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Easton's Bible Dictionary
Bel protect the king!,
The last of the kings of Babylon ( Daniel
5:1 ). He was the son of Nabonidus by Nitocris, who was the daughter of Nebuchadnezzar
and the widow of Nergal-sharezer. When still young he made a great feast to a
thousand of his lords, and when heated with wine sent for the sacred vessels his
"father" ( Daniel
5:2 ), or grandfather, Nebuchadnezzar had carried away from the temple in
Jerusalem, and he and his princes drank out of them. In the midst of their mad
revelry a hand was seen by the king tracing on the wall the announcement of God's
judgment, which that night fell upon him. At the instance of the queen (i.e.,
his mother) Daniel was brought in, and he interpreted the writing. That night
the kingdom of the Chaldeans came to an end, and the king was slain ( Daniel
5:30 ). (See NERGAL-SHAREZER.)
The absence of the name of Belshazzar on the monuments was long regarded as an
argument against the genuineness of the Book of Daniel. In 1854 Sir Henry Rawlinson
found an inscription of Nabonidus which referred to his eldest son. Quite recently,
however, the side of a ravine undermined by heavy rains fell at Hillah, a suburb
of Babylon. A number of huge, coarse earthenware vases were laid bare. These were
filled with tablets, the receipts and contracts of a firm of Babylonian bankers,
which showed that Belshazzar had a household, with secretaries and stewards. One
was dated in the third year of the king Marduk-sar-uzur. As Marduk-sar-uzar was
another name for Baal, this Marduk-sar-uzur was found to be the Belshazzar of
Scripture. In one of these contract tablets, dated in the July after the defeat
of the army of Nabonidus, we find him paying tithes for his sister to the temple
of the sun-god at Sippara.
Hitchcock's Dictionary of Bible Names
master of the treasure
Smith's Bible Dictionary
(prince of Bel)
The last king of Babylon. In ( Daniel
5:2 ) Nebuchadnezzar is called the
father of Belshazzar. This, of course, need only mean grandfather or ancestor.
According to the well-known narrative Belshazzar gave a splendid feast in his
palace during the siege of Babylon (B.C. 538), using the sacred vessels of the
temple, which Nebuchadnezzer had brought from Jerusalem. The miraculous appearance
of the handwriting on the wall, the calling in of Daniel to interpret its meaning
the prophecy of the overthrow of the kingdom, and Belshazsars death, accorded
in Daniel
5.
International Standard Bible Encyclopedia
bel-shaz'-ar (belsha'tstsar; Baltasar, Babylonian Bel-shar-usur):
According
to Daniel
5:30, he was the Chaldean king under whom Babylon was taken by Darius the
Mede. The Babylonian monuments speak a number of times of a Bel-shar-usur who
was the "firstborn son, the offspring of the heart of" Nabunaid, the last king
of the Babylonian empire, that had been founded by Nabopolassar, the father of
Nebuchadnezzar, at the time of the death of Ashurbanipal, king of Assyria, in
626 BC. There is no doubt that this Belshazzar is the same as the Belshazzar of
Daniel. It is not necessary to suppose that Belshazzar was at any time king of
the Babylonian empire in the sense that Nebuchadnezzar and Nabunaid were. It is
probable, as M. Pognon argues, that a son of Nabunaid, called Nabunaid after his
father, was king of Babylon, or Babylonian king, in Harran (Haran), while his
father was overlord in Babylon. This second Nabunaid is called "the son of the
offspring of the heart" of Nabunaid his father. It is possible that this second
Nabundid was the king who was killed by Cyrus, when he crossed the Tigris above
Arbela in the 9th year of Nabunaid his father, and put to death the king of the
country (see the Nabunaid-Cyrus Chronicle col. ii, 17); since according to the
Eshki-Harran inscription, Nabunaid the Second died in the 9th year of Nabunaid
the First. Belshazzar may have been the son of the king who is said in the same
chronicle to have commanded the Babylonian army in Accad from the 6th to the 11th
year of Nabunaid I; or, possibly longer, for the annals before the 6th and after
the 11th year are broken and for the most part illegible. This same son of the
