DANIEL 5 REVISITED

 

 The Handwriting on the Wall (collage and acrylics, 2004)

This is a short update to a previously post on this subject. But first, here is a quick rehash of what I said earlier:

This phrase from the Bible is one of many that has entered into our general vocabulary. It usually refers to something that prophesies a coming doom. It appears in expected places such as the lyrics to Christian songs or the title of a study on Daniel by David Jeremiah. But it can also be found in gansta rap lyrics and, my favorite, the final lines in Paul Simon's The Sound of Silence: “The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls and tenement halls and whispered in the sounds of silence.”

We are probably all familiar with the story in which King Belshazzar is having a large feast in his palace, using the stolen goblets from the Jerusalem Temple to drink from. At one point in the festivities, he sees a disembodied hand writing on the wall near a lamp. The main concern of the story from that point on is the proper interpretation of the writing.

This palace has been excavated. The walls are covered with white gypsum, which would have made the writing easy to read. Apparently, the king was the only one who actually witnessed the act of writing itself. Levine points to a somewhat similar earlier situation when King Nebuchadnezzar was the first one to notice a fourth “man” in the fiery furnace with the three young Jewish men.

It would make sense that Belshazzar was the first one to see the writing since, as E.J. Young notes, “It was the custom at oriental feasts for the king to sit on a raised platform, apart from the guests (see v. 1, 'in front of the thousand'). Thus, he probably was facing in a different direction than the others.

The Dictionary of Biblical Imagery sees a similarity with two other occasions in which “the finger of God” wrote something: God writing the ten commandments on stone (Exodus 31:18) and Jesus driving out demons by 'the finger of God” (Luke 11:20). “In each case, finger imagery conveys the power and immediacy of God's action.” Tremper Longman adds Exodus 8:19 and Psalm 8:3 to this list of biblical passages.

As in previous stories in this book, the king calls in all his non-Jewish magicians, diviners, etc. But they are unable to understand the meaning of the words. A somewhat related story appears in Genesis 41:8. His promise of the third highest rank in the land if they can solve the puzzle makes sense in light of the fact that Nabonidus was actually the king and Belshazzar filling in for him in his absence. In any case, the promise is an empty one, as Daniel knows, since Belshazzar will soon be deposed.

The first major question involves the inability of the magicians to understand the writing. Longman feels it may imply “that it was written in some sort of code, because it had been written in Aramaic, the common language of the day. Their inability cannot be the result of a simple inability to read the script, if it were written out in a normal manner. The text ultimately does not let us know.” But that does not stop scholars from speculating anyway:

Goldingay suggests that possibly the letters were written in a peculiar type of cuneiform or that the weights involved were actually abbreviated (as we might do with kg. or lb.). Most other commentators identify the difficulty in the fact that Aramaic was written in scripta continua (without a break between words) and without vowel indications, as Hebrew was also written.

Then again, the problem may not have been in the reading of the words, but in their meaning. Hartman and DiLella say, “For the storyteller, the writing was apparently in regular Aramaic script, giving ordinary Aramaic words, but the message conveyed by the words was beyond the understanding of the pagan wise men; cf. the mysterious name of Isaiah's son, Maher-shalal-hash-baz, which the prophet inscribed 'in ordinary writing', but of which no one could grasp the significance until the prophet explained the meaning (Isa 8:1-4).”

In verses 24-28 we come to the proper interpretation of the terse message, as given by Daniel. Interpretation: mina (large weight related to “count”), shekel (1/60 of a mina, related to “weight”), and pares (½ parsin, interpreted as “divide”). This is like some other OT prophecies which depend on taking an ordinary object or word and through wordplay deriving a spiritual message (for example, see Amos 7:7-9; 8:1-3).

Chisholm summarizes it best: “At the surface level, the words meant literally 'a mina, a mina, a sheckel, and half-shekels.' These units of measure suggested an image of monetary weights being placed on a scale. As such, each word carried a double meaning. The term mene' sounded like the verb menah, meaning 'to number.' God had numbered the days of Belshazzar's reign, and the king's time was up (v. 26). The word teqel sounds like the verb tequal, meaning 'to weigh.' Belshazzar had been weighed on God's scales and found wanting (v. 27). The term upsarin (combining the conjunction 'and' and the plural of peres, 'half-shekel) sounded like the verb peras, 'to break in two.' Belshazzar's kingdom had been broken and would be handed over to the Medes and Persians (v. 28).”

In addition, Goldingay notes that menah can have the meaning of 'to appoint' or 'to destine.' And E.J. Young says, “We have a play upon words in which the basic idea of division in liked with the name of the conqueror [peres and Persia].”

Finally, various scholars have fancifully suggested that each of the weights stood for a subsequent ruler of Babylon, but they can't seem to agree on which kings those were or even how many kings were in mind. Similarly, The Jerusalem Bible suggests that perhaps the sequence of terms are “allusions to the decreasing influence of the three successive empires (Babylonians, 'Medes,' and Persians).”

