Daniel 5:1-6 - The fingers of a human hand appeared

5:1-4

We now jump to near the very end of the Babylonian empire. The armies of Cyrus were gathering and very soon they would conquer Babylon. Belshazzar, the son of Nebuchadnezzar, was a pretty useless king. At the start of this chapter we have him giving a great banquet and profaning the things of God. There was lots of wine flowing around the banquet. In earlier days Nebuchadnezzar had had many gold and silver goblets brought in from the temple in Jerusalem. The text emphasises that these were “taken from the temple of God”, but Belshazzar, his nobles, wives and concubines drank from them, and as they did so they praised to “gods of gold and silver, of bronze, iron, wood and stone”. They were utterly profaning the name of the Lord. When people become proud and boastful we can be sure that a fall is not far away. All this show was pure bravado, as the armies of Cyrus were close at hand.

5:5,6

Then a hand appeared and wrote on the wall. It seems that King Belshazzar was the only one who saw the hand.  He watched it as it wrote and was in a state of shock. From the following verses it is clear that he did not know what it had written. However, the king must have known how fragile his kingdom was. The banquet was an act of bravado, pretending that he was in control and feared nothing. So when something like this happened he knew, or feared, that he had been found out.