Belshazzar was missing from history until 1854

Daniel 5 stages its famous scene, the hand writing on the palace wall, at the feast of Belshazzar, on the night Babylon falls. For a long time that name was a problem. The Greek historians listed Babylon's last king as Nabonidus. No Belshazzar anywhere. Skeptics reasonably concluded Daniel had invented him.

Then, in 1854, cylinders excavated from a ziggurat at Ur were read: a prayer of Nabonidus for "Belshazzar, my firstborn son." Babylonian records filled in the picture. Nabonidus absented himself from Babylon for years at the Arabian oasis of Tayma, and his son ran the capital in his place. The man at the feast was real, and he really was the authority in the city on the night it fell.

The details repay attention. Daniel never has the king offer the usual reward of second place; Belshazzar offers the interpreter of the writing the position of "third ruler in the kingdom." If the first two places were an absent father and the son hosting the feast, third was the highest seat he had to give. Honest note in the other direction: no Babylonian text ever calls Belshazzar king, and Daniel calls Nebuchadnezzar his father where the cylinders name Nabonidus; the chapter's memory is sharp on the man and loose on the titles. Both facts belong in the story.

Where to see it: a Nabonidus cylinder naming Belshazzar is in the British Museum. Read Daniel 5:7, 16, and 29, and watch for "third."