Daniel Lesson 15

Historical Background of Belshazzar’s Feast – 5:4

Daniel is a book of wisdom; if were a book of prophecy it would be included with the prophets; it is not included with the prophets, it is included with the wisdom literature of the Old Testament, in the third part of the Hebrew canon, not the second part. Therefore the key issue in Daniel is not prophecy but the application of prophecy to experience and this fact alone should have prevented many premillenarians from sitting around waiting for Christ to return talking about prophecy and should have showed them that the way to handle prophecy is to use it in the present, not just sit around waiting for the future.

The book of Daniel was written in certain parts; the part that we’re studying, chapters 2-6, deals with the various crises in Daniel’s political career. Daniel is a political official and therefore represents a model for believers of all time how to operate inside the cosmos when the kingdom of God is not in its spectacular form, when God the Holy Spirit is not moving as He did before 586 BC, but He is moving in an indirect way through the Gentiles. Jesus called the time that began with the fall of Jerusalem the times of the Gentiles, and the times of the Gentiles is when the kingdom of man dominates. The kingdom of God is held in abeyance, God the Holy Spirit has withdrawn His Shekinah glory from the temple; the temple has been destroyed and now every believer in Israel must dwell underneath Gentile dominion. So we have acted out in history the cosmos in operation.

So each one of these crises that Daniel faces, in Daniel 2 he had the crisis of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream; in chapter 3 the crisis involving the four youths; in chapter 4 the crisis involved in Nebuchadnezzar’s psychosis, and now in chapter 5 we have the crisis of Belshazzar’s feast, or if we wanted to be slightly humorous, panic in the palace. Daniel 5 is the time when the Babylonian Empire collapsed, and a lot of history is involved, and so this morning before we go too far into chapter 5 it will be necessary to review a vast amount of history. History, because one reason, history is no longer taught in the public schools; it is no longer taught because there’s no framework left in which to teach history, so therefore the average person knows nothing of the great Persian Empire and what a tremendous contribution it made in history, and why God used Cyrus to end the Babylonian Empire, when in fact the whole issue of God using Cyrus is a topic of prophecy in Isaiah; it’s a topic of prophecy in Jeremiah, and it also comes out in the book of Daniel. This is a very important era of history.

There are certain principles involved in the fall of Babylon that we can apply to our own nation. So for these reasons we are only going to deal with a few verses in chapter 5 this morning and deal mostly with historical background, referring to portions of Scripture that pertain. Daniel 5:1, “Belshazzar the king made a great feast to a thousand of his lords, and drank wine before the thousand. [2] Belshazzar, whiles he tasted the wine, commanded to bring the golden and silver vessels which his father Nebuchadnezzar had taken out of the temple which was in Jerusalem; that the king, and his princes, his wives, and his concubines, might drink therein. [3] Then they brought the golden vessels that were taken out of the temple of the house of God which was at Jerusalem; and the king, and his princes, his wives, and his concubines, drank in them. [4] They drank wine, and praised the gods of gold, and of silver, of brass, of iron, of wood, and of stone.”

So this is one big blast that Belshazzar is having in his palace. The day is October 12 and the year is 539 BC. We know exactly the day, we know exactly the month, and we know exactly the year because there were other people watching what happened on this fateful day and we will be studying what happened in this fateful day and fateful night for 2-3 weeks. Fortunately it is a well attested historic fact that was observed by observers outside of the Bible as well as by the writers of Scripture. And putting it all together we can gain a lot of background as to what happened and why Daniel says certain things, why the Queen, for example, in Daniel 5:10 comes in and says certain things. All these things make sense once we know the historic background.

But before we go any further we have to deal with a problem that liberals will attack us on in verse 1. If you go to a religions course in school, or if you read the usual stuff in the AP and UPI and you are reading an article or listening to a lecture by a man who hasn’t done any study in the last 20-30 years you will hear the argument made that Belshazzar is fiction. And the argument at first will sound impressive to you, and I will present the argument as to why the liberal says that Belshazzar is fiction and why verse 1 is completely wrong historically.

There were a known number of kings in the Babylonian Empire. The first one was Nabopolassar. Nabopolassar was the man who organized the Chaldean tribes; he ruled from 626-605 BC, a period of some 22 years. He was succeeded by Nebuchadnezzar. Nebuchadnezzar was his general and chief administrator and Nebuchadnezzar ruled from 605-562 BC or 44 years. It was Nebuchadnezzar who set the pace for the entire Babylonian Empire. Nebuchadnezzar is the one that Daniel had the greatest impact on, and as we saw in Daniel 4 it appears that Nebuchadnezzar became a believer. Watch the years go by and watch the ruler. These rulers are confirmed in Scripture and out of Scripture. Nebuchadnezzar was succeeded by his son, Emel Marduk. Emel Marduk was his very weak son in fact, and he was so bad that he was assassinated after two years, so he ruled from 562-560 BC. We’ll study a little bit about this man because he too is mentioned by the Holy Spirit in Scripture and he becomes an important person, but he only survived two years and he was finally bumped of by Neriglissar.

Neriglissar was Nebuchadnezzar’s son-in-law, and he reigned four years, from 559, the year began in 559 and went through 556. Neriglissar had married Nebuchadnezzar’s daughter. Nebuchadnezzar had at least two daughters; one daughter married this man and another daughter married a man that we will have to deal with in chapter 5, a man by the name of Nabonidus. But Neriglissar assassinated Emel Marduk, took over the throne, and he died of natural causes. He was then succeeded by his son, Labasi Marduk. Notice the pagan names and how the god Marduk keeps coming up here. See, Belshazzar, Bel is a god’s name. All these men are named after pagan deities. Now Labasi Marduk was his son and he reigned for the grand total of 9 months because he manifested certain mental patterns of behavior that his grandfather had.

Remember, these people are all related, even though Neriglassar isn’t Nebuchadnezzar’s son, he’s his son-in-law, which therefore make his son, Nebuchadnezzar’s grandson. And Nebuchadnezzar had a weakness in his family toward what we would call mental illness, toward neurosis and psychosis and this son showed early signs of this when he became king and so the leaders decided they’d had enough of it with Nebuchadnezzar so they assassinated him. They got some of his friends together in the palace and they beat him up with their hands and fists, and this man was literally beat to a pulp until he died as a very young boy inside the temple.

