Daniel 5

The fifth chapter of Daniel is the court tales at their most concentrated and their most dramatically charged. The scene opens in medias res at a great feast; the sacrilege of drinking from the Jerusalem temple vessels is committed almost casually, as an afterthought of the celebration. The appearance of the hand is immediate and unannounced, described in a single verse. The king's physical reaction — face changed, thoughts alarming, limbs giving way, knees knocking — is one of the most vivid descriptions of fear in the Hebrew Bible, and it is given before the writing has even been read, the horror located in the mere fact of the hand rather than in the content of the message. The wise men's inability to read the writing has generated discussion: the four Aramaic words are readable as ordinary script, and the question is whether they could not read them or could not interpret them. Daniel alone reads and interprets, and he does so without being given the king's gifts first — a refusal that marks his distinction from court wisdom dependent on royal favour.

The historical details of the chapter are, from a scholarly perspective, among the most clearly anachronistic in the book. Belshazzar was not the son of Nebuchadnezzar (he was the son of Nabonidus, the actual last king of Babylon), was not himself officially king (he served as regent while Nabonidus was in Tema), and did not die the night Babylon fell (the city was taken by Cyrus's forces in October 539 BCE with minimal resistance, and Nabonidus survived to be exiled). The historical confusion is one of the strongest arguments for the late dating of the book — an author writing in the sixth century, close to the events, would presumably have known these details. The author writing in the second century was working with the traditions available about the fall of Babylon, which had by then been filtered and shaped by two centuries of transmission. The four Aramaic words — mene, mene, tekel, upharsin — are one of the most famous textual puzzles in the book: they can be read as a list of weights (a mina is sixty shekels; the sequence may parody the statue's metals in chapter 2), as a series of past-tense verbs (numbered, weighed, divided), or both simultaneously. Daniel reads them as both. The chapter closes with the fall of Babylon in a single verse — That very night Belshazzar the Chaldean king was slain — one of the most abrupt endings in the Hebrew Bible.