Suddenly the fingers of a human hand appeared and wrote on the plaster of the wall, near the lampstand in the royal palace. The king watched the hand as it wrote. 6His face turned pale and he was so frightened that his knees knocked together and his legs gave way. 7The king called out for the enchanters, astrologers and diviners to be brought and said to these wise men of Babylon, “Whoever reads this writing and tells me what it means will be clothed in purple and have a gold chain placed around his neck, and he will be made the third highest ruler in the kingdom.” 8Then all the king’s wise men came in, but they could not read the writing or tell the king what it meant. So King Belshazzar became even more terrified and his face grew more pale. His nobles were baffled.
The Bible warns us: “Do not be deceived: God cannot be mocked. A man reaps what he sows” (Galatians 6:7). Belshazzar learned that the hard way. Earlier in the book we saw how on two other occasions God used dreams to direct a message to heathen King Nebuchadnezzar. This time God had a message not only for King Belshazzar but for all the prominent Babylonians attending his dinner. It was a message they were not going to be happy to hear, since the message of God’s judgment on sin is never pleasant to human ears. It was a message of doom.
The gaiety and carousing at the royal banquet came to a sudden stop when suddenly the fingers of a human hand appeared and wrote four words on the wall of the royal banquet hall. The writing appeared on the wall near the lampstand, where it could easily be seen by the king and all his banquet guests. The fact that the king saw only the fingers writing alerted him immediately to the fact that this writing was by a supernatural being.
We can readily imagine how the king’s face, flushed with wine, was instantly drained of color, and how the blasphemous laughter and the obscene joking stopped and were replaced by a look of raw terror. One can imagine how the noise in the huge banquet hall was followed by an awkward silence. The fingers disappeared, and only the writing remained.
All eyes turned to the king on his elevated platform. But now they no longer saw a bold blasphemer; they saw a man grey with fear. Besides, the muscles and joints of his legs and hips were not functioning the way the Creator designed them. “His knees knocked together and his legs gave way”; they lost the strength to hold his body, and he was unable to stand. The voice which only a few moments earlier had been singing the praises of Babylon’s gods and mocking Israel’s God now called for help. Belshazzar wanted the kingdom’s wisest men, “enchanters, astrologers and diviners,” to decipher the writing and tell him what it meant.
In his panic, which was compounded by his guilty conscience, the king offered any royal adviser a generous reward if he could read the mysterious handwriting. The man would be clothed in purple, the royal color, worn only by the king and his nobles. He would have a gold chain, a royal decoration worn only by men of rank, placed about his neck. And—highest reward of all—he would be made the third ruler in the kingdom. It seems that what the desperate king was offering was a position of equal rank alongside himself and his father, Nabonidus. In other words, the coregency would become a triumvirate.
In answer to the king’s summons, the wise men of Babylon came to the royal banquet hall. These were the king’s specialists, men who were accustomed to interpreting dreams and predicting the future by means of magic. But one after another they admitted to the king that they could not tell him what he wanted to know.
Time passed. The king’s consternation grew as wise man after wise man studied the inscription on the wall and confessed he couldn’t make sense out of it. If Babylon’s wisest men couldn’t tell him what the words said, who could? No doubt a supernatural power had sent the message. But what did it say?
We’re told that the banquet guests shared their king’s bewilderment and fear. They were just as baffled as he was. The banquet hall became a scene of confusion and panic.
It was, of course, not by accident that the empire’s wisest men could not read the words written on the palace wall. God had deliberately withheld the key to understanding the mysterious message. When he chose to, he would tell them what the message meant. And when he did, it would not be good news—not for Babylon, and especially not for Belshazzar.