Chapter five of the Book of Daniel describes the royal banquet of King Belshazzar, the son of Nebuchadnezzar. Nebuchadnezzar was the Babylonian emperor who had conquered Jerusalem, exiled its people, destroyed the Temple and carried off its sacred vessels in triumph. Interestingly, the Bible portrays him as eventually acknowledging his hubris and humbling himself, as he says, before the ‘Ever-Living One, whose dominion is an everlasting dominion and whose kingdom endures throughout the generations. All the inhabitants of the earth are of no account…’ (Daniel 4:31-32).
Belshazzar, his son, was nowhere near as humble. In the midst of a gala banquet he ordered the sacred vessels to be brought to his palace. In addition to profaning them by using them as common drinking cups, he added sacrilege by toasting and praising his pagan gods. In punishment for his glorifying lifeless gods, the live hand of God writes a cryptic message on the palace wall:
But you Belshazzar his son, did not humble yourself although you knew all this. You exalted yourself against the Lord of Heaven and had the vessels of His temple brought to you. You and your nobles, your consorts and your concubines drank wine from them and praised the gods of silver and gold, bronze and iron, wood and stone which do not see, hear or understand; but the God who controls your life breath and every move you make – Him you did not glorify! He therefore made the hand appear and caused the writing that is inscribed: Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin… (Daniel 5:22-25).
Rembrandt has captured the startled expression of the king and his guests. He has remained true to the biblical text insofar as only the king beholds the inscription, while the others drop their vessels and gaze at the king. It is noteworthy that he has painted the words of the cryptic message in Hebrew letters, but has written them up and down rather than from right to left, offering an inventive explanation for why they could not be deciphered.
Overcome by terror, Belshazzar called for his soothsayers. No one could interpret the inscription. The Queen suggested that they check with Daniel, one of the exiles from Jerusalem, who was summoned to solve the riddle. Daniel asserts that while his father Nebuchanezzar humbled himself before the Lord, Belshazzar’s impious desecration of the sacred vessels had called forth immediate punishment. The cryptograms, reduced to three, are to be deciphered as follows:
Mene – numbered; God numbered your reign and ended it.
Tekel – weighed; you have been weighed in the balance and found wanting
Pharsin – divided; your kingdom has been divided and given to the Medes and Persians.
The story ends with Daniel being given the insignia of nobility and Belshazzar being killed the night of the banquet.
Why such a stern and inexorable condemnation? What was it about the use of the holy vessels that signaled the fall of the curtain on the Babylonian empire?
In the description of Nebuchadnezzar’s conquest of Jerusalem, the Bible makes mention of the following bit of information:
King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon marched against him; he bound him in fetters to convey him to Babylon. Nebuchadnezzar also brought some vessels of the House of the Lord to Babylon, and set them in his palace. (2 Chronicles 36:7)
In reaction to this, Hananiah son of Azzur, a contemporary of the prophet Jeremiah, proclaims:
Thus said the Lord of Hosts the God of Israel: I hereby break the yoke of the king of Babylon. In two years I will restore to this place all the vessels of the House of the Lord which King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon took from this place and brought to Babylon. And I will bring back to this place King Jeconiah son of Jehoiakim of Judah, and all the Judean exiles who went to Babylon – declares the Lord. Yes, I will break the yoke of the king of Babylon (Jeremiah 28:1-4).
The order in his description is telling; first vessels, then the king, then the people. The captured vessels signify a perceived defeat of the God of Judah. Their symbolic value was immense. That would explain why Belshazzar’s misuse of them was so provocative, and induced the wrath of God.
The widespread misconception that the God of Israel was simply another deity in the international pantheon was put to an end that very evening in Babylon. By debasing the vessels of the Temple of the Lord, Belshazzar not only abused his royal privilege, but intended to celebrate his victory over the Israelite God.
What is all the more ironic is that precisely while Belshazzar was flexing his royal muscles and rejoicing, the divine hand of history, according to Herodotus, was at work undermining the king and kingdom, as the Persians and the Medes invaded Babylon.
The notion of royal vessels belonging to the King of Kings seems somewhat primitive and anthropomorphic. Does the Master of the Universe need a set of tableware? The Rabbis grappled with the question:
What was the purpose of…all of the holy vessels? The Jewish people said to the Holy One Blessed Be He: Master of the Universe, the kings of the nations have a palace, a table, a candelabrum, incense burners…these are appurtenances of kingship. Every king needs them, and You are our king, our savior, our redeemer; shouldn’t you have these royal paraphernalia so that the entire world will know that You are king? He said to them, My sons, you are flesh and blood and so you have need of all this, but I have not need since I do not eat or drink, I need no light as my servants attest, since the sun and the moon illuminate the world and I shine my light upon them. I shall watch over well in the merit of your fathers.
The conclusion is clear: the vessels serve man, not God. But precisely because men so depend on material forms as symbols, their misuse – as in the case of Belshazzar – brings on catastrophe.
Why then were there temple vessels which could cause such a philosophical misconception among Jews and gentiles alike? The answer lies in the fact that man was created in the image of God. God’s role as a creator is reflected in the creativity of man.
In Genesis, six days of creation were followed by the creation of the day of rest, the Sabbath. In the Book of Exodus we learn of six other days that were followed by a special seventh day:
The Presence of the Lord abode on Mount Sinai, and the cloud hid it for six days. On the seventh day, He called to Moses from the midst of the cloud…’Tell the Israelite people to bring Me gifts; you shall accept gifts for Me from every person who heart so moves him. And these are the gifts that you shall accept from them: gold, silver, and copper; blue, purple…And let them make Me a sanctuary that I may dwell among them.’ (Exodus 24:15-16, 25:1-9)
On the seventh day, Moses was instructed regarding the construction of the Sanctuary and its vessels. The parallel is so striking that the Rabbis determined that the kinds of labor prohibited on the Sabbath were all those acts necessary for the construction and furnishing of the Sanctuary in the desert. Man’s royal privilege to create, to pursue aesthetic perfection and technical virtuosity, found expression in the crafting of the sacred vessels for use in God’s sanctuaries. The vessels themselves were a form of offering. They were not merely receptacles for libations and sacrificial offering; they were inherently holy, having been consecrated to God by man, as an expression of his divine spark – his tzelem elohim – and as a form of thanksgiving.
Therefore, when Belshazzar defiled the sacred temple vessels by secular use, he violated the relationship of the people of Israel with their ancestral God. It was this which signaled an important turning point in Jewish history. When Belshazzar dislodged the spirit from the vessels where it was hiding, it openly revealed itself on the whitewashed wall from where it could never be erased, portending the end of Babylonian Empire and the return of the vessels and the people to where they belonged.
1. Rembrandt has adopted the opinion of Rabbi Samuel in b. Sanhedrin 22a. His friend and Jewish consultant Rabbi Menasseh ben Israel, no doubt, informed him, of this opinion. See Steven Nadler, op.cit. p. 125 ff.
2.Herodotus, Histories (1:191).
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