Belshazzar’s Feast
Rembrandt
REMBRANDT, c1637. OIL ON CANVAS.
A great Babylonian king named Nebuchadnezzar looted the Temple of Jerusalem and took the holy artefacts as his own. Hist son, Belshazzar, hosts a feast and uses the golden cups from the temple as receptacles for wine and merriment until the hand of God appears and inscribes in the wall in an cryptic script. While in the Old Testament text, the script is suggested to be Aramaic, here Rembrandt uses Hebrew. At the time of this painting, he was living in the Jewish Quarter of Amsterdam and took the text from the book of a close friend and Rabbi of his. But Rembrandt alters it, rearranging the characters into columns and incorrectly transcribing a letter to retain a sense of illegibility to the message. As the story goes, Belshazzar and his party of party of high society Babylonians could not decipher God’s message and had to call upon Daniel to help. The message, both in the bible story and in Rembrandt’s description reads: “God has numbered the days of your kingdom and brought it to an end; you have been weighed in the balances and found wanting; your kingdom is given to the Medes and Persians”.