Belshazzar

Belshazzar is a Babylonian king named in the book of Daniel, the son of Nebuchadnezzar according to the narrative and the ruler whose feast, sacrilege, and death in a single night form the center of Daniel 5. The text introduces him as host of a great feast for a thousand of his lords (Daniel 5:1), ordering the gold and silver vessels taken from the Jerusalem temple to be brought so that he, his lords, his wives, and his concubines might drink from them (Daniel 5:2), and the company drinks and praises gods of gold, silver, bronze, iron, wood, and stone (Daniel 5:4). Daniel later charges him directly: he has lifted himself against the Lord of heaven, used the vessels of God's house, and not glorified the God in whose hand his breath is (Daniel 5:23). Belshazzar is also named in the date formulas of Daniel 7:1 and 8:1, where revelations come to Daniel during his reign.

In the narrative, the desecration is followed by terror. A hand writes on the plaster of the wall, the king's face changes and his knees strike together (Daniel 5:6), and he summons the enchanters, Chaldeans, and soothsayers, promising purple, a gold chain, and to be "the third ruler in the kingdom" to whoever reads and interprets the writing (Daniel 5:7). He is reminded that there is a man in the kingdom in whom is the spirit of the holy gods, who in his father's days was made master of the magicians and wise men (Daniel 5:11). Daniel recounts how the Most High gave Nebuchadnezzar kingdom, greatness, glory, and majesty (Daniel 5:18), how that king's heart was lifted up and he was deposed (Daniel 5:20) and driven to eat grass like oxen until he knew that the Most High rules in the kingdom of men (Daniel 5:21). The interpretation ends with PERES: the kingdom is divided and given to the Medes and Persians (Daniel 5:28), and that night Belshazzar the Chaldean king is slain (Daniel 5:30).

Historically, the name corresponds to the Akkadian Bel-shar-usur, meaning roughly "Bel, protect the king," and cuneiform documents including the Nabonidus Cylinder from Ur name Belshazzar as a son of the last Neo-Babylonian king, Nabonidus. Because Nabonidus was absent from Babylon for an extended period, Belshazzar evidently exercised royal authority there, which is one common way of explaining the offer of the "third" place in the kingdom (Daniel 5:7) — an interpretive suggestion rather than a statement the text itself makes. The same history bears on the narrative's description of Nebuchadnezzar as Belshazzar's "father" (Daniel 5:2, 11, 18), since Belshazzar was by birth a son of Nabonidus; some read "father" as ancestral or dynastic usage, and others as a narrative linkage of Belshazzar to the proud king of Daniel 4. The fall of Babylon to the Medes and Persians in 539 BC is a fixed point in ancient Near Eastern history, though the identification of the "Darius the Mede" who receives the kingdom in the following verse is disputed among historians and interpreters.

Christian traditions read the chapter in different registers. Some treat Daniel 5 as straightforward court narrative whose details (the co-regency, the vessels, the nocturnal fall of the city) are historically reliable, and read the "weighed in the balances" language as a settled divine verdict on pride. Others, holding that Daniel was composed much later, read the chapter as theological narrative shaped for a later audience and are less concerned with matching each detail to Babylonian records, while still affirming the depicted judgment of a king who dishonors God. Liturgical and homiletical use varies too: the story functions in some traditions chiefly as a warning against sacrilege and presumption, in others as a demonstration that God's kingdom outlasts every empire, and in others as a typological contrast with the Lord's own supper, where vessels and kingship are handled very differently. The differences turn less on the text's wording than on questions of genre, dating, and how directly narrative detail is expected to map onto external history.

AI-generated reference entry, grounded in the passages where this term appears — history and Scripture stated as such, interpretation labeled as interpretation. Not a substitute for the text itself.