Biblion Bible Commentary
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In That Night
Daniel 5:29-31
29 Then Belshazzar commanded, and they clothed Daniel with purple, and put a chain of gold about his neck, and made proclamation concerning him, that he should be the third ruler in the kingdom. · WEB
The king keeps his promise to the man who has just sentenced him, and the empire changes hands before morning.
Then Belshazzar commanded, and they clothed Daniel with purple, and put a chain of gold about his neck, and made proclamation concerning him, that he should be the third ruler in the kingdom Daniel 5:29.
The reward is conferred on a man who had refused it Daniel 5:17 and had just told the king he was finished. Whatever else is true of Belshazzar, he pays his debts and he does not kill the messenger — the honors are proclaimed publicly, at the highest rank he had authority to give. It is a strange, almost admirable piece of conduct, and it changes nothing. He honors the interpreter and does not act on the interpretation. There is no confession here, no torn robe, no plea, nothing of Nineveh's response to a far blunter message Jonah 3:6–9. The purple goes on Daniel, the account stays closed, and the room presumably goes back to the wine.
The promotion also arrives too late to be worth anything by morning — a rank in a kingdom that has hours to run. Daniel accepts what he had declined as a fee once it can no longer function as one, and the position he is given by a dying regime is precisely what places him in the administration of the next Daniel 6:2. God's provision for his servant is routed through the last official act of the man he had to condemn.
In that night Belshazzar the Chaldean King was slain Daniel 5:30.
One sentence. No siege narrative, no account of how the defenses failed, no description of the assault — the empire that had carried Judah into exile, burned the temple, and taken the vessels ends in eleven words. The brevity is the judgment. And in that night seals the interval: the writing appeared and the sentence executed within a single evening, with the interpretation as the only warning given and no time allowed for it to be acted upon. A kingdom counted, weighed, and divided in the space of one banquet.
Darius the Mede received the kingdom, being about sixty-two years old Daniel 5:31.
Received — the same passive the whole book has used. He does not seize or conquer it; it is handed to him, and the reader has been told for four chapters who does the handing Daniel 2:21 Daniel 4:17 Daniel 5:28. The second metal is in place. History outside the book knows this transition as the fall of Babylon to Cyrus's army; the identity of the Darius who received the kingdom under him is discussed at length and settled by nobody, and the book's argument does not rest on it. What the chapter has established is that the change of empire happened on a stated night, to a named power, exactly as a prophecy given in the first empire's greatest days had said it would.
held with reason What this mark means