Handwriting on the Wall, The

DESCRIPTION: "At the feast of Belshazzar and a thousand of the lords, While they drank from golden vessels," "the hand of God" wrote "on the wall." Daniel explains the situation to Belshazzar. The hand may write about you, too
AUTHOR: Knowles Shaw (1834-1878)
EARLIEST DATE: 1965 (Burton/Manning-EastTennesseeStateCollectionVol1)
KEYWORDS: religious nonballad
FOUND IN: US(Ap)
REFERENCES (1 citation):
Burton/Manning-EastTennesseeStateCollectionVol1, p. 46, "At the Feast of Belshazzar" (1 short text, 1 tune)
Roud #7123
CROSS-REFERENCES:
cf. "There's a Little Hand Writing on the Wall" (subject)
NOTES [397 words]: This is a brief summary of the first part of Daniel 5. The festival for a thousand of his lords is in Daniel 5:1. The bringing in of golden vessels is in 5:2. The hand that writes on the wall appears in 5:5. Daniel is summoned in 5:12, although he should not be called a "captive"; he was in exile, but seems to have been free to go where he wished, at least in Babylon, at this time. The Shaw song does not continue the story after this, but the rest of the chapter of Daniel describes Belshazzar's fear and the overthrow of Babylon.
Unfortunately for anyone interested in this hymn, there was no King Belshazzar of Babylon. The last king of Babylon was Nabonidas. He had a son whose name would probably have been rendered "Belshazzar" in Aramaic (the language of this section of Daniel), but this Belshazzar never became king. The rest of the "history" in this part of Daniel is even worse, e.g. there was no King Darius the Mede, and while there were Kings Darius of Persia, they came after, not before, Cyrus of Persia. All evidence is that the author of the Book of Daniel wrote during the 160s B.C.E., during the persecution of Antiochus IV of Syria, and that the author knew effectively nothing about the events of 539 B.C.E. (when Persians under Cyrus captured Nabonidas's Babylon). He doesn't even seem to have been able to write proper Hebrew (a scholarly rather than a living language by the 160s), which is probably why he gave up and started writing in Aramaic.
It is also curious that the Septuagint Greek translation, which was probably made just a few decades after Daniel was written, omits much of this chapter, especially verses 17-22, which is most of Daniel's condemnation of Belshazzar. This raises a strong possibility that the Aramaic of this chapter was heavily interpolated by a later writer.
Steve Roud initially separated "The Handwriting on the Wall" (#7123) and "There's a Little Hand Writing on the Wall" (#11814); he has now combined them under the former number. He may be right; they are obviously about the same topic. But the Writing on the Wall is one of the most vivid and famous of Old Testament stories, and has been the subject of much later writing. Given the difference in form, I (tentatively) continue to split them; the lyrics of "There's a Little Hand" do not occur in Knowles Shaw's original text of "The Handwriting on the Wall." - RBW
Last updated in version 6.6
File: BuM1046

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