[406] Birs-Nimrod (Grote, _Hist. of Greece_, III., chap. xix.; Layard, _Nin. and Bab._, chap. ii.).
[407] Arist., _Polit._, III. i. 12. He says that three days after its capture some of its inhabitants were still unaware of the fact.
[408] Acts xii. 20-23; Jos., _Antt._, XIV. viii. 2.
[409] For further information on this subject I may refer to my paper on "Rabbinic Exegesis," _Expositor_, v. 362-378. The fact that there are slight variations in spelling Nebuchad_n_ezzar and Antiochus Epiphanes is of no importance.
[410] Psalm cxxiii. 1. See Eurypides, _Bacchæ_, 699.
[411] Exod. xvii. 16.
[412] Psalm cxlv. 13.
[413] Isa. xxiv. 21, xl. 15, 17. For the "host of heaven" (στρατία οὐράνιος, Luke ii. 13) see Isa. xl. 26; Job. xxxviii. 7; 1 Kings xxii. 19; Enoch xviii. 14-16; Matt. xi. 25.
[414] Isa. xliii. 13, xlv. 9; Psalm cxxxv. 6; Job ix. 12; Eccles. viii. 4. The phrase for "to reprove" is literally "to strike on the hand," and is common in later Jewish writers.
[415] Dan. ii. 38.
[416] Psalm xxxiii. 4.
[417] Exod. xviii. 11.
"That night they slew him on his father's throne He died unnoticed, and the hand unknown: Crownless and sceptreless Belshazzar lay, A robe of purple round a form of clay." SIR E. ARNOLD.
In this chapter again we have another magnificent fresco-picture, intended, as was the last--but under circumstances of aggravated guilt and more terrible menace--to teach the lesson that "verily there is a God that judgeth the earth."
The truest way to enjoy the chapter, and to grasp the lessons which it is meant to inculcate in their proper force and vividness, is to consider it wholly apart from the difficulties as to its literal truth. To read it aright, and duly to estimate its grandeur, we must relegate to the conclusion of the story all worrying questions, impossible of final solution, as to whom the writer intended by Belshazzar, or whom by Darius the Mede.[418] All such discussions are extraneous to edification, and in no way affect either the consummate skill of the picture or the eternal truths of which it is the symbolic expression. To those who, with the present writer, are convinced, by evidence from every quarter--from philology, history, the testimony of the inscriptions, and the manifold results obtained by the Higher Criticism--that the Book of Daniel is the work of some holy and highly gifted _Chasîd_ in the days of Antiochus Epiphanes, it becomes clear that the story of Belshazzar, whatever dim fragments of Babylonian tradition it may enshrine, is really suggested by the profanity of Antiochus Epiphanes in carrying off, and doubtless subjecting to profane usage, many of the sacred vessels of the Temple of Jerusalem.[419] The retribution which awaited the wayward Seleucid tyrant is prophetically intimated by the menace of doom which received such immediate fulfilment in the case of the Babylonian King. The humiliation of the guilty conqueror, "Nebuchadrezzar the Wicked," who founded the Empire of Babylon, is followed by the overthrow of his dynasty in the person of his "son," and the capture of his vast capital.
"It is natural," says Ewald, "that thus the picture drawn in this narrative should become, under the hands of our author, a true night-piece, with all the colours of the dissolute, extravagant riot of luxurious passion and growing madness, of ruinous bewilderment, and of the mysterious horror and terror of such a night of revelry and death."
The description of the scene begins with one of those crashing overtures of which the writer duly estimated the effect upon the imagination.
"Belshazzar the king made a great feast to a thousand of his lords, and drank wine before the thousand."[420] The banquet may have been intended as some propitiatory feast in honour of Bel-merodach. It was celebrated in that palace which was a wonder of the world, with its winged statues and splendid spacious halls. The walls were rich with images of the Chaldeans, painted in vermilion and exceeding in dyed attire--those images of goodly youths riding on goodly horses, as in the Panathenaic procession on the frieze of the Acropolis--the frescoed pictures, on which, in the prophet's vision, Aholah and Aholibah, gloated in the chambers of secret imagery.[421] Belshazzar's princes were there, and his wives, and his concubines, whose presence the Babylonian custom admitted, though the Persian regarded it as unseemly.[422] The Babylonian banquets, like those of the Greeks, usually ended by a _Kōmos_ or revelry, in which intoxication was regarded as no disgrace. Wine flowed freely. Doubtless, as in the grandiose picture of Martin, there were brasiers of precious metal, which breathed forth the fumes of incense;[423] and doubtless, too, there were women and boys and girls with flutes and cymbals, to which the dancers danced in all the orgiastic abandonment of Eastern passion. All this was regarded as an element in the religious solemnity; and while the revellers drank their wine, hymns were being chanted, in which they praised "the gods of gold and of silver, of brass, of iron, of wood, and of stone." That the king drank wine before the thousand is the more remarkable because usually the kings of the East banquet in solitary state in their own apartments.[424]