Charles Ellicott Commentary Daniel 5

Belshazzar. —On this king, see Excursus C. As he was the son of Nabonidus, a space of about thirty years must have elapsed since the event recorded in the last chapter. The Babylonian empire survived the death of Nebuchadnezzar only twenty-five years.

A thousand. —There is nothing unreasonable in the number of the guests; in fact, the Septuagint have doubled the number. (See Esther 1:3-4.)

Before the thousand. —The king appears to have had a special table reserved for himself apart from the guests. For this custom, compare Jeremiah 52:33.

While he tasted—i.e., while he was enjoying the wine. The sacred vessels were brought out of the temple of Merodach and profaned in this manner for the purpose of defying Jehovah.

But it may be reasonably asked, what led him to think of Jehovah in the midst of the revelry? It may have been that some drunken fancy seized him. It may have been that he had been warned that the prophets of Jehovah had foretold the overthrow of Babylon by Cyrus, whose armies were now in the neighborhood.

Whatever the true explanation may be, there can be no doubt, from Daniel’s language (Daniel 5:23) and from the way in which Belshazzar’s gods are mentioned (Daniel 5:4), that the whole act was one of defiance of Jehovah.

In the same hour— that is, suddenly and unexpectedly. (Compare Daniel 3:6.) Observe that it was only a portion of the hand that the king saw , and that we are not told whether the guests saw the hand or not. That the writing was visible to all is plain from Daniel 5:8. We remark here, as in other supernatural manifestations recorded in Scripture, that a portion only has been witnessed by many, while the whole has been seen only by one or by a few. (Acts 9:7.)

Candlestick.— This, of course, would make both the hand and the writing more distinctly visible to the king.

Plaster. —This was invariably used in the inner chamber of the Assyrian and Babylonian palaces. (See Layard, Nineveh and Babylon, p. 529.)

The king’s countenance was changed.— The effect of the vision on the king changes his whole expression to that of alarm instead of drunken mirth.

The astrologers. It is worthy of notice that on this occasion the magicians (the chartummim) do not appear. We must either suppose that they are included under the general term "Chaldeans," or that the king in his terror forgot to summon them. The "wise men" spoken of (Daniel 5:8) were the body over which Daniel was president—a post which, it appears from Daniel 8:27, he held at this time. It is needless to discuss why Daniel did not come in at first.

The third ruler. See Excursus C. Those who adopt another view of Belshazzar maintain that a triumvirate existed at this time, similar to that in the days of Darius the Mede (Daniel 6:2), and that the king promises to raise to the rank of "triumvir" the person who could interpret the vision successfully. It may be noticed that the form of the ordinal "third," both here and in Daniel 5:16 and Daniel 5:29, is very peculiar, and that in the last two passages it resembles a substantive rather than an adjective.