Canter Bridge

Badly as Babylon’s King Nebuchadnezzar comes off, he is the moral equivalent of a rock star when placed alongside his pitiable son Belshazzar. For all his overweening pride, the pater familias of this dubious tribe at least learned the lesson that ‘the God of the heavens is sovereign over the affairs of men and gives rule and power to whomever he wills’. Thought it took becoming an animal to figure this out, the biblical book of Daniel at least credits the now defunct Nebuchadnezzar for his tuition.

Not so Belshazzar the son, a man who earns that lamentable historical badge of being the last leader of an empire. Belshazzar will learn nothing and will die in the very night his chickens come home to roost.

Now the book’s chronicling of Nebuchadnezzar’s mixed record is full of commands. One might gather the impression that giving commands is all this foolish king knew how to do. Chapters three and four register four times the fact that Nebuchadnezzar gave a te’em, a commandment or decree. It is virtually the royal thing to do, at least in Babylon where—over against the Israelite ideal of monarchy—the king does not listen, read Torah, or consult the politically independent and YHWH-sourced prophet.

Telling people to do things and throwing drunken parties are about the only two activities the text allows to remain in the playbook on the Babylonian king’s bedroom shelf. He also seems to collect hordes of available women, let us not wrest from his hands a third activity.

At any rate, Nebuchadnezzar’s core competence seems to be ‘placing a te’em‘: decreeing things. Not to be too harsh on the man, he is credited with a worldwide following of people who do what he has said they will do. His decrees may be foolish, but they are not impotent.

Enter Belshazzar, Nebuchadnezzar’s son.

The text that describes this party animal is rich with ironies pertaining to gold and the other raw products of his royal pretense. That much is obvious.

What may be less so is that, a mere two sentences into the man’s appearance, we find him setting the table for his own demise. Significantly, this rump end of imperial dynasty—Cyrus the Mede will soon replace him—does not appear in full imperative stride. Unlike his father, he does not decree. He acts rather under the decree of wine.

King Belshazzar made a great festival for a thousand of his lords, and he was drinking wine in the presence of the thousand. Under the influence of the wine, Belshazzar commanded that they bring in the vessels of gold and silver that his father Nebuchadnezzar had taken out of the temple in Jerusalem, so that the king and his lords, his wives, and his concubines might drink from them. So they brought in the vessels of gold and silver that had been taken out of the temple, the house of God in Jerusalem, and the king and his lords, his wives, and his concubines drank from them. They drank the wine and praised the gods of gold and silver, bronze, iron, wood, and stone.

A more literal flourish on the part of the translator might have said it like this:

Belshazzar, under the decree of the wine, spoke (ordered) that they bring the vessels of gold and silver …

So is the decline of this feckless imperial dynasty writ small in the party-room of its pathetic scion on the night of his unlamented death.

The Hebrew Bible’s refined sense for irony appears to smirk with an exiled captive’s self-satisfaction at the death spiral of his bombastic, self-absorbed, drunken emperor.

There is more than one way to refuse to bend the knee.