The King Who Wasn't in the Records: Belshazzar, Nabonidus, and Daniel 5

Daniel 5 opens at a royal banquet. Belshazzar, king of Babylon, is feasting with a thousand nobles when fingers appear and write on the plastered wall. The king summons Daniel to interpret the inscription. Daniel does, and announces the fall of the kingdom. That very night, Belshazzar is killed.

In the nineteenth century, this scene attracted a particular line of criticism. The king’s name was the problem. Every known list of Babylonian rulers ended with Nabonidus (r. 556–539 BCE) as the last king of the Neo-Babylonian Empire. No figure named Belshazzar appeared anywhere in the cuneiform record. Critics argued that the author of Daniel had invented a fictitious monarch — evidence, they said, that the book was historical fiction rather than a reliable account.

The argument seemed reasonable in 1850. It was no longer reasonable after 1854.

Rembrandt van Rijn · Belshazzar’s Feast, c. 1635–1638 · National Gallery, London · Public Domain. An artist’s imaginative depiction of Daniel 5, not a documentary image.

What the Nabonidus Cylinder Revealed

In 1854, J.G. Taylor, British Consul at Basra, excavated at the site of the ancient ziggurat at Ur in southern Iraq and recovered a set of clay cylinders. The Nabonidus Cylinder is a votive inscription in which the Babylonian king addresses the moon-god Sîn, and it contains a passage that permanently altered the scholarly assessment of Daniel 5.

Nabonidus records that when he departed for an extended military and religious expedition to Tayma in the Arabian Peninsula, he entrusted “Belshazzar, my firstborn son” with royal authority in Babylon. The Nabonidus Chronicle — a separate administrative document — corroborates this independently, noting that during Nabonidus’s years away from Babylon, the New Year festival (akītu) could not be properly celebrated because the king himself was absent. The one managing affairs in his stead was Belshazzar.

Raymond Philip Dougherty’s monograph Nabonidus and Belshazzar (Yale University Press, 1929) remains the foundational analysis of these texts. Dougherty demonstrated that Belshazzar functioned as co-regent — holding significant executive power during his father’s decade-long absence — which is why he appears in neither the formal king list nor the royal annals under his own name: he was never the officially crowned king. John J. Collins’s Hermeneia commentary on Daniel (Fortress Press, 1993) confirms this consensus reading.

Why “Third Ruler” Is Exactly Right

One detail in Daniel 5 had puzzled readers for a different reason: the reward Belshazzar offers to whoever can interpret the inscription is the position of “third ruler in the kingdom” (5:7, ESV). Why third? A king with the power to offer any honor would more naturally offer first or second.

The co-regent arrangement explains this immediately. With Nabonidus as first in the empire and Belshazzar as second — functioning king in Babylon but subordinate to his absent father — the highest position Belshazzar could actually grant was the one directly below himself. Third was the ceiling, because second was already taken by the man making the offer.

This is the detail that turns the argument around. The feature critics cited as evidence of historical confusion — a “king” who does not appear in king lists — turns out to reflect a precisely accurate understanding of Belshazzar’s anomalous constitutional position. And the puzzling “third ruler” reward reflects that same position with equal precision.

What the Evidence Confirms and What It Doesn’t

It is worth being clear about what these documents establish. The Nabonidus Cylinder and Chronicle confirm that Belshazzar was a historical person, that he served as co-regent in Babylon while his father campaigned elsewhere, and that a real power structure existed in which he ranked second in the empire. The details in Daniel 5 that once seemed like historical errors now align with what the cuneiform record shows.

What the extra-biblical sources do not do is confirm the specific events of Daniel 5 — the banquet, the inscription on the wall, the night of Belshazzar’s death in the precise form the narrative describes. Scholars maintain that distinction. Paul-Alain Beaulieu’s study of Nabonidus’s reign (The Reign of Nabonidus King of Babylon 556–539 B.C., Yale University Press, 1989) provides the fullest account of the Neo-Babylonian evidence without collapsing the gap between historical confirmation and literary reconstruction.

What can be said is that the case for Belshazzar being a fictional invention has not survived contact with the evidence. The king who was missing from the record was missing because of his constitutional status as co-regent, not because he did not exist. That is a very different kind of absence.

References

• Raymond Philip Dougherty, Nabonidus and Belshazzar: A Study of the Closing Events of the Neo-Babylonian Empire (Yale Oriental Series 15; Yale University Press, 1929)
• John J. Collins, Daniel: A Commentary on the Book of Daniel (Hermeneia; Fortress Press, 1993)
• Paul-Alain Beaulieu, The Reign of Nabonidus King of Babylon 556–539 B.C. (Yale Near Eastern Researches 10; Yale University Press, 1989)
• Ernest C. Lucas, Daniel (Apollos Old Testament Commentary; InterVarsity Press, 2002)

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