Belshazzar's Feast and the Writing on the Wall
Belshazzar throws a banquet for a thousand of his nobles and calls for the gold and silver vessels looted from the temple in Jerusalem to drink from. As they toast the gods of gold and silver, bronze, iron, wood and stone, a hand appears and writes on the plaster of the wall.
The king's face changes and his knees knock together. None of his wise men can read it. The queen remembers Daniel, long out of favour, who is brought in, refuses the offered rewards, and reads the words: MENE, MENE, TEKEL, PARSIN — numbered, weighed, divided. The interpretation turns on their sense as weights and as verbs: your reign is counted out, you have been weighed and found wanting, your kingdom is given to the Medes and Persians.
That same night the city fell. Babylonian records place Belshazzar as co-regent for his father Nabonidus, which explains the offer of third place in the kingdom rather than second.
Where in scripture
[57] I will make her princes, her wise men, her governors, her deputies, and her mighty men drunk. They will sleep a perpetual sleep, and not wake up,” says the King, whose name is Yahweh of Armies. [58] Yahweh of Armies says: “The wide walls of Babylon will be utterly overthrown. Her high gates will be burned with fire. The peoples will labor for vanity, and the nations for the fire; and they will be weary.”
Jeremiah 51:57–58
[1] Belshazzar the king made a great feast to a thousand of his lords, and drank wine before the thousand. [2] Belshazzar, while he tasted the wine, commanded that the golden and silver vessels which Nebuchadnezzar his father had taken out of the temple which was in Jerusalem be brought to him; that the king and his lords, his wives and his concubines, might drink from them. [3] Then they brought the golden vessels that were taken out of the temple of God’s house which was at Jerusalem; and the king and his lords, his wives and his concubines, drank from them. [4] They drank wine, and praised the gods of gold, and of silver, of brass, of iron, of wood, and of stone. …
Daniel 5:1–31 — opening verses
Scripture quotations are from the World English Bible, a public-domain translation.
