Varsity Christian Fellowship - Daniel 5

We went through Daniel 5 for varsity christian fellowship cell group meet last Wednesday. I was supposed to lead cell group meet for that session for my cell group as my co cell group leader was away to India for a mooting competition. I am not quite confident of myself in leading cell group session by myself, and I was preparing the previous day about how I should be going about leading the session. Lo and behold, we had a combined cell group session with the other cell groups because there were too few people. The year 1's had a make up contract lecture. So all 4 cell groups of the varsity christian fellowship had a combined cell group session that day. It relieved me of having to lead cell group because another cell group leader from another cell group did most of the talking. I was in some sense disappointed that I didn't get the opportunity to try out leading the cell group by myself.

The pedagogy of cell group session has been kind of a question and answer session on the passages of Daniel. For the session on Daniel 5, one of the issues raised was why King Belshazzar offered to make any person who could interpret the apparition of the hand writing on the wall the position of third highest ruler in the kingdom instead of the second highest ruler in the kingdom. The guess put forward by a member was that King Belshazzar was first in command, and his queen, second in command, and thus, he was only willing to offer the third position of the kingdom.

I did a quick search during the session for commentaries on the passage of Daniel 5 and came to this website. There was previously skepticism by bible scholars as to the historicity of Daniel 5 since historical records demonstrate that a man named Nabonidus was the last king of Babylon and not Belshazzaar. But the discovery of the Nabonidus Cylinder reveals King Belshazzar to be the eldest son of Nabonidus. So the website listed above suggest the possibility of King Belshazzar being co-regent with his father, which explains his conferring of third position in kingdom as he could not give the first or the second, which is him and his father. I suppose another interesting question to ask is why the bible passage calls King Belshazzar the son of King Nebuchadnezzar. I think from my study of Daniel in Central Bible Studies, I have come to interpret the Book of Daniel in a less historically literal manner, and wouldn't be too critical at the this apparent historical deviation.

What I found interesting about the Nabonidus Cylinder was the inscription that was on it. The cylinder states: "As for me, Nabonidus, king of Babylon, save me from sinning against your great godhead and grant me as a present a life long of days, and as for Belshazzar, the eldest son -my offspring- instill reverence for your great godhead in his heart and may he not commit any cultic mistake, may he be sated with a life of plenitude."

I am not sure which god King Nabonidus is praying to. There are a pantheon of gods which the Babylonians worship. But the words above suggest some sort of concept of sin when it comes to the religious doctrine of the Babylonian religion. It interest me to know how similar is this concept of sin of the ancient Babylonian religion is with that of the Jewish and Christian religions. Do they have the concept of atonement of sins as the Judaism and Christianity?

Another question raised in the cell group session was why God would have King Belshazzar killed and his kingdom overthrown instead of treating him more leniently as King Nebuchadnezzar. A member brought up the paradigm of culpability that we study about in criminal law. In criminal law, a person is deemed culpable of a crime if there is the actus reas (act) and mens rea (mental) components of the crime. In this case, Belshazzar's act of using the cups of gold and silver that were taken from the Jewish temple and drinking it in praise of foreign gods of gold and silver was suggested to be a grievous trespass against God. That would be the actus reas. The mens rea lies with the knowledge that King Belshazzar had towards his action. In verse 22, we read of Daniel telling King Belshazzar that he had not humbled himself despite knowing of the incident regarding King Nebuchadnezzar being struck with madness.

A member in the group thought that it is a strain to bring in the concept of culpability from criminal law when evaluating the actions of King Belshazzar though. He says that in the bible, we pretty much see God punishing people for what would seem to contemporary human minds to be disproportionate punishment. He cites the instance of God striking dead the ox cart driver who had used his hands to block the ark of God from falling off the ox cart as it was being transported into the city. He says, to our human rationality, it would have been preferable for the guy to prevent the ark from falling onto the floor. But he conceded later that there was culpability involved as the israelites should have placed the ark onto something more honourable than an ox cart.

Another issue brought up was why Daniel initially refused to accept the gifts offered by Belshazzar but relented in the end. A member referred to the accounts of Daniel 1 where Daniel and his 3 friends had reused to eat the royal food, and suggested that the reason could be that of not wanting to defile themselves with the culture of the Babylonians. I gave the hypothesis that given what Daniel knows about the impending downfall of the Babylonian kingdom, the gifts would have been worthless to him. But I would refrain now from my answer as it suggest a condescension on Daniel's part towards the gifts offered.

To wrap things up, our Exco leader talks about how we view the actions of a person with the lens of how we perceive the character to be. She mentions her observation about how we were coming up with suggestion trying to portray the actions of Daniel in a good light because we believe him to be a good character. She ask that if it were the case that we know of another person whom we do not like who would have done the same thing as Daniel, would we be so generous with our interpretation of his actions?

I do remember reading somewhere about how we accrue a positive interpretation upon the actions of biblical characters, and how this could be a wrong way to interpret actions. In that article, it talked about how David resorted to actions like feigning his madness in order to escape the captivity of a foreign King, and conspired with a foreign army to attack Israel. The author said that these actions by David were not condonable, but indicated his flaws as a character in relying on his own strengths instead of God. I do recognize the portrayal of David as a flawed character in the bible. I am not sure about these other biblical characters like Daniel though. It would be interesting to know what flaws he has.