There is some historical verification of the ending to the story in that the historian Herodotus says Babylon was captured at nighttime while its leaders were enjoying a feast. And one last detail: The time of this event that Herodotus records happens to coincide with the annual rising of the constellation Libra, which is appropriate in its image of a scale for weighing. “This recalls the picture of God as the just judge who ably manages the affairs of the world, and who not only measures motives and actions but evaluates and controls each person's destiny.” (DBI)

Updates

To start with, I would like to refer the reader to an earlier post titled “Balaam: Numbers 22-24.” In it I wrote:

“Because of doubts concerning the historicity of the episode with the talking donkey, there has even been speculation that the prophet himself was a fictional character. After all, here we have a prophet who isn't even Jewish but is still able to converse with God and even has a considerable reputation outside his own land.

So it was quite exciting when a totally unique form of archeological evidence was uncovered. The information below comes from David L. Stubbs' commentary on Numbers and from Biblical Archaeology Today, xi(5), p. 34.

Nothing else was known concerning Balaam except the details given in Numbers 22-24 and a few other biblical passages. Then in 1967, some Dutch archeologists were excavating at Deir 'Alla, identified with the biblical Succoth in northern Israel where Jacob built a booth for his cattle. They found pieces of several plaster panels containing writing in a red pigment. It appeared that these panels were attached to a column inside a non-Israelite Iron Age II temple. After many years, they pieced the writing together and reconstructed the Aramaic inscription to read “Book of Balaam, son of Beor, the man who was a seer of the gods.” The rest of the writing confirmed the existence of a pagan prophet named Balaam who was revered by Canaanites hundreds of years later.

The reconstructed text of the first panel describes Balaam receiving a night vision (see Numbers 22:8,20) in which he learns that the heavenly council is planning to remove all the light from the sun. In the second panel, which is in poorer condition than the first, it appears that Balaam may possibly be counseling the people to resort to child sacrifice to avert the disaster. If so, it indicates that Balaam was not just a prophet, but also an exorcist of sorts. This would fit well with the multiple roles that Balaam is expected to play in Numbers 22-24 as someone who not only can discern God's will, but also one who can cast effective spells against an enemy.

As to the age of this wall, the strata covering these panels and earlier levels had large cracks indicating destruction by a large earthquake. One such earthquake is prominently mentioned in Amos 1:1 and Zechariah 14:4-5 dating to about 750 BC. Other indications give the range of dates from 900-600 BC.”

So here we have an interesting literal example of the words of the prophet being written on a wall.

The second update also comes from the pages of BAR, this time in a letter to the editor by D. Freund followed by a response from the editor. Freund related the fact that his father was auditing a class at UCLA (my own alma mater) in which the mysterious words “mene, mene, tekel, and parsin” were also explained by his professor as being derived from the value of certain Persian coins circulating at the time. However, instead of these relating to future kings, the professor felt that they referred to two past and one present kings of Persia.

According to this interpretation (similar but not identical to that proposed back in 1944), in the words of Freund, “The wall inscription may well have been a graffito of three coins: a mina (worth many shekels) with the head of Belshazzar's grandfather, suggesting he was a great king; a shekel coin with the head of his father; a lesser but still great man; and a farthing coined with the head of Belshazzar himself, suggesting that he was all but worthless in comparison to his forebears. The meaning of that graffito was of course clear to anyone who saw it scrawled on the palace wall, but who would dare reveal its meaning to the king? Only Daniel had the courage to suggest to the king that he was a failure, and that his kingdom would soon fall.”

The editor of BAR called this particular theory “intriguing, there is, however, no way to know how Daniel read (i.e. vocalized) the inscription and how exactly, in his mind, the pun worked.” My read on this professor's theory is even more skeptical. For one thing, in the typical fashion of liberal Bible scholars, they are willing to take bits and pieces of the biblical narratives as accurate when it pleases them to do so but systematically strip them of all supernatural (and thus impossible) elements.

Thus, the related detail of the king seeing the words actually being written is purposely ignored as well as Daniel's divine revelation that Belshazzar was about to lose his kingdom to the Persians, which did happen at that time. Secondly, if all the king saw was some graffiti scribbled on the wall of his palace, would he really have begun to tremble all over with fear and be so concerned on what the words meant that he consulted all his wise men for the interpretation? Instead he would be outraged that anyone had the nerve to deface his palace and go to great lengths to have his wise men find out who it was. Thirdly, why did his wise men supposedly know exactly what the words meant? If it was that obvious, why couldn't Belshazzar figure it out himself? And if the meaning wasn't that obvious, why didn't one of the wise men simply put himself in good stead with the new king by making up an interpretation that was flattering to him?

Then there is the unlikelihood of not one of the king's numerous servants and courtiers at some point in the process of preparing this grand banquet noticing this obvious scribbling (whatever its meaning) defacing the room without quickly whitewashing it out before the king had a chance to see it.

But the most obvious problem with this scenario is the historical fact that before Babylon was conquered by the Persians, there was no coinage at all in that country. All hunks of metal were simply valued by their weight, as noted in the mention of scales in Daniel's interpretation . The introduction of even crude coins did not take place until about 100 years after that time. I personally have a small Persian silver coin from 200 years after Babylon fell. Even it is so crudely made that you can barely distinguish the picture of a person on it.

In conclusion, it is far easier and more consistent to simply take the account at its face value.