THE CLAIM
Daniel 5 names Belshazzar as king of Babylon at the city's fall (539 BCE) and recounts Daniel's interpretation of the writing on the wall. For much of the nineteenth century, classical sources (Herodotus, Xenophon, Berossus) named Nabonidus, not Belshazzar, as last king of Babylon. This apparent contradiction was a standard critical objection to the historical reliability of Daniel.
THE EVIDENCE
In the nineteenth century, cuneiform tablets from Babylonian archives began to document Belshazzar as Nabonidus's eldest son. The Nabonidus Cylinder (H. C. Rawlinson, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1880) named Belshazzar explicitly. The Nabonidus Chronicle (British Museum tablet BM 35382) documents Nabonidus's ten-year residence in Tema (Arabia) while "the king's son" and "the princes" governed Babylon. Raymond Philip Dougherty's Nabonidus and Belshazzar (Yale University Press, 1929) gathered the cuneiform evidence and established that Belshazzar exercised royal authority as co-regent during Nabonidus's absence - including, per the Verse Account of Nabonidus, holding the title of crown prince with full executive powers.
THE STRONGEST OPPOSING VIEW
A strong critical reading still notes that Daniel 5 contains technical inaccuracies even after the cuneiform recoveries. It calls Belshazzar "king" (Aramaic melek) rather than "crown prince," and names Nebuchadnezzar as Belshazzar's "father" (Daniel 5:2, 11, 18, 22), when Nabonidus was his biological father. John J. Collins (Daniel, Hermeneia, Fortress, 1993) argues that the narrative reflects a Hellenistic author working from oral tradition, and that the co-regency discovery does not resolve the Nebuchadnezzar-father issue.
THE APOLOGETIC RESPONSE
Edwin M. Yamauchi (Persia and the Bible, Baker, 1990) and Alan R. Millard ("Daniel and Belshazzar in History," Biblical Archaeology Review 11:3, 1985) make two responses: (a) Ancient Near Eastern kinship terminology routinely used "father" for any royal predecessor or ancestor - the Neo-Assyrian record, for instance, calls Jehu "son of Omri" although Jehu destroyed Omri's line; Daniel's usage fits the convention. (b) Belshazzar's exercise of royal powers - including the offer of "the third place in the kingdom" (Daniel 5:16), since Nabonidus held first and Belshazzar second - is historically precise in a way that a late, uninformed author is unlikely to have invented. R. K. Harrison (Introduction to the Old Testament, Eerdmans, 1969) emphasises that the nineteenth-century claim that Belshazzar never existed has been definitively reversed by the cuneiform record.
OPEN QUESTIONS
The precise force of "father" in Daniel 5 - dynastic ancestor or biological father - remains a live question. The literary form of the chapter (court-tale genre versus annalistic history) and its composition date are central to the broader scholarship on Daniel.
FURTHER READING
Raymond Philip Dougherty, Nabonidus and Belshazzar, Yale University Press, 1929. Alan R. Millard, "Daniel and Belshazzar in History," Biblical Archaeology Review 11:3 (1985). Edwin M. Yamauchi, Persia and the Bible, Baker Book House, 1990.
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