Daniel 5 sets Babylon's fall at the feast of Belshazzar, whom it calls "king" and "son" of Nebuchadnezzar (5:1; 5:11; 5:30). The Babylonian monuments name a Bel-shar-usur as the eldest son of Nabonidus, the empire's last king, a crown prince left in command of the city while his father was elsewhere. The 1915 ISBE reconciles the two carefully, and the reconciliation is worth seeing for what it is: it proposes that Belshazzar ruled Babylon as co-regent (so he could be called "king"), and that "son of Nebuchadnezzar" follows the common Near-Eastern habit of naming a famous predecessor as "father" (as the Assyrians called Jehu "son of Omri"). On one point the records and Daniel plainly agree: the king's son died the night the city was taken. The ISBE presents this as the harmonization a conservative reader would make; a reader who weights the monuments differently may read the titles differently. (Source: ISBE 1915, "Belshazzar"; the crown-prince detail is from the Nabonidus-Cyrus Chronicle.)
Empires and rulers of the Old Testament world
Belshazzar: the night Babylon fell
RulerBabylon
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- Daniel 5:1bsb
Later, King Belshazzar held a great feast for a thousand of his nobles, and he drank wine with them.
- Daniel 5:30bsb
That very night Belshazzar king of the Chaldeans was slain,
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