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Bible expressions we still use
The writing on the wall
Daniel 5 · Belshazzar’s feast on Babylon’s last night
Daniel 5 tells of a great feast that King Belshazzar of Babylon held for a thousand of his nobles. Babylonian inscriptions show that Belshazzar ruled the capital as crown prince for his father Nabonidus, who spent years away from the city; Daniel calls Nebuchadnezzar his father, and in Hebrew “father” can also mean ancestor or predecessor. The guests drank from the gold and silver vessels taken from the temple in Jerusalem and praised their gods. Then the fingers of a human hand “wrote on the plaster of the wall, near the lampstand” (Daniel 5:5). No wise man of Babylon could read it. Daniel read “MENE, MENE, TEKEL, PARSIN” — words that also name weights — and explained them as numbered, weighed and divided. “That very night” Belshazzar was slain (Daniel 5:30); in 539 BC Babylon fell to the Persians under Cyrus.
Today “the writing is on the wall” means that the signs of coming trouble or failure are plain to see: when sales keep falling, the writing is on the wall for a shop. To “see the writing on the wall” is to notice that something is about to end before it does.
Key verses
Later, King Belshazzar held a great feast for a thousand of his nobles, and he drank wine with them.At that moment the fingers of a human hand appeared and wrote on the plaster of the wall, near the lampstand in the royal palace. As the king watched the hand that was writing,So all the king’s wise men came in, but they could not read the inscription or interpret it for him.Now this is the inscription that was written: MENE, MENE, TEKEL, PARSIN.That very night Belshazzar king of the Chaldeans was slain,Sources
Adapted and shortened from the Tyndale Open Bible Dictionary · CC BY-SA 4.0
Tyndale Open Bible Dictionary © 2023 Tyndale House Publishers · CC BY-SA 4.0 — Belshazzar; Mene, Mene, Tekel, Parsin; Babylon, Babylonia
Adapted from Tyndale Open Bible Dictionary: articles chosen, shortened and retold in our own words (history, nature and daily life only) and, in languages other than English, machine-translated. The original work by Tyndale House Publishers is available for free at tyndaleopenresources.com.
