GOD’S WORD FOR YOU
DANIEL 5:5
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5 Suddenly the fingers of a human hand appeared and wrote on the plaster of the royal palace wall, opposite the lampstand. The king saw the hand as it wrote.
Archaeologist Robert Koldewey excavated Babylon with a team of two hundred working constantly from 1899-1917 (a German, Koldewey continued his work during the First World War without fighting). He excavated the huge ziggurat or step-pyramid that dominated the Babylonian skyline, the streets and buildings of the city, its walls, waterways, temples, and the palace of the kings. He also discovered what are thought to be the foundations and lower floors of the Hanging Gardens. In the palace was a very large room, 55 feet (17 meters) wide, and 170 feet (52 meters) long. In the center of one of the long sides was a niche, opposite the chamber’s main entrance. Here is where the throne stood on a dais. The king’s throne facing the entrance also faced a beautiful blue mosaic on the wall, but behind the king and to the sides, the walls were covered in plaster, which is surely the “gira” or plaster of our verse (Koldewey’s notes of the excavation includes the phrase “gips bestand,” or, “and there was plaster”).
The room would have been lit by ordinary candles on the tables, but also by an enormous “nebrashta,” a very large candelabra. Daniel uses the Babylonian word here, unique in Scripture, instead of the word “menorah,” the golden lampstand that was used in the temple and which was also captured by Nebuchadnezzar. It would be strange, very strange, for Daniel to rename the menorah if it were in use, even in a pagan setting, when he used the same word usually used for the goblets or dishes of the temple in verse 2. Therefore we can conclude that this was probably not the temple’s lampstand, but the usual lamp for the vast nine-thousand square-foot throne room (the same dimensions as two basketball courts laid out end-to-end). Considering the size of the room, it is obvious that a thousand guests would have had no trouble finding a place to sit (or recline, Esther 7:8; John 12:2). It would be comparable to the seating of guests one finds at a large wedding supper in our culture, although I have never been to a wedding with that many guests. Nor would I want to have to wash the dishes or clean the tables and floors afterward.
During the drinking, the toasts, the laughter, and the usual joy of a holiday, the king’s eyes were suddenly drawn to the plaster wall of the banquet hall. A hand was there, with fingers writing something on the wall. Daniel’s taxt assures us that the king could see the hand, but we wonder and even suspect that the guests could not see the hand. But it’s clear that everybody could see what the hand had written there. The letters that were written by the hand were clear for everyone to see because they were written on the wall opposite or across from the big lampstand, and the magicians are going to be called in to try to read the writing.
What about this hand and its fingers? Gerhard says that there was a tradition known in his time that “three fingers of one hand write on the wall opposite the face of the feasting King Belshazzar, and those three fingers indicate the three persons of the Trinity” (Exegesis, Volume III, §29). He also quotes the Latin text of Isaiah: “Who grasps the mass of the earth with three fingers?” (Isaiah 40:12, quis adpendit tribus digitis molem terrae, Vulgate). But Isaiah’s text is simply, “Who has held the dust of the earth in a measure?” And our text in Daniel says nothing of only three fingers; not in Aramaic, nor Latin, nor German. The numeral would be “talatah” just as Daniel has in 3:23; 6:2 and 7:5, and other places in the Aramaic part of his book. If we take this idea of “three fingers” in the kindest possible way– such as that three fingers are usually used to grasp a pen or a stylus (although I would have said four fingers are usually in use)– we still have only a very shadowy hint that the Trinity is meant here. It would be better to say that such a claim only decorates the text, it is not proved by the text in this place. Gerhard concludes: “If (such allegories or imagery that can’t be proved) are less appropriate and fitting, then the learned hold them in contempt, or adversaries laugh at them, and the weak are offended by them.” They’re not useful.
Daniel himself says that the hand was sent by God (5:24). It wrote what God wanted it to write. Was it the hand of God? Was it a disembodied (as it were) hand of the pre-incarnate Christ, who is the Word of God (John 1:1; 1:14)? Was it an angelic hand? These are questions we do not need to answer, and cannot answer, with certainty. The hand was sent by God just as the fire that did not consume the bush was a fire that was sent by God (Exodus 3:2). The hand wrote out the word of God in judgment for Belshazzar to see, but he would not be able to understand.
This verse proclaims the law and a severe judgment. Too often sinners do not even understand that what they are doing is sinful, as if they cannot understand the meaning of the Ten Commandments or of Christ’s explanation of the Commandments in the Gospels (Matthew 5:21-48; Mark 10:11-19). They too often have no clue that “sin is everything that is contrary to the law” as our Confession clearly states. But the main function of the law is to reprove, to show us our sins. This is what the fingers of the hand were doing as they wrote on Belshazzar’s pretty white wall.
When a man picks up his trowel and spreads plaster over a surface of lath, brick, or stone, he might concentrate on doing a good, fine job. My dad, brother, and cousins were painters like that. I was always thinking and daydreaming of other things. I would wonder (I specifically remember doing so) as I spread plaster on a wall, “What will happen to this plaster some day? Will it last until the building is torn down? Will it be ruined by a leak from above? Will some thug with a sledge hammer break it all apart looking for loot? Will a child draw something that will have to be painted over?” But imagine having a hand sent from God to write a message, a clear message of law or gospel, on that plaster. The workman’s heart swells to think God would use what he had done for God’s good purpose. So it is with the potter who turned the clay cup on his wheel, a cup that Jesus used. Or the shipwright who pegged in the strakes of the ploion boat that Jesus used to cross the sea (Matthew 8:23). But whether the shipwright, or the potter, or the painter has done a thing that the Lord himself would use, or that the Lord’s servants will use, what truly matters is that whatever we do, we do to God’s glory. “Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might” (Ecclesiastes 9:10), and “do it all for the glory of God’ (1 Corinthians 10:31). Here the law of God guides believers. And where it condemns sin like Belshazzar’s, it is written to instruct us and to correct us, so that we can repent, turn back to God, put our trust in him, and be forgiven.
In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith
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Pastor Smith serves St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, New Ulm, Minnesota
God’s Word for You – Daniel 5:5 Fingers