Daniel: The Golden Age

The story of Belshazzar is like Esther, Samson or David and Goliath where the punishment fits the crime. There is no waiting for justice as they got what was coming to them. We are fable people from childhood. The fox gets the grapes. The tortoise wins the race. It’s all so neat and simple which explains why in uncertain times when surrounded by moral ambiguities and the villains are winning with no hint of judgment in the near term we return to these stories to encourage us that, as Martin Luther King said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

In the story the Persians have been busy preparing for the fall of Babylon by digging a trench around the city of Babylon and temporarily diverting the Euphrates River. Their army entered under the walls of the city by means of the riverbed, swiftly moved to the palace, and killed the drunken guards. 

So, while the Persians are entering below, Belshazzar is hosting a grand feast. It’s clearly not an intimate dinner for a few confidants but 1,000 nobles, wives, and concubines have been invited - or likely commanded to attend. This is an act of rare stupidity or perhaps it is an effort to bolster the morale of a city surrounded by enemy forces. “There is nothing to fear but fear itself” banners might have been placed around the room and motivational speakers had been hired to come in and assure the crowd that everything was going just as planned and the best was yet to come. This was the Golden Age. While the Persians are excavating the foundations of the city the rulers are carousing with the King while ignoring the noise of the obvious and the evidence of the inevitable. Is it possible that out of a thousand people there were not a few who looked at each other and said, “I think he’s lost his mind. What are we doing here?”

I’m not sure Belshazzar was as much an evil king as he was unusually stupid. The literal meaning of stupid is unfeeling or having no sensations. Unlike David, he had not chosen men like the sons of Issachar who understood the times. How many of the wise men in his court could be considered those who understood the times?  Not a one. They were men who simply read the room but not the times. Belshazzar was bankrupt for wisdom and surrounded by sycophants. He had gone so far in negligence of wise counsel and disdain for common decency that any chance for a return to human dignity, repentance and regeneration had become impossible. As it turns out, he never even gets the chance.

In this instance God is not just reversing the fortunes of a villain but calling down doom on a fool and the entire kingdom. His own corrupted values have caused the moral values of the kingdom to crumble even while the army underneath is tearing away at the physical foundations of the city. This is a bankrupt man we are seeing for what he really is: A profane coward who can do nothing but collapse when he is faced with the judgment of God. He does not shake his fist. He screams and shouts and promises rewards and bribes that will very soon not be his to give.

So the hand has written on the wall

“God has numbered the days of your reign and brought it to an end.”

“You have been weighed in the scales and found wanting.”

“Your kingdom is divided and given to the Medes and Persians.”

“That very night Belshazzar, king of the Babylonians was slain, and Darius the Mede took over the kingdom..” Belshazzar joins the company of other fools weighed in the scales and whose souls were required of them on the spot - the rich fool, Ananias and Sapphira, Herod Agrippa. 

What a night. It begins with feasting and drinking and ends with the sudden and violent death of a fool and the end of the kingdom. Sometimes things go slow and then they go fast. Not only is the life of the king lost but the life and future of the kingdom itself. What was once great is now a ghost of history. There is the long decline and then the sometimes violent ending when leaders cannot face an inconvenient truth and try to make enough noise of their own to drown out the incessant sounds of the foundations being dug out from below and the enemy coming in the night to destroy what seemed indestructible. The greatest nation on the earth is now just a rubble of distant memory.

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Art by William Balfour-Ker

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