Similarly Antiochus Epiphanes, if he had not been half mad, might have taken warning, before he insulted the Temple and the sacred vessels of Jerusalem, from the fact that his father, Antiochus the Great, had met his death in attempting to plunder the Temple at Elymais (B.C. 187). He might also have recalled the celebrated discomfiture--however caused--of Heliodorus in the Temple of Jerusalem.[428]
Such insulting and reckless blasphemy could not go unpunished. It is fitting that the Divine retribution should overtake the king on the same night, and that the same lips which thus profaned with this wine the holiest things should sip the wine of the Divine poison-cup, whose fierce heat must in the same night prove fatal to himself. But even such sinners, drinking as it were over the pit of hell, "according to a metaphor used elsewhere,[429] must still at the last moment be warned by a suitable Divine sign, that it may be known whether they will honour the truth."[430] Nebuchadrezzar had received _his_ warning, and in the end it had not been wholly in vain. Even for Belshazzar it might perhaps not prove to be too late.
For at this very moment[431] when the revelry was at its zenith, when the whirl of excited self-exaltation was most intense, when Judah's gold was "treading heavy on the lips"--the profane lips--of satraps and concubines, there appeared a portent, which seems at first to have been visible to the king alone.
Seated on his lofty and jewelled throne, which
"Outshone the wealth of Ormuz or of Ind, Or where the gorgeous East with richest hand Showers on its kings barbaric pearl and gold,"
his eye caught _something_ visible on the white stucco of the wall above the line of frescoes.[432] He saw it over the lights which crowned the huge golden _Nebrashta_, or chandelier.[433] The fingers of a man's hand were writing letters on the wall, and the king saw the hollow of that gigantic supernatural palm.[434]
The portent astounded and horrified him. The flush of youth and of wine faded from his cheek;--"his brightnesses were changed"; his thoughts troubled him; the bands of his loins were loosed;[435] his knees smote one against another in his trembling attitude,[436] as he stood arrested by the awful sight.