The Writing on the Wall, and the Lions

Nebuchadnezzar died, and after him came other kings, and Daniel grew old in Babylon. And one night the king who was then on the throne — Belshazzar — gave an enormous party for a thousand of his nobles. And when the wine was in him, he had a splendid idea. There were cups in the treasury that his grandfather had taken out of the house of God in Jerusalem, seventy years before: the gold and silver cups made for the worship of the Lord. Fetch those, he said, and let us drink out of them. So they poured wine into the cups of the temple, and drank, and sang the praises of their gods of gold and silver and bronze and iron and wood and stone. And at that moment the fingers of a human hand came out of the air beside the lampstand and began to write on the plaster of the palace wall. Just a hand. Writing. And the king watching the knuckles of it move. The color went out of his face, and his thoughts terrified him, and his legs gave way under him so that his knees knocked together. And he shouted for every wise man in Babylon: whoever can read this writing and tell me what it means will be dressed in purple and wear a gold chain and be the third man in the kingdom. And they all came in and looked at it. And not one of them could read it.

And then the queen came into the banqueting hall — she was old enough to remember the old days — and she said, “O king, live for ever. Do not let your thoughts frighten you. There is a man in your kingdom who has the spirit of God in him. In your father’s day he was found to have understanding and wisdom like the wisdom of the gods, and your father made him chief of all the wise men. His name is Daniel. Send for Daniel, and he will tell you what it means.” So they sent for the old man. And the king offered him the purple and the gold chain and the third place in the kingdom. And Daniel said, “Keep your gifts, and give your presents to somebody else. I will read the king the writing anyway.” And then he told the king the truth, which nobody had done all evening: “The Most High God gave your grandfather Nebuchadnezzar a kingdom and greatness and glory. And when his heart grew proud, God brought him down out of it, until he learned that the Most High rules over the kingdoms of men and gives them to whoever he pleases. And you are his son, and you knew all this — and you have not made your heart humble. You have lifted yourself up against the Lord of heaven. You had the cups of his house brought in, and you and your nobles drank out of them and praised gods of silver and gold that cannot see or hear or know anything at all. And the God who holds your breath in his hand, and every road you walk on — him you have not honored.” And then he read the writing. Three words: “Mene. Tekel. Peres. Mene — God has counted the days of your kingdom, and finished it. Tekel — you have been weighed in the scales and found light. Peres — your kingdom is divided, and given to the Medes and the Persians.” And Belshazzar kept his word: they put the purple robe on Daniel and the gold chain round his neck and made him third in the kingdom. And that same night the king was killed, and Darius the Mede took the kingdom. The writing did not take long to come true.

Under the new king, Daniel — who must have been well over eighty by then — did so well that Darius decided to put him in charge of the whole empire. And the other officials could not bear it. So they went looking for something to accuse him of: some bribe, some mistake, some fiddled account. And they could not find one single thing, because he was faithful, and there was nothing to find. So they said to each other, “We shall never find anything against this man — unless we find it in the law of his God.” And they went to the king in a body, and flattered him, and told him that everybody had agreed on a splendid new law: for thirty days, nobody in the empire may ask anything of any god or any man — except the king. And anybody who does is thrown into the den of lions. And, they added, let it be written down and sealed, in the way of the Medes and Persians, so that it cannot be changed. And Darius, flattered, signed it.

And when Daniel heard that the law had been signed, he went home. And he went up to his own room, where the windows were open toward Jerusalem — and he knelt down and prayed and gave thanks to his God, three times that day, just as he had always done. He did not hide. He did not shut the windows. He did not pray in a cupboard for thirty days and start again in the spring. He simply went on doing what he had been doing since he was a boy — and they were waiting outside to watch him do it. So they went to the king and reminded him of his lovely new law, and then said, “Daniel, one of the captives from Judah, pays no attention to you or to the law you signed. Three times a day he says his prayers.” And Darius understood, far too late, exactly what he had signed and who had made him sign it. And he was sick about it. He spent the whole day trying to find a way out — and there was none, because the law of the Medes and Persians could not be changed, not even by the king who made it. So at sundown he gave the order, and they brought Daniel and put him down into the lions’ den. And the king said to him, through the dark, “Your God, whom you serve so faithfully — may he rescue you.” And they rolled a stone over the mouth of the den, and the king sealed it with his own ring so that nothing could be changed.

And the king went back to his palace and would not eat. He sent away his musicians. He lay down and could not sleep. And God shut the lions’ mouths, and they did Daniel no harm at all. At the first grey light of morning the king was up and running — running, an old king in his nightclothes — to the den. And when he got near, he called out in a voice full of grief: “Daniel! Servant of the living God! Your God, whom you serve so faithfully — has he been able to save you from the lions?” And out of the pit came a voice: “O king, live for ever! My God sent his messenger and shut the lions’ mouths, and they have not hurt me — because I was found innocent in front of him. And I have done nothing wrong to you either, O king.” And the king was beside himself with joy, and had Daniel lifted out. And when they looked him over, there was not a scratch on him. And then the king turned on the men who had set the trap, and had them thrown into the den themselves, with their families — and the lions were not hungry that time. The pit those men dug for somebody else was where they finished. And Darius wrote to every nation and language in the earth: “I make this decree: in every part of my kingdom, let people stand in awe of the God of Daniel. For he is the living God, and he goes on for ever. His kingdom will never be destroyed, and his rule will have no end. He rescues and he saves, and he does signs and wonders in heaven and on earth — and he has rescued Daniel out of the power of the lions.” And Daniel — the boy who would not eat the king’s dinner, the young man who read a dream, the old man who would not shut his window — did well all his life, right through the reign of Darius and on into the reign of Cyrus the Persian. And it was Cyrus who finally let the people go home.