Biblion Bible Commentary
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Belshazzar's Feast
Daniel 5:1-4
1 Belshazzar the king made a great feast to a thousand of his lords, and drank wine before the thousand. · WEB
A thousand guests, the captured temple vessels brought out on purpose, and a toast to gods of gold and silver — the deliberate insult that opens the last night of Babylon.
Belshazzar the king made a great feast to a thousand of his lords, and drank wine before the thousand Daniel 5:1.
A new reign, and a very different king. Where Nebuchadnezzar had been a builder and a soldier, this one is introduced by a banquet — a thousand nobles, and a monarch who drinks in front of them rather than in the customary seclusion. The date is not given here, but the last verse of the chapter supplies it: this is the final night of the Babylonian empire Daniel 5:30. Outside the walls a Medo-Persian army is on the ground. Inside, the court is at table, and the confidence is not irrational — Babylon's fortifications were the wonder of the age and its stores were deep. The feast is a statement about the siege.
Belshazzar, while he tasted the wine, commanded that the golden and silver vessels which Nebuchadnezzar his father had taken out of the temple which was in Jerusalem be brought to him Daniel 5:2.
And the fuse lit in the book's second verse burns down here. The vessels carried to Shinar in the first deportation Daniel 1:2 have stood in a treasure house for decades, untouched — even Nebuchadnezzar, for all his rages, left them where they were. This king sends for them while he tasted the wine, and the phrase places the decision exactly: it is a drunk man's inspiration, and it is nonetheless deliberate. He knows what they are and where they came from; the text says so, naming the temple and the city. Vessels made for one use are handed round to the king and his lords, his wives and his concubines, and the guest list is part of the insult — what had been reserved for priests is now passed to the whole banquet.
They drank wine, and praised the gods of gold, and of silver, of bronze, of iron, of wood, and of stone Daniel 5:4.
This is not mere sacrilege; it is a toast. The cups of the God of Israel are raised to Babylon's own gods, and the meaning is unmistakable to everyone in the room: our gods took his gods' furniture, and here is the proof in our hands. With an enemy at the wall, the king stages a religious demonstration that his patrons are the stronger.
And the list of materials is the tell. Gold, silver, bronze, iron, wood, stone — four of them the metals of the image in the dream this man had grown up hearing about Daniel 2:32–33, with wood and stone added for the rest of the pantheon. He praises the substances of a statue that a prophecy had already reduced to chaff, on the night the second metal comes for the first. Daniel will shortly point out the one thing missing from the inventory: these gods don't see, or hear, or know, and the God whose hand holds the king's breath went unglorified Daniel 5:23. The hand appears in the next verse, and it is the only hand in the chapter that does anything.
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