Belshazzar: Encyclopedia II - Belshazzar - Belshazzar in the Bible

Belshazzar - Belshazzar in the Bible

Daniel 5:1-4 describes "Belshazzar's Feast" in which the sacred vessels of Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem, which had been brought to Babylon by Nebuchadnezzar at the time of the Captivity were profaned by the company. The narrative unfolds against the background of the impending arrival of the Persian armies.

In consequence of this, during the festivities, a hand was seen writing on the wall of the chamber a mysterious sentence mene mene tekel upharsin, which defied all attempts at interpretation. Their natural denotations of weights and measures were superficially meaningless: "two minas, a shekel and two parts." When the Hebrew sage Daniel was called in, he read and interpreted the words. The last word (prs) he read as peres not parsin. His free choice of interpretation and decoding revealed the menacing subtext: "Thou art weighed in the balance and art found wanting." The divine menace against the dissolute Belshazzar, whose kingdom was to be divided between the Medes and Persians, was swiftly realized: in the last verse we are told that Belshazzar was slain in that same night, and that his power passed to Darius the Mede.

This Biblical story is the source of the popular phrase "the writing on the wall" as a euphemism for impending doom that is so obvious only a fool would not see it coming.

Daniel 5:1-4 calls Nebuchadnezzar the father of Belshazzar. The same claim is made in the deuterocanonical Book of Baruch, which most scholars believe to have been written around the same time, in the second century BC. This may simply have been a mistake on the part of the authors. Some Biblical commentators argue that the statement can be reconciled with extra-Biblical sources by interpreting the term to mean forefather or predecessor. (The Hebrew word for father av is commonly used in the sense of forefather.)

For a list of artistic and musical references to the feast, see the article Belshazzar's Feast.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Belshazzar in the Bible", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki