That night Belšazzar was killed and the
Babylonian Empire ended. The author of Daniel chose one of the most iconic
Babylonian beliefs to announce its demise, that is, the age-old idea that the
gods communicated in the future by leaving ominous signs everywhere as heavenly
writing. The Babylonian scholars were no longer able to read them; the writings
of the gods was incomprehensible to them. Only a younger foreigner could
understand them. It is generally assumed that the biblical author imagined
Hebrew letter to appear on the wall—Rembrandt’s Belšazzar’s Feast strikingly displays this—and that the
language was Aramaic. But what if the message was in Babylonian and written
with cuneiform signs. That was after all the accepted system through which gods
communicated with humans. This would make the failure of the Babylonian
diviners even more dramatic. They no longer had a connection to the scholarly tradition
that was Babylonian’s pride. The empire had lost its power over knowledge. (Marc
Van Der Mieroop, Before and After Babel: Writings as Resistance in Ancient Near
Eastern Empires [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023]. 197-98)
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