words."

Then he made him listen to his own family history. God made your grandfather great and gave him the holy land and the priestly nation, and he shed their blood like water and burned the house and sent the whole inheritance into captivity here. And his heart got big and he said, my hand did this, my own strength stood by me. And God put him out among the beasts of the field and the birds until he could say out loud that heaven kills and heaven revives, and only then gave him his palace back.

"You knew all of that," Daniel said, "and when your men came home from the battle you did not thank the one who gave you the breath in your body. You thanked idols of silver and gold and iron and brass and clay, which cannot rescue anybody, which can do no harm and no good. Then you sent for the holy vessels."

He turned to the wall. Numbered, he said. The years of your kingdom have been counted and they are finished, because the seventy years of the exile are up. Weighed, and you came up short. Separated, and it goes to the Medes and the Persians.

The Crush at the Gate

Nobody in the hall said anything. Then everyone moved at once.

The princes went for the doors and jammed in the gateway, and men who had come in that evening as the victors of a battle were trampled down and crushed in the opening by the men behind them.

Belshazzar did not run. Pain took him where he sat, and he went to his bed and lay there grieving out loud, and the noise of it went through the palace. Then it stopped. He had fallen asleep. He slept the way a corpse lies, from pure terror, and did not move.

What the Doorkeeper Worked Out

There was a doorkeeper in the king's bedroom, an old man who had served Nebuchadnezzar and was well thought of in the house. He stood in the dark next to the sleeping king and reasoned it through by himself.

Daniel read every dream Nebuchadnezzar ever had, he thought, and not one word of it ever failed. Now he has said what is decreed about this one. The spirit of God is on him and he does not lie. So why should I not take this head off and run with it to Cyrus and Darius, and find favor with the kings who are going to own this city by tomorrow?

He did exactly that. He got up quickly in the half light, drew the sword out from under the king's pillow, and cut off Belshazzar's head with the king's own weapon. Then he walked. All that night, out of the city and across the plain, holding it, until the sky went grey and he came to the camp of the two kings.

When he held it up, Darius and Cyrus and every man in the army began to shake and stare at each other. They made him explain how a servant came to be standing there with the head of Babylon in his hand at sunrise, and he told them about the vessels, and the fingers, and the red ink by the lamp, and what the Jewish captive had read off the wall.

Then the two kings got down on the ground in front of their armies.