| Belshazzar - Bel
protect the king!, the last of the kings of
Babylon (Dan. 5:1). He was the son of
Nabonidus by Nitocris, who was the daughter
of Nebuchadnezzar and the widow of
Nergal-sharezer. When still young he made a
great feast to a thousand of his lords, and
when heated with wine sent for the sacred
vessels his "father" (Dan. 5:2), or
grandfather, Nebuchadnezzar had carried away
from the temple in Jerusalem, and he and his
princes drank out of them. In the midst of
their mad revelry a hand was seen by the
king tracing on the wall the announcement of
God's judgment, which that night fell upon
him. At the instance of the queen (i.e., his
mother) Daniel was brought in, and he
interpreted the writing. That night the
kingdom of the Chaldeans came to an end, and
the king was slain (Dan. 5:30). The
absence of the name of Belshazzar on the
monuments was long regarded as an argument
against the genuineness of the Book of
Daniel. In 1854 Sir Henry Rawlinson found an
inscription of Nabonidus which referred to
his eldest son. Quite recently, however, the
side of a ravine undermined by heavy rains
fell at Hillah, a suburb of Babylon. A
number of huge, coarse earthenware vases
were laid bare. These were filled with
tablets, the receipts and contracts of a
firm of Babylonian bankers, which showed
that Belshazzar had a household, with
secretaries and stewards. One was dated in
the third year of the king Marduk-sar-uzur.
As Marduk-sar-uzar was another name for
Baal, this Marduk-sar-uzur was found to be
the Belshazzar of Scripture. In one of these
contract tablets, dated in the July after
the defeat of the army of Nabonidus, we find
him paying tithes for his sister to the
temple of the sun-god at Sippara.
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