One of the men who did that was a man by the name of Nabonidus; Nabonidus ruled from 555 BC to the fall of the kingdom. Nabonidus who was the official king all during the time of chapter 5. Therefore, says the liberal, there is no room for such a king as Belshazzar; Belshazzar is not mentioned by Herodotus; Belshazzar is not mentioned by any of the pagan historians, and so therefore, the argument goes, Belshazzar is a legal fiction.

Now I cite this and go to Daniel 5:1 to point this argument out because I want you to see the fallacy of reasoning involved. This is a fallacy that is quite common among critics of Scripture. Eventually, after many years of lecturing and book writing and all these claims that Belshazzar was a fiction, archeologists discover a thing called Nabonidus cylinder, plus some other encryptions, so we found some inscriptions that are not only inscriptions mentioning Belshazzar as Nabonidus’ son, but explaining why in Daniel 5 Nabonidus is not there and Belshazzar was sitting on the throne on that fateful night when the city fell. There’s a whole story behind why and it was all brought out on these inscriptions. So once again we see the critics of Scripture having problems keeping their mind where their mouth is when it comes to criticizing. And when the data is all in and when the archeology has discovered more data we discover, of course, the Holy Spirit did know in fact what He was writing about, and this accuracy of chapter 5 has gone down as one of the all-time goofs of modern liberalism. Belshazzar was a historic figure. So we now know that what we read in Daniel 5 is one of the most intimate and most divine viewpoint accounts we have of what happened on that fateful night.

Now to get some background we have to understand that there were two kingdoms involved. There was the kingdom of Babylon, or Babylonia and this is the kingdom that was the one dreamed of first in Daniel 2. Then there was another kingdom, Medo-Persia. The Medo-Persian kingdom would be the second kingdom and that finally took over; that was the second great kingdom. Now we know from Daniel 2, or we should, that certain things that Daniel pointed out in that chapter would be true of these kingdoms. So we don’t even have to read secular history to understand certain characteristics that we ought to find in these kingdoms. The first thing we know from Daniel’s vision is that gold represents Babylon and silver represents Medo-Persia. We also know that these metals, besides deteriorating in monetary value also show increasing strength as you go down from that statue that was dreamed of, you go from the head to the chest to the thighs down to the toes, there is increasing strength in the metal in the statue until you get down here and it’s iron.

When we went through chapter 2 we said at least two deductions could be made from this famous dream. One deduction was that the economic life of the times of the Gentiles would continue to deteriorate. It would continue, in other words, to have an inflating currency that would be worth less and less. To prove the point I had a price list of some common household goods sold under the Babylonian Empire so you could compare the prices people paid for goods at that time with prices you would pay today, such things as a bed set would cost $10.00 in the Neo-Babylonian Empire. So obviously we’ve had a price increase. Inflation is not new and if we are to take this as a hint, apparently inflation is the norm and standard for the times of the Gentiles. Babylon had a fair currency, Medo-Persia had a very worse currency; from the price of a slave which was 40 shekels in the time of Nebuchadnezzar, by the time Cyrus takes the throne slaves are selling for 80 shekels, which shows you that the monetary unit has become progressively worthless. The average rate of inflation at its worst during this period was 5%.

Now to picture where this all is we’ll look at a map of the geographical area. This is the Mediterranean, here is Israel, this is what we used to call Asia Minor, it’s now Turkey, here’s the Black Sea, the Caspian Sea, the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea. Now you have to do some mental adjusting here because this is the first time in the study of God’s Word that we’re going to go so far east geographically. So mentally we’re going to have to shift gears and stop thinking that we are on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean. We’re going to have to go thousands of miles off to the east; in fact over here beyond this river is India. Now the Babylonian Empire took in most of the Tigris Euphrates Valley. They controlled this area, they controlled it as far north as the growing Median Empire; as far southwest as the border with Egypt. They controlled Palestine with the fall of Jerusalem in 586 BC and they controlled certain seaports on the Persian Gulf. That was the extent of the Babylonian Empire.

When Cyrus took over, and I’ll explain the details later but I want you to see what we’re talking about as far as general geographical size; by the time Cyrus finished his conquest and the Medo-Persian Empire had attained its maximum, you can see that the boundary of the east side of this empire went all the way over into what is now India. This becomes important because it becomes important for the study of the Hindu religion and Buddhism. We are faced with a phenomenon that beginning in 586 BC with the collapse of Israel six world religions begin within 100 years. We have a man by the name of Zoroaster begin his religion in Persia. We have the Buddhist reforms over in India and China. We have certain reforms in India, and the other was Confucius in China. So therefore there’s a lot of [can’t understand word] going on and we must be careful. Cyrus’ Empire, moving as Far East as it did into India apparently was a vehicle for taking some of the teachings of Isaiah the prophet over into this area. And this explains why Confucianism, Buddhism, and Zoroasterism to some degree is influenced by monotheism. It’s always been a mystery as to why these religions started very quickly, started within 50 to 75 years of each other, and why they all had similar characteristics; why in the West, for example, you had the rise of philosophy which sought an absolute unifying principle.

Apparently then, the Medo-Persian Empire was the means of spreading much Jewish teaching and Jewish influence. The book of Esther is a story of some of the Jewish influence and the high court of Xerxes, and so therefore with all of this influence that’s going on it shouldn’t be surprising to say that this had an effect permanently on the religious history of all mankind. So we’re dealing with a very, very critical point of history and so we want to go back and look at how it all got started and what was going on, what was God doing and why did He act the way He did.

First we’ll start with the decline of the Babylonian Empire; we’ll treat it from that point of view and then we’ll go north and look at the Medo-Persian Empire. The decline of the Babylonian Empire is a sad tale, that is repeated all too often in the western nations. The causes are usually the same and by studying what happened in the past we can see why God acts as He does. Babylon had two major problems. Nabonidus, the man who was Belshazzar’s father, was trying to solve both of those problems when Daniel 5 erupted. One of those problems was an economic problem; the other problem was what we will call a religio-culture problem. Briefly stated its economic problem was inflation. He could not control the decline of currency. And the religious problem was a problem of unity; they had increasingly become pluralistic, you had Jews that refused to worship Marduk, you had Arabs that refused to worship Marduk. The Jews worshiped Jehovah, the Arabs worshiped Suen who was the moon god, and then you had some of the Babylonians, they did not like Marduk, others did like Marduk, and you had a lot of lesser deities. So the problem was right from the beginning with the kingdom of man, that as you conquer various and diverse peoples you have this diversity problem that crops up. Now we have the diversity problem; the diversity problem will always be with the Gentiles; we have different races that come from different backgrounds, we different religious beliefs that come from different religious backgrounds, and so we have a melting pot and it’s hard, sometimes, to maintain a unity in that melting pot. So this problem of religio-cultural difficulties is not a new one, it’s not one that we don’t know either.

Nebuchadnezzar was the one who actually set up some of these problems. Nebuchadnezzar brought on this problem by his conquest, by including so many people inside the kingdom that we had a problem of religious unity. He also brought on the economic problem two ways; he had a fantastic building program. Nebuchadnezzar built one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, the famous Hanging Gardens of Babylon. He built it as a present to his wife; his wife got lonesome out in the dusty humid plains of the northwest Persian Gulf and she didn’t like the surroundings and she kept harping on him and finally to shut her up he built the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, and the Hanging Gardens do stand as one of the great engineering feats of the ancient world. The Babylonians were able to discover such things as the Pythagorean Theorem which the Pythagoras then stole and called it his own, and we have known it as the Pythagorean formula, the sides of a right triangle, but that was not Greek; it was done by the Babylonians. The Babylonians were responsible for our 360 degrees in a circle; that is not something that came out of the Arabs; it’s something that came from Babylon. So even today Babylon has its influence.

What about the history of the thing? Nebuchadnezzar had become a believer in Daniel 4 but Nebuchadnezzar, even though he became a believer, apparently was unable to influence the direction of his culture; he was unable to transform the kingdom of man into the kingdom of God and so when Nebuchadnezzar died he left it to the son, Emel Marduk. In 2 Kings 25:27 we have a notice about his son. His son lacked the genius of his father. “And it came to pass in the seven and thirtieth year of the captivity of Jehoiachin, king of Judah,” so this is after Nebuchadnezzar’s died, under Nebuchadnezzar’s era you had the fall of Jerusalem. Get your chronology set up here; you had the fall of Jerusalem. Then you had Nebuchadnezzar’s son, Emel, as he is known in history, Marduk, known differently here in the Scripture, Emel Marduk then took over and he did something to Jehoiachin.

Now verse 27 is an important verse in Scripture because it’s one of those rare verses that we have an actual clay inscription that gives the same thing. Just quite by change the archeologists were digging up thousands and thousands of these clay tablets in Babylon and when they started looking at them and sorting them out they found this one clay tablet that had Jehoiachin’s name on it, and on the clay tablet is exactly the formula of how much food he got each day, given to him by Emel Marduk. And this is represented here in verse 27, during “the captivity of Jehoiachin, king of Judah, in the twelfth month, on the seven and twentieth day of the month, that Evil-merodach,” this is just the phonetics coming over into the king James, Evil-merodach but it’s from Emel Marduk, king of Babylon, in the year that he began to reign did lift up [liberate] Jehoiachin, king of Judah, from prison. [28] And he spoke kindly to him, and set his throne above the throne of the kings that were with him in Babylon, [29] And changed his prison garments, and he did eat bread [his food regularly] continually before him all the days of his life. [30] And his allowance was a regular allowance given him by the king, a daily rate for every day, all the days of his life.” Now that eating of the bread in verse 29 means that he was admitted to the royal palace. The document that proves he was admitted to the royal palace is now in our possession. Therefore this portion of Scripture has again been vindicated.

He apparently began to lift up, notice it says in verse 27 that it occurred in the first year of his reign; this apparently was because he had looked upon his father and seen how his father had been blessed by his pro-Semitic attitude toward Daniel and his companions. Remember Daniel and his companions occupied high places in the administration of the Babylonian Empire, thus it’s not strange that when the son came to reign he would have a special place for them.

Now there was another man that existed at the same time and he is mentioned in Jeremiah 39:3 you’ll see the name of another man that was circulating at that time in Babylon, in high places, had a position of great influence. In the King James his name is spelled differently than the way we know it in history but he is a man who is going to change the course of history, Neriglassar. When the princes and Babylonian officials came to Jerusalem to inspect, it says in verse 3, “And all the princes of the king of Babylon came in, and sat in the middle gate,” now these men, these princes are the kings that were mentioned in 2 Kings 25:28, these are the men over whom Jehoiachin, the Jewish king, was promoted. So you had a little problem in the state department; you had a lot of these Gentile princes and elevated above them was the king of Israel. That was the notice in 2 Kings 25. Now one of the men who was not promoted when Jehoiachin was promoted in 2 Kings 25:27 is this man, the first man on the list of verse 3, it’s spelled in the King James, “even Nergal-sharezer,” now that is the same man that we know in history as Neriglassar.

Now we can’t prove this, but it certainly looks from the history of the Babylonian Empire that this man became intensely jealous and anti-Semitic because of the promotion of Jehoiachin above him. Jehoiachin was quoted in the royal circles, his affection was looked to, there were Jews in the administration, and so Neriglissar decided he was going to put an end to it and he killed Emel Marduk in a palace assassination. Then he ruled for four years, succeeded by his son, Labasi Marduk, who was a neurotic and they couldn’t stand him so they bumped him off nine months leaving Nabonidus.

Nabonidus is the man who is in charge in Daniel 5. He is also known in history as Nabu-Na’id, that’s the way his name looks when you transliterate it from cuneiform. But this man, Nabonidus was a genius diplomat. He had worked for Nebuchadnezzar; all the time Nebuchadnezzar was functioning as king he would send Nabonidus around on diplomatic missions to various countries. Nabonidus negotiated one of the most famous treaties in history. On day in 585 BC, just a year after the fall of Jerusalem, there was a battle going on in Asia Minor. We’ll get to that later, at a river called the Halys on one side was the empire of Lydia, on the other side was the empire of Media, and they collided at this river, and they had been fighting over this river for a long time and then one day there was a solar eclipse and everything blacked out. It was interesting because the Greek astronomer Thales had predicted this for several years; it was the first sign of modern predicted science, and this solar eclipse occurred right in the middle of the battle. Both armies stopped fighting, both backed off, and lo and behold, in between both of them comes Nabonidus. And he was a shrewd enough diplomat to take care of the shock created by the solar eclipse and negotiate a treaty which lasted for many, many decades, and he was looked upon as the most successful ambassador of the ancient world.

Now Nabonidus also, apparently along with Neriglissar married a daughter of Nebuchadnezzar. This is why later in Daniel 5 you will see Nabonidus’ son, Bel, notice the Bel, Belshazzar, Bel is the name of a god, may Bel protect your life, Belshazzar is the son, it says, of Nebuchadnezzar. But he isn’t the son of Nebuchadnezzar; he’s actually the grandson of Nebuchadnezzar. The Aramaic doesn’t distinguish between son and grandson. To make him the son… obviously can’t be Nabonidus that’s carrying the genes of Nebuchadnezzar because he’s not a relative of Nebuchadnezzar, so obviously his mother must be a daughter of Nebuchadnezzar. His mother is the woman who shows up as the queen later on in Daniel 5 and she is going to say certain things that lets us know about the family life of Nebuchadnezzar. She’s the queen for whom Nebuchadnezzar built the Hanging Gardens. And later on she was straightened out by Daniel and learned a lot of Bible doctrine, and she is going to be there on that fateful night when her son gets into this drinking orgy and goes down with the city. And as he goes down with the city his mother is going to stand there and give him certain instructions which she had received as a young woman in the court of Nebuchadnezzar from the prophet Daniel. So it’s a very, very interesting thing, and to understand all the things that happen at the party in Daniel 5 we do have to know history.

Now Nabonidus was known for a lot of other things besides being a diplomat. And one of the other things that he is known for explains why he is absent in Daniel 5 and why he put his son, Belshazzar, on the throne. He had a hobby; Nabonidus had a very strange hobby; his hobby was archeology, and he used to go all around the Babylonian Empire digging things up and he wasn’t very much interested in running the show, he was actually a weak administrator. He did make some key archeological discoveries but he conducted excavations, he restored ancient temples, and all of this cost money, which of course added further to his economic problem. He had a public works program that just couldn’t be beat. The only thing that beat it was Nebuchadnezzar’s public works program before; both were bankrupting the government by all this activity. At one point Nabonidus even had one of his daughters consecrated to an ancient temple office.

Now Nabonidus had a summer home down where he liked to dig. He decided that things were getting bad economically for one thing, and he thought of an idea one day that he could kind of kill two birds with one stone; he could have his hobby and enjoy his hobby of archeology and he could also work on the economic problems of Babylon. What were the economic problems of Babylon? The Median Empire had just begun to become powerful to the north. So to the north we have the Median Empire; the Medes controlled all the northern trade routes. In fact, they began to plunge southward to a place called Carchemish, and we talked about the military importance of Carchemish before. So he was pinched off on his trade routes; his seaport from the Persian Gulf was silting up and at the time they had no way to dredge open these harbors. So his sea commerce was beginning to decline. He only had one way to go and that was west and south. So he went west and tried to open up ports along the eastern edge of the Mediterranean and he went to a place called Tema, down here and made friends with the Arabs because he thought that he could then take caravans and manage these routes across to the Persian gulf through the desert of Arabia. It was a new concept but he had to open up trade routes to the south in order to maintain economic income for his country.

So while he was down in Tema, which was his summer home, he stayed there ten years; he decided he liked it down there better than the city of Babylon and he stayed down there and put his son, Belshazzar in charge up in Babylon. So although Nabonidus is technically the king of the Babylonian Empire, geographically he’s not there. And he is not there the night that it falls. We know where he was because he gave us a report and we have that report, written 24 hours after the fall of Babylon. So he was down in Tema for ten years and while he was down here he had an idea. He noticed that there were a lot of Jews in the administration; he noticed that there were a lot of Jews that Nebuchadnezzar had brought in, namely Daniel and his friends, plus a lot of the Hebrew royalty, and he decided that these Jews make such good administrators that he would begin to settle a series of fortresses built on the oasis. So he had a whole string of fortresses and each one of these was managed by Jews. So he exported Jews to the south part of his empire to make it run right. And these Jews have stayed there for centuries and later one we find the names of some of the Jewish families that he brought south.

During that time he came in contact with the Arabians and he noticed that the Arabs liked a goddess called Sin, that’s not “sin” as we think of it; it’s a tz. And this is a goddess of the moon. He also had a mother who was a priestess from Haran. That’s where Abraham came from and by that time that city had gone to the worship of Sin. So he decided that what the empire needed to help solve the religious problem was some sort of a unity. And keep this in mind, that dream of Daniel 2 is talking about a religious cultural unity, very important when we deal with fulfilled prophecy and what the antichrist is going to do. There’s nothing new that’s going to happen in history that hasn’t happened before in history. What is going to be new in history as the antichrist rises to power is he’s simply going to extend further movements that have already been started in history.

But what we’re looking at now is something that men have always dreamed of, to create a unity on the basis of religion. So he decided to make the plunge and put the goddess Sin in charge, and he began to push this and began to dictate to the priesthood. And of course this offended the priests that worshiped Marduk, and while he was at Tema for ten years, he never went to the new year festival; there was a new year festival held each year in Babylon, and this was a very, very important festival. The king would come in, he would sit down on the throne and he would actually act out Marduk as god; he would become deity at that point and that would be when the king would integrate with nature and he would be the source of prosperity.

So now you can begin to see what happened; there became a popular movement in Babylon against Nabonidus and his son Belshazzar because they said that the reason the Medes are increasing in strength is discipline upon us because we have shelved the worship of Marduk in favor of this new god. So there are a lot of things that are happening to Babel at this time.

On April 4 in 539, this is the spring of that year of Daniel of Daniel 5, in April of 539 he finally goes to the north, his advisor says you’ve got to get up here, the thing is falling apart, the situation is out of control, something is needed. So he moves north and finally in that day he takes the oath at the New Year’s festival and then he begins to take… Cyrus is closing down; he begins to take all the gods and goddesses from the town. As Cyrus’ army advances and as Cyrus pushes down he envelops one town after another on the road to Babylon. And as he does so Nabonidus instructs the retreating soldiers to go in and raid every single temple that you can, carry away every idol, carry away every god. So he packs all these gods into the city of Babylon; so while this drunken feast is going on the city has just been packed and crammed with gods and goddesses. There’s one on every street; you could have your choice; it was the most fantastic collection of idols the ancient world has ever seen. It was one of the most disastrous mistakes that any diplomat in the ancient world ever made also, as we will see from what Cyrus is going to do.

And then finally he had… the final blow to Nabonidus was he thought he had many years supply of food in the city of Babylon, we’ll study a little about that next week, he had double walls around the city, he had a special set of drawbridges so that the city, from the human point of view, was impermeable. They had water to last two years; they had food to last at least two years. So they had no worry that anybody was going to take Babylon. This is why there’s the relaxed attitude in the middle of this feast in Daniel 5; even though that very night that they’re drinking and having their orgy, Cyrus’ armies had surrounded the city completely, the guards on the walls know it, in spite of all that they’re very, very relaxed because they know Cyrus simply cannot breach the walls to Babylon. And they have very good reasons for saying so.

Now one of the assets that Nabonidus had was a general by the name of Gobyras; Gobyras was a commander of his eastern division on the gulf. And Gobyras was one of Nebuchadnezzar’s great generals, he was an older man by the time Nabonidus reigned, and Gobyras was a smart military man who saw which way the wind was blowing, and when he saw Cyrus coming down from the north he knew that Cyrus was the man for the future. Not only had the Jews prophesied the rise of Cyrus, and not only had the Gentiles prophesied the rise of Cyrus, one of things we’ll see was that Cyrus was the closest thing to a Messiah that the ancient world ever saw. Gobyras saw the hand-writing on the wall so he defected. And he took all of the eastern division with him. When he took that eastern division with him, Cyrus thought so much of that that he decided to make Gobyras the commander of the siege of Babylon. So this is how Gobyras is now commanding the armies, October 12, 539 BC, the day of Daniel 5. The armies are not only surrounding the city but they’re under the command of one of their formal generals.

So much for the decline and fall of Babylon; now the rise of Medo-Persia. All the while this was going on there is a fantastic story of the rise of Medo-Persia and we want to study this because in all of this, as we go through these details, this is one of the things you’ll always lose out in school because they’ll never point this out to you about history, yet I cannot imagine a fundamental Christian who loves the Lord and who is attracted to a Word have a despicable attitude toward history; it’s inexcusable, history is the place where God acts. History is the place where you can see God at work, and all of this decline business that I’ve just gone through, and especially now this chapter on the rise of the Medes and the Persians is a chapter on the sovereignty of God, a very important chapter on the sovereignty of God. The Jews knew that God was sovereign, He was righteous, He was just, He was omniscient, omnipotent, omniscient, immutable, and eternal; they knew these attributes. But like us all, they needed fresh experiences to see just how big these attributes really were.

One of the attributes, sovereignty, the Jew had kind of artificially limited, as we often do as believers. He always thought of God’s sovereignty in connection with the nation Israel. So he would say, oh, is God sovereign over the Gentiles; oh yes, God’s sovereign over the Gentiles. How do you know God is sovereign over the Gentiles? Well, because when we’re obedient to Jehovah He gives us victory in battle over the Gentiles, that’s how we know God is sovereign over Gentiles. Keep in mind, because we make the same mistake; they concede to the sovereignty of God operating through themselves on external circumstances. So it would be analogous to a believer to day saying do I believe the sovereignty of God? Yeah, I believe the sovereignty of God, God guides me to witness to this person over here, God guides me to have victory over this chaos over here, God helps me do this over here, God gets me a job. Do I believe in the sovereignty of God? Yes, I believe in the sovereignty of God because God operates through me.

But the lesson the Jews began to learn in 586 was that God is so big that His sovereignty is so fantastic that He doesn’t have to operate through Israel. He can operate directly on the Gentiles without going through Israel. He can operate directly on Cyrus, directly on Nebuchadnezzar. That’s what the book of Daniel is about, to prove that Jehovah, God of Israel, is so great that He can operate independent of His chosen instrument. Analogy: a believer today faces chaos over here, maybe a job over here, may face a dozen other situations. With the proper attitude toward God’s sovereignty, God not only works… take an easy example, here’s somebody who is an unbeliever. You say God’s going to work in that person and you say God’s going to work in that person through you. True, but God can also work on that person through n number of other ways. God can work directly on that person, God can work through other believers on that person, God can work through these situations directly, He does not have to go through you. You don’t have to open your mouth, you don’t have to lift a finger, God can work directly on these situations. And that’s the Jews are learning; they have been sidelined from active history; they are poor, miserable captives. They are in a situation where militarily they can’t do anything; economically they can’t do anything. They can do nothing except sit and watch the wind of history blow, and yet as they sit there as helpless captives, completely a crushed people, they say look, Jehovah God works without going through us.

And so the rise of the Medo-Persian Empire is a testimony to the sovereignty of God and it is a very fascinating story; so we’ll now take up the story of the rise of Cyrus and how he… this is predicted in Isaiah and Jeremiah. It goes back many, many years, back up in the northern areas; here’s the Caspian Sea, the Black Sea, Asia Minor and eastern Mediterranean. Up in this area there are a group of tribes, they are banded together and they are called the Medes, not the Persians, the Medes. The Medes are important because the Medes are descendants of a man by the name of Japheth; they are not Semitic peoples. They are Japhetic people; very important because the times of the Gentiles will be largely Japhetic; we are Japhetic, our civilization is largely Japhetic. So the Medes are one of the great forerunners of the Japhetic line.

All right, the sons of Japheth operate and completely dominate… there’s a high plateau here just southeast of the Caspian Sea. It’s a high plateau that is very demanding. In order to grow their crops, and they don’t have any rain, the maximum rain on the plateau is 3-8 inches a year; and the only way they can grow crops was literally to dig miles and miles of irrigation ditches under ground to take snow from the mountains along the edge of this plateau and convey that melted snow down to their fields. It was, in other words, an environment the developed a tough people. The people had to survive in 20 to 30 below zero weather during the winter. So when the Medes began to move in history they had had all this conditioning; this rigorous environment, this tough kind of farming, this kind of environment where they had to survive under the cold. And when they began to move south, the Semitics and the other peoples down in the south were no match. The Medes over powered them. The Medes got together in the year 700 BC. So remember, God in His sovereignty is working this all out. Remember in 700 BC the prophets are prophesying about this taking place. Nobody had yet seen it, it’s just now beginning to boil, it’s just now beginning to work, but God in His sovereignty has already assured believers; in 721 BC the northern kingdom has fallen, in 586 BC the southern kingdom will fall, but God says in spite of the chaos that this brings on, I am in control of history, you must trust Me. So in 700 BC they get together.

Finally, in the year 625 BC they have their first great ruler. Cyaxares I, just notice the dates so you can link it up. This is during Nebuchadnezzar’s reign to the south. Cyaxares reigns from this until 585 BC when that battle that I told you about, that Nabonidus was the negotiator for. Cyaxares was the man who got the Median army started, and he descended out of the plains; the Medes began to pour off the plains, this high plateau, and come down. And when they started to come down everything went before them; the Medes swept everything before them. They moved to the west and they drove over into Asia Minor and stopped at the Halys River. To the west was the kingdom of Lydia, capital city was a famous city from the book of Revelation, Sardis. And Lydia, the Lydians were kind of the kinfolk of the Greeks. This is going to be important later on because the New Testament is going to be written in Greek. But the Median Empire extends over to the Halys River. Cyaxares was a great soldier and finally in the year 585 BC, we don’t know whether he had a heart attack when he saw the solar eclipse or what happened, but he died that year just shortly after he negotiated the treaty with Nabonidus. He was succeeded by his son; now this man is interesting case of like father not like son, Astyages.

Astyages was a man who tried to live in his father’s footsteps and never quite made it. Cyaxares was the man who got the Medes all together, and Astyages tried to keep on but he didn’t quite make it and he had a daughter, who was one of the most beautiful girls in the ancient world, there were a lot of songs written about her, Mandane, and he had a very potent weapon. What he couldn’t get politically, religiously and military he was going to get through his daughter. So he noticed, as he began to take inventory of his kingdom that he couldn’t keep control over, and there were a dangerous group of people he noticed just to the east. These people were called Persians. Except they actually literally weren’t called Persians, they later became Persians but they were the forerunners of it. He was over in this area, all up in here, the Caspian Sea and the Black Sea, and he looked over here and he got a little nervous because he saw these Persians were pretty tough people too. In fact, they were just as tough as the Medes were. And not only that but he saw a man who was called Cambyses I, who looked like he might just possibly be a better soldier than he was. So he made a deal, and Astyages married his daughter off to Cambyses.

So now watch, we have a Mede, a Mede marries his daughter, so we have a female Mede married to this male Persian. Their son is Cyrus, Cyrus the Great, Cyrus II. And Cyrus is going to be known in history as “the mule,” and it’s not a sign that he is stubborn, the mule is just a hybrid and he is called the Mede and the Persian because his mother was a Mede and his father was a Persian. Well, no sooner had Mandane married Cambyses and become pregnant than Astyages had a dream about her, and he dreamed that out from her womb came this vast vine, and the vine entangled all of the civilizations and crushed him who crushed others. And so he interpreted the dream of his daughter that his daughter would give birth to a world conqueror. There was all sorts of, shall we say instability in the ancient world that pointed that there was something great about to happen. Isaiah and Jeremiah apparently were two men who furthered this concept of news about Cyrus. So there was a lot of unrest, just like before Jesus Christ’s day; there was a lot of unrest. And so Astyages decided he had to do something, and he brought his daughter, still pregnant, back to his capital city, Ecbatana.

When he brought her back he made plans to slaughter the baby as soon as it was born, so he told one of his trusted agents to go in with the midwife and the moment that baby is born I want it killed, male or female, destroy it. And so the man who was given the order to destroy it walked in and he just couldn’t bring himself to kill this baby. So he pawned the job off on one of the custodians. And this man just happened to have a wife who at that time was giving birth to another baby, and this woman, when she gave birth to her baby the baby was stillborn. And he told his wife that he had been given permission by this administrator to destroy the baby and the way to destroy the baby was to leave it exposed and let it starve to death out in the field, it would be publicly exposed. This is the way the Medes kill their people; anybody 70 years or older they just staked them out on the ground and let the dogs and the vultures eat them and this way they got rid of the aged peoples; this is how the Medes handled the old age problem, unlike the Biblical solution of course.

So the Medes had this reputation, and the wife couldn’t bring herself to do it, she says hey, I’ve got an idea, my baby is stillborn, how about taking the stillborn baby, we’ll put him in the field and I’ll kept his baby. So that’s what they did, and she raised this baby as her own child. And it was unknown to Astyages that this baby that was growing up right under him, the custodian’s boy, was not the custodian’s boy but he was a child of royalty. And one day when the boy was about eleven years old they had a little incident that happened when he was playing with some of the boys in the court. All the little kids got together and they were going to play king that day. And they said, Cyrus, you be king and we’ll be your servants. So this boy, in the play he was acting out the role of the king and some of the little kids that were playing his servants didn’t obey him. So Cyrus became very indignant and he said I am king, I demand that he be whipped. And so they took sticks and beat the kids that wouldn’t obey Cyrus. Well obviously the parents got hold of this little incident, and they brought it all to the attention of Astyages, and the more Astyages, when he interviewed these kids and he saw what had happened, that boy Cyrus just didn’t look right. You know, you’ve heard he looked more like the postman… Astyages said he didn’t look quite like the custodian’s son ought to look. And he finally tortured out of the custodian what had happened.

So then he did a very dumb thing and it shows you how the Lord worked. Cyrus is God’s man and I’ll prove it to you from Isaiah and Jeremiah in a moment. Cyrus must get to where he’s going to get, and all this is God working totally outside of Israel; totally on Gentile ground to show you His sovereign working. So as Cyrus grows and he gets into this position, and he says all right, I’ll tell you Cyrus, I was one day going to kill you because of the dream that I had, that out from the womb of your mother came this great vine that would envelop all of history; now Cyrus, since the dream has really been fulfilled, he took the play incident that happened at age 11 in the streets as the fulfillment of the dream, so you see, what it meant was that he would just kind of act as king, that’s just a quirk to your nature, so since this dream has already been fulfilled I need not fear a future fulfillment. So he shipped Cyrus back to his parents, Cambyses, and that was the worst mistake he ever did, because in 550 BC Cyrus would be back again, this time leading an army and he destroyed Ecbatana and that’s how the Persians finally took over the Empire.

