This prayer of Nabonidus was all in vain, for, offered as it was to a god who could

neither hear nor see, Belshazzar found in his service no spiritual strength. It is pathetic to

read the petition that Belshazzar may be satisfied with the fullness of life, when, as a fact,

like the wicked, he did not live out half his days.

In Dan. 5: 2 Nebuchadnezzar is called his "father", and the critics have not failed to

make capital out of this. Their efforts, however, reflect upon their own intelligence rather

than Daniel's veracity, for as there is no equivalent in either Chaldee or Hebrew for our

English word "grandfather", and, as even the little-instructed reader knows, the Hebrew

idiom uses the word "father" for "ancestor", these critics should first of all tell us what

other word Daniel could have used. We know that Daniel had access to Jeremiah's

prophecy, to say nothing of his personal knowledge of the exact relationship that

Belshazzar bore to Nebuchadnezzar. Jer. 27: 7 says of Nebuchadnezzar: "All nations

shall serve him (Nebuchadnezzar), and his son (Nabonidus, who offered the prayer cited

above), and his son's (Belshazzar), until the very time of his land come."

The banqueting hall in which Belshazzar held his iniquitous feast has been discovered.

It is 60 feet wide by 172 feet long, with beautifully decorated walls. Here this last of

Babylon's kings made a great feast. Away on a military expedition against Cyrus, his

father, Nabonidus, had left his son as co-regent, but instead of looking after the defences

of the city he planned this great carousal. We read that he "drank wine before the

thousand", and this apparently worked upon his vanity and innate wickedness, so that

"whiles he tasted the wine, he commanded to bring the golden and silver vessels which

his father, Nebuchadnezzar, had taken out of the temple which was in Jerusalem, that the

king, and his princes, his wives, and his concubines, might drink therein" (Dan. 5: 2).

This was done, and the name of the great Jehovah was contemned, as they praised the

gods of gold, and silver, of brass, of iron, of wood, and of stone, but "in the same hour

came forth the fingers of a man's hand and wrote over against the candlestick upon the

plaister of the wall of the king's palace" (Dan. 5: 5).

This emphasizes the fact that the life of the last king of Babylon ends in a

blasphemous act, an historic foreshadowing of what is foretold in later chapters:--

Goliath, it will be remembered, defied the armies of the living God, and the God of

those armies (I Sam. 17: 10 and 45), and David slew him with a small smooth stone.

Sennacherib "blasphemed" and "reproached the living God" (Isa. 37: 4 and 23), and

the angel of the Lord smote the camp of the Assyrians, Sennacherib himself perishing at

the hand of his sons. So will it be at the end when the last great blasphemer occupies the