Then commanded Belshazzar, and they clothed Daniel with scarlet, and put a chain of gold about his neck, and made a proclamation concerning him, that he should be the third ruler in the kingdom. The Septuagint runs thus: "Then Baltasar the king clothed Daniel in purple, and put on him a golden necklace, and gave authority to him over a third part of his kingdom."
The only difference here is that there is no word of a proclamation. Theodotion and the Peshitta agree with the Massoretic text. We have תַּלְתָא here instead of תַּלְתִּי. The presence of the haphel form instead of the aphel, is to be noted.
No reader whose attention is directed to it can fail to be struck with the magnanimity of Belshazzar; he had promised that whoever would interpret the inscription should be clothed in purple and gold, and be made third ruler of the kingdom.
Had he been a mean man, he might have higgled about the matter; he might have declared an uncertainty as to whether Daniel did not, out of his spite against the murderers of the son of Nebuchadnezzar, invent the evil interpretation.
The treatment Ahab meted out to Micaiah the son of Imlah sows the way a tyrannical monarch may a-t towards one who has uttered unpalatable prophecies against him. He might, according to the Persian story, have proclaimed Daniel exalted to all the promised honors, and then instantly had him executed.
But, no; in noble simplicity he fulfils his promise to the last letter, without any apparent after-thought of vengeance. If Belshazzar is intended to represent Antiochus Epiphanes, certainly the portrait is singularly unlike anything we know of that monarch.
Cruel and. treacherous, he was very unlikely to keep such a promise to one who had made such a prophecy concerning him. Even if lie could have done so, no Jew, with blood boiling from the indignities and cruelties heaped upon the Jewish race, could have pictured him doing this.
Even the natural instinct that makes us think that specially terrible misfortune must be the result of specially unbroken wickedness, would certainly have led the writer of Daniel, if drawing on his imagination, to make Belshazzar meanly refuse his rewards, or, having given them, to threaten the receiver with death.
It is no answer to say, with Ewald and Jephet-ibn-Ali. that the reward once promised was irrevocable, for the accuracy of the reading of the writing might have been contested, and the correctness of the interpretation denied.
Further, as has been pointed out by Keil, there is no evidence that Epiphanes ever desecrated the sacred vessels at a banquet; he was regardless enough to have done so, but his financial necessities were too pressing for delaying the coining of these golden treasures.
Moreover, in Antiochus such desecration would be without purpose, whereas, as we have seen, there might be a purpose in the action of Belshazzar. The idea maintained by commentators of the critical school, that there in any reference in the description given here of the feast of Belshazzar and its results to the feast which Antiochus gave to the peel,In of Antioch, as described by Polybius, 26; is mere nonsense.
The ponts of contrast are vastly more prominent than the points of resemblance. Belshazzar's feast is over in one night; Antiochus's feast lasted several days. Belshazzar's feast was given in his palace, to "a thousand of his lords;" Antiochus invited the whole populace of Antioch to revel in the grove of Daphne.
While, as we have seen, there is blasphemy against Jehovah and defiance of him in Belshazzar's feast, there in no kind of debauchery. In regard to the feast of Antiochus, on the other hand, while there is maddest excess of every kind, a very orgy of lust and drunkenness, there is no word, either in Polybius or in the Books of the Maccabees, of any special act of defiance to Jehovah, or blasphemy of his Name.
The only point of identity is that both the banquet of Belshazzar and the orgy of Antiochus have been called "feasts." Altogether, the idea that Belshazzar represents Antiochus Epiphanes is nearly as absurd as that Nebuchadnezzar does.
Did the orthodox interpretation involve such an identification, what boundless scorn would be poured on the unfortunate maintainers of such a view?