Biblion Bible Commentary
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You Have Not Humbled Your Heart
Daniel 5:17-24
17 Then Daniel answered before the king, “Let your gifts be to yourself, and give your rewards to another. Nevertheless, I will read the writing to the king, and make known to him the interpretation. · WEB
Daniel refuses the fee and then indicts the king on one count: he knew his father's story and learned nothing from it.
Let your gifts be to yourself, and give your rewards to another. Nevertheless, I will read the writing to the king, and make known to him the interpretation Daniel 5:17.
The purple and the gold chain are declined before a word of interpretation is spoken, and the refusal is what buys the next seven verses their freedom. A paid man could not have said what follows. Daniel will read the writing anyway — the service is given, the fee is not taken — which is the posture of every prophet who ever had to tell a ruler the truth on his own premises 2 Kings 5:16 Numbers 22:18.
To you, king, the Most High God gave Nebuchadnezzar your father the kingdom, and greatness, and glory, and majesty Daniel 5:18.
He begins with history, and with the same accounting he had used on the man himself: God gave it Daniel 2:37. The greatness is described without stint — nations trembling, and a king who killed whom he wanted to, and he kept alive whom he wanted to Daniel 5:19 — the very language of arbitrary power that the vision of the tree existed to correct. Then the turn: but when his heart was lifted up, and his spirit was hardened so that he dealt proudly, he was deposed from his kingly throne, and they took his glory from him Daniel 5:20. The grass, the dew, the animal's heart, and the terminus — until he knew that the Most High God rules in the kingdom of men Daniel 5:21. A whole chapter compressed into three verses, spoken to a man who had grown up inside the story.
You, his son, Belshazzar, have not humbled your heart, though you knew all this Daniel 5:22.
There is the charge, and though you knew all this is the whole of it. The predecessor had been ignorant and was taught; this king was taught in advance, for nothing. He inherited the most expensive lesson any monarch ever paid for and treated it as a family anecdote. Scripture treats knowledge as an aggravation, not a mitigation — the servant who knew is beaten with more stripes Luke 12:47–48 Hebrews 10:26 — and the whole architecture of these two chapters turns on the contrast: one king humbled and restored, the next weighed and finished.
But have lifted up yourself against the Lord of heaven; and they have brought the vessels of his house before you... you have praised the gods of silver and gold, of bronze, iron, wood, and stone, which don't see, or hear, or know Daniel 5:23.
The indictment names the act precisely: not merely drunkenness or sacrilege but self-exaltation against the Lord of heaven. And the gods toasted from Jerusalem's cups are dismissed in the prophets' standard three verbs — they do not see, hear, or know Psalms 115:4–7 Isaiah 44:18 Jeremiah 10:5. The contrast lands in one clause: you have not glorified the God in whose hand your breath is, and whose are all your ways. Every lungful the king took while insulting him was on loan from him. Then the part of the hand was sent from before him Daniel 5:24 — the hand came from the God whose hand held his breath, which is the connection the whole speech exists to make.
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