The Book of Daniel

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · May 17, 1883

The Book of Daniel.

Apropos of recent discoveries in the field of Assyrian exploration, it may not prove uninteresting to point out here that it is owing to Sir Henry Rawlinson that a very curious point in the book of Daniel has been cleared up. Belshazzar, it will be remembered, promised to make Daniel “third ruler in the kingdom.” It had long struck many critics as odd that the promise should have been “third ruler” only, and not “second,” seeing that the design of the sovereign was evidently to make him the next important personage to himself in the Government of Babylon. Now for many years it was supposed that the Belshazzar of the Scriptures and the Nabonidus of the Assyrian records were one and the same person. Hence there were some striking discrepancies between the two accounts, the Biblical and the Babylonian. Daniel's Belshazzar was a descendant of Nebuchadnezzar, but Nabonidus was not of the family of Nebuchadnezzar at all; Daniel's Belshazzar died in the city the night it was taken, but Nabonidus, when Babylon was taken, was spared by the conqueror, who actually made him Governor of Carmania! These appeared hopeless discrepancies, until Sir Henry Rawlinson, in 1854, found certain clay cylinders in a corner of the Temple of the Moon, and, deciphering the inscriptions impressed upon them, solved the difficulty. Nabonidus refers to the latter as “Belshazzar my eldest son, the offspring of my heart.” Nabonidus had married the daughter of Nebuchadnezzar in order to strengthen his position as king, and Belshazzar was the issue of this marriage. Hence Belshazzar was a grandson of the Nebuchadnezzar of the Bible. But as Nabonidus was an interloper, he ruled conjointly with his own son, sharing the kingdom, and thus soothing the susceptibility of those who stood up for the rightful line represented by Nebuchadnezzar's daughter. Belshazzar ruling in Babylon was, therefore, himself only a deputy king—was himself only the “second ruler” in the kingdom. Hence it was that the utmost honor he could promise the Jew Daniel was, that he should be “third” in the kingdom, he himself being the second.—Jewish World.