But Cyrus was a born diplomat. When he took over the empire he had a problem, he had Medes over here, he had Persians over here. So he came up with a most ingenious solution, one that characterized his empire. And keep in mind Daniel 2; each one of these kingdoms becomes more diverse. What he decided to do was to have two crowns and he said I don’t want to offend the Medes, these people are strong people, and I can’t sit here and waste all my energy ruling people that don’t want to be ruled, do I’ll make friends with them. And so he had a dual crown; he wore one crown for the Medes and one crown for the Persians and he became the ruler of the Medo-Persian Empire. And from this point forward Cyrus had a policy of reconciliation, a reconciliation toward all peoples and all religion. And this is going to again be a fulfillment of a prophecy in Isaiah and Jeremiah.

Well all is not up yet, we’re still in 550 BC and we’ve got to span the time from 550 BC to 539 BC, we’ve still got about ten year left, and those ten years become very interesting. Cyrus gets his kingdom started and he has a little problem in the west at the river Halys. Remember that over here was the kingdom of Lydia; Lydia, capital of Sardis, had a king by the name of Croesus; Croesus was a very superstitious person and he had made that treaty, negotiated by Nabonidus on the day of the solar eclipse, and he got to thinking, he says hmmm, he says Cyrus is taking over, the Medes that I made the treaty with are no longer in control of the situation. He says I don’t exactly know how these Persians are going to handle the show so I’ll go down to the Oracle of Delphi and consult my oracle and find out what the oracle says. Now the oracle had earlier warned Croesus, he said… the Oracle of Delphi said beware when a mule rules the Medes. And he couldn’t figure out the mule until Cyrus got the throne, and immediately when Cyrus got the throne he said, ah, there it is, Cyrus is the mule, Cyrus has a mother who was a Mede and a father who is a Persian, that makes him the mule. So he immediately recognized a fulfillment of the Oracle of Delphi, he thought. So he went to the Oracle of Delphi the second time and he said should I cross the Halys and defeat Cyrus. And the Oracle replied in a very enigmatic way, as all non-biblical prophecy is; the prophecy reads: “Croesus, when you cross the Halys you will destroy a great empire,” end of the prophecy.

Croesus immediately decides that’s my green light, I’ll now cross the Halys and attack Cyrus. So he crossed the Halys and he did destroy an empire, his own. He crossed the Halys and he met Cyrus, and one of the most interesting techniques that was used in the ancient world in the military is recorded for us in Herodotus. Cyrus brought his army up and he had a problem. This shows you, by the way, the genius of Cyrus. When Croesus crossed he had a tremendous group of horsemen, one of the most skilled groups of horsemen in the ancient world. Cyrus’ troops were tired, they had marched thousands and thousands of miles, and when they got to the Halys River and they saw these horses, they figured how can we ever deal with this kind of a problem, we just don’t simply have the force to deal with this. So Cyrus got to talking with some of his men and he came up with what must be one of the most unique ways of dealing with a cavalry situation. He commanded the [can’t understand word] to advance in front of his other troops against the Lydian horsemen. Behind them was to follow the foot soldiers, and last of all the cavalry. When his arrangements were complete he gave his troops orders to slay all the other Lydians who came in their way without mercy but to spare Croesus and not kill him. The reason why Cyrus opposed his camels, what he did, he got an idea of taking all the camels, the caravans that had brought the army supplies, and he took off and apparently went down and they took off all the supplies off all the camels, and they got the camels out in front of their line.

So here are the Lydians over here moving this way with their horsemen, here is Cyrus moving with his, but in front of it he has this tremendous [can’t understand word] of solid phalanx of camels. Well, the reason why was that the horse has a natural dread of a camel and he cannot abide by either the sight or the smell. And so Cyrus simply flipped his little whips at the camels, the camels moved up, and these horsemen just spun around and some of the men were thrown off the horses, and that was the victory at the River Halys, and it was one of the famous ingenious things that Cyrus did.

All right, Cyrus finally took care of Lydia and by now he had come across all the way to the Aegean. Now you see why this is an important empire; do you see now why the Word of God has to use, will be used in the Persian Empire through Daniel. Do you see now why the book of Esther is so important that there is a Jewish girl who is going to be the queen of Xerxes? Why is that so important? Because the Word of God will be taken to India; the Word of God will be taken west to Greece; the Word of God will be tremendous in its expansion during this time, all due to the working of God through the Persian Empire.

Now turn to Isaiah 45 and you’ll see why the Jews championed Cyrus as the year 539 slowly approached the armies of Cyrus began to pinch off Babylonian city after Babylonian city. The suspense heightened in the cities; the Jews consulted their books and they realized that Cyrus was the long hoped for man who would give them freedom. In Isaiah 44:28 is one of the most rare prophesies in God’s Word. Why is it rare? Because it mentioned a man’s name centuries ahead of time. “Who saith of Cyrus, he is my shepherd, and shall perform all my pleasure; even saying to Jerusalem, Thou shalt be built; and to the temple, Thy foundation shall be laid.” Cyrus, the man who was that baby who almost died, is going to be the Gentile means of ending the captivity. Cyrus is the man who ends the Jewish captivity.

Isaiah 45:1, “Thus saith the Lord to His anointed,” notice the strong language in verse 1; somebody asked about the word Christos in the Hebrews class; all right, look at this one, here’s another case of Christos and it’s used of a Gentile king, translated the way we would normally translate it, “Thus saith to the Lord to His Christ, to Cyrus, whose right hand I have held, to subdue nations before him; and I will loose the lions of kings, to open before him and two-leaved gates; and the gates shall not be shut.” That is a prophecy of the breech of the laws of the city of Babylon, and next time we’re going to deal with the details of just how that breech occurred. [2] I will go before thee,” God said in verse 1, “and make the crooked places straight; I will break in pieces the gates of bronze, and cut in sunder the bars of iron, [3] And I will give thee the treasures of darkness, and hidden riches of secret places, that thou mayest know that I, the LORD, who call thee by thy name, am the God of Israel.”

What’s the point? The God of Israel doesn’t have to operate through Israel on the world, the God of Israel is so big He can operate on the world directly, a tremendous lesson for the Jews.