king is most probably mentioned again in the same chronicle as having died in
the night in which Babylon was captured by Gobryas of Gutium. As Nabunaid II,
though reigning at Hatran under the overlordship of his father, is called king
of Babylon on the same inscription on which his father is called by the same title;
so Belshazzar may have been called king of Babylon, although he was only crown
prince. It is probable also, that as Nabunaid I had made one of his sons king
of Harran, so he had made another king of Chaldea. This would account for Belshazzar's
being called in Daniel
5:30 the Chaldean king, although, to be sure, this word Chaldean may describe
his race rather than his kingdom. The 3rd year of Belshazzar spoken of in Daniel
8:1, would then refer to his 3rd year as subking of the Chaldeans under his
father Nabunaid, king of Babylon, just as Cambyses was later subking of Babylon,
while his fathe r Cyrus was king of the lands. From the Book of Daniel we might
infer that this subkingdom embraced Chaldea and Susiana, and possibly the province
of Babylon; and from the Nabunaid-Cyrus Chronicle that it extended over Accad
as well. That the city of Babylon alone was sometimes at least governed by an
official called king is highly probable, since the father of Nergal-har-ucur is
certainly, and the father of Nabunaid I is probably, called king of Babylon, in
both of which cases, the city, or at most the province, of Babylon must have been
meant, since we know to a certainty all of the kings who had been ruling over
the empire of Babylon since 626 BC, when Nabopolassar became king, and the names
of neither of these fathers of kings is found among them.
In addition to Nabunaid II, Belshazzar seems to have had another brother named
Nebuchadnezzar, since the two Babylonian rebels against Darius Hystaspis both
assumed the name of Nebuchadnezzar the son of Nabunaid (see the Behistun Inscription,
I, 85, 89, 95). He had a sister also named Ina-esagilaremat, and a second named
probably Ukabu'shai'-na.
Belshazzar had his own house in Babylon, where he seems to have been engaged in
the woolen or clothing trade. He owned also estates from which he made large gifts
to the gods. His father joins his name with his own in some of his prayers to
the gods, and apparently appointed him commander of the army of Accad, whose especial
duty it was to defend the city of Babylon against the attacks of the armies of
Media and Persia.
It would appear from the Nabunaid-Cyrus Chronicle, that Belshazzar was de facto
king of the Babylonian empire, all that was left of it, from the 4th to the 8th
month of the 17th year of the reign of his father Nabunaid, and that he died on
the night in which Babylon was taken by Gobryas of Gutium (that is, probably,
Darius the Mede (see DARIUS)).
The objection to the historical character of the narrative of Daniel, based upon
the fact that Belshazzar in Daniel
5:11, 18
is said to have been the son of Nebuchadnezzar whereas the monuments state that
he was the son of Nabunaid, is fully met by supposing that one of them was his
real and the other his adoptive father; or by supposing that the queen-mother
and Daniel referred to the greatest of his predecessors as his father, just as
Omri is called by the Assyrians the father of Jehu, and as the claimants to the
Medo-Pers throne are called on the Behistun Inscription the sons of Cyaxares,
and as at present the reigning sheikhs of northern Arabia are all called the sons
of Rashid, although in reality they are not his sons.
LITERATURE.
The best sources of information as to the life and times of Belshazzar for English
readers are: The Records of the Past; Pinches, The Old Testament in the Light
of the Historical Records of Assyria and Babylonia; Sayce. The Higher Criticism
and the Monuments; and W. W. Wright's two great works, Daniel and His Prophecies
and Daniel and His Critics.
R. Dick Wilson
Tags:
belshazzar, babylon (last king), bible commentary, bible history, bible reference, bible study, daniel, define, mene tekel upharsin, nebuchadnezzar, sacred vessels, writing on the wall
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