Belshazzar in Easton's Bible Dictionary
Bel protect the king!, the last of the kings of Babylon
(Dan.
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" (Dan. 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 (Dan. 5:30).
(See
NERGAL-SHAREZER -T0002709.)
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.
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