Now turn to Daniel 5, that feast; again the date, October 12, 593 BC. Cyrus has destroyed Lydia; Cyrus is the king; Cyrus has already got Gobyras; Gobyras has defected from the high command of the Babylonians. The Babylonian military is left leaderless. Nabonidus is frantically outside the city, he’s up in a place called Uruk this night, upstream, up the river. And alone and left in total command of the city is Belshazzar, and Belshazzar does this brilliant thing.

Daniel 5:1, “Belshazzar, the king, made a great feast to a thousand of his lords, and rank wine before the thousand. [2] Belshazzar, while he tasted the wine, commanded to bring the golden and silver vessels which his father had taken out of the temple, that the king, and his princes, his wives, and his concubines, may drink therein.” Now the King James is very nice. The word “wives” is not the word wives, it is his harem women. And the word “concubines” are his prostitutes. So you’ve heard of the wine and the women, well they were in abundance that night.

Now to show you how they handled the women, a passage again in Herodotus. This is their attitude toward women; they didn’t hear or ERA. “The Babylonians have one of the most shameful customs,” Herodotus says, “every woman born in the country must go once in her life and sit down in the precinct of Venus and there have sexual intercourse with a stranger. Many of the wealthier women, who are too proud to mix with the others, drive in covered carriages to the temple, followed by a goodly train of attendants, and there take their station. But the larger number seat themselves within the holy enclosure with reeds of string about their heads. And here there is always a great crowd, some coming and others going, lines of cord mark out paths in all directions among the women and the strangers pass along them to make their choice. A woman who has once taken her seat is not allowed to return to her home until one of the strangers throws a silver coin in her lap and takes her with him beyond the holy ground. When he throws the coin he says these words: ‘The goddess Mylitta prosper thee.’ The silver coin may be of any size; it cannot be refused for this is forbidden by the law, since once thrown it is sacred. The woman goes with the first man who throws her money and rejects no one. When she has gone with him and so satisfied the goddess she returns home and from that time forth no gift however great will prevail with her. Such of the women as are tall and beautiful are soon released but others who are ugly have to stay a long time before they can fulfill the law. Some women have waited in the temple of Venus four years. A custom very much like this is found….” and he goes on.

So that’s their attitude toward women. And to use your creative imaginations you can see what must have been going on in Daniel 5:2. It was one of the all time party of parties. And it was given in a time when the army had completely surrounded the city of Babylon. Why were they praising, in Daniel 5:4, the gods of gold, silver, brass and iron? Remember the city had been filled with idols. Remember what Nabonidus’ tactic was on the eve of October 12? Strip all the temples, bring the idols into the city, hoping that he could get enough idols in the city, there’d be enough gods for Babylon that he could fend off the enemy. The place was filled idols, but there was still that residual anti-Semitism; the Jews are still known. And so on that last night as Belshazzar gets drunk he loses his ability to reason and he thinks there’s a way of doing despot to the Jews; I know what we’ll do, we’ll go and we’ll get those sacred vessels out; the Jews don’t have any idols, look there’s the idol of Bel, there’s the idol of Marduk, there’s the idol of Venus, where are all the idols, where is the idol of the God of Israel? He doesn’t have any, so this is what we’ll do. We’ll get all the vessels from the temple, that’s the only material thing that you have. And so he strips them and he brings them out and he drinks out of them.

And then when they go in Daniel 5:4 and they start to praise the gods, this is when doom falls upon the nation. God allows negative volition to proceed to its own damnation, and at this point he has called for judgment upon himself. When he does the act of Daniel 5:3-4 he is in a sense rejecting the Lord Jesus Christ. He has heard the gospel ministry, Daniel is going to witness to him once again in this chapter and when Daniel witnesses to him, Daniel is going to say, Belshazzar, you knew this all along. Belshazzar had heard the Word and heard the Word and heard the Word and rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, and so God uses negative volition to His own good pleasure and he allows Belshazzar to make this blasphemous [can’t understand word.]

Now to see a principle of what’s going on here, turn to Jeremiah 17:5, this is Belshazzar’s mistake and this is a mistake of many, many believers, the mistake of all unbelievers and some believers. “Thus saith the LORD, Cursed be the man that trusts in man, and makes flesh his arm, and whose heart departs from the LORD.” The curse, cursed is that man, in other words, the word curse means bring judgment down upon the man who would trust in man. This is symptomatic; the Babylonians represent Jeremiah 17:5 to the n^th degree, trusting in the manmade double walls of Babylon, trusting in the manmade draw bridges, trusting in the works of man. So God says “cursed be that man.” We can learn many things from this history and approaching Daniel 5; we can learn for one thing how great our God is. Think of the helpless Jews, there were Jews trapped in that city of Babylon that night; they could have been massacred, but they weren’t. There were Jews who were utter victims, passive victims to the external circumstances, and as the Jews sat and as they loyally studied the Word of God, as they trusted the Word that they had taken in, outside God was working their salvation, not through a Jewish general but through a Gentile general.

Now if God could work to bring about the Medo-Persian Empire to save the Jews of Babylon, if He could so work through this birth, as I’ve shown you, we’ve gone into all this detail, if He could supervise the victory at the Halys River, if He could work with the particular birth of Cyrus preventing him from being killed, if God could do all this in response to His loyal program to believers, then our God can circumvent any external circumstance, any disaster that may befall you. As a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ you understand from history that God is sovereign and He doesn’t need to work directly through believers, He can work directly through unbelievers; He can work through situations, He can work through adversity, through catastrophe. That is how big the God of Israel is.

And then this last lesson we learn from Jeremiah 17:5 and that is that the God of Israel also patiently waits, 2 Peter 3:9 says He is “not willing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance.” God waits and He postpones His judgment; He waited on the city of Babylon to see, is there positive volition there, is there any response to the teaching of Daniel, are these people listening to My Word? No. And so October 12 was the day that grace came to an end for that city. Grace is not a permanent feature of history; grace did not precede the fall, there was no grace before the fall. Grace is something that started after the fall of Adam and grace is not something that continues eternally; grace ends with the Great White Throne judgment. There is no grace after that; love yes, love for the elect; God’s grace is limited and it goes on and on; let’s not be like the city of Babylon.