Daniel5chapter 5

For a long time Belshazzar was the book's embarrassment: no Babylonian king list had his name. Then cuneiform texts turned up naming Belshazzar as the son of Nabonidus, the last king of Babylon. Nabonidus spent about ten years away from the city at the desert oasis of Tema in Arabia, and left Belshazzar holding the kingship in Babylon.

That solves the strangest detail in the chapter. Belshazzar offers Daniel the third place in the kingdom, not the second — because the first place was his absent father's and the second was already his own. It is a small thing that only makes sense if the writer knew how that court actually worked.

The Nabonidus Chronicle, a Babylonian tablet, records what happened outside. Cyrus's army beat the Babylonians at Opis, took Sippar without a fight, and then entered Babylon itself without a battle. Greek writers add the detail that the attackers lowered the Euphrates — which ran straight through the middle of the city — and walked in along the drained riverbed under the walls.

Those walls were the reason the party could happen at all. Babylon's defenses were famous enough that Herodotus devotes pages to them, and the city had grain stored for years. Belshazzar was not being reckless by feasting while an army camped nearby. He was being confident. The river was the one door nobody had bolted.

Drinking from the temple vessels taken out of Jerusalem was not just insult; in the ancient world, captured temple gear proved whose god had won. He was toasting his own gods with the trophies.