Today, I am reading and commenting on Daniel 5-6.

Reading the account about the writing on the wall, I was again struck by something which I had never thought about before.  It’s not that I never noticed, just that I never thought it noteworthy.  When the fingers appeared and began writing on the wall, the ruler of Babylon, Belshazzar, was terrified.  I had never really thought about it because fingers appearing and starting to write would be somewhat frightening in any case.  Today, it struck me, the writer thought it necessary to point out that Belshazzar was terrified.  That suggests that there was more going on than just the fingers appearing.  Which led me to think about the fact that the writers tell us that he was deliberately committing sacrilege against the God of the Israelites by using goblets taken from the temple in Jerusalem to drink from while praising other gods.  To me this suggests that Belshazzar understood that the writing represented judgement against him, despite the fact that he could not read it.  This is confirmed for me when he became even more frightened when his “wise men” could not read the writing.  Those “wise men” would have been well trained in the lore surrounding the gods whom Belshazzar acknowledged so that, if the writing was from one of those gods, they should have been able to read it.  So, Belshazzar knew the message even though he was unable to read what was written.  The message of Belshazzar’s fear is the same as what Paul writes in the first chapter of Romans, God’s qualities have been known such that people are without excuse.  Later in the passage, Daniel even tells Belshazzar that he knew about God, and still refused to be humble before Him.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.