Daniel 5:5

5. Poetry and story have done their best to make vivid this climax of the feast, when Belshazzar, having publicly scorned Jehovah, drinking from his holy cup amid the laughter of his lords, suddenly felt the boisterous company grow deathly silent, and looking up saw on the plaster (literally, stucco) of the wall, under the full light of the golden chandelier, a ghostly hand appear, and saw the “palm” of that supernatural hand as it wrote strange words before his eyes,

And wrote, and wrote, on the white wall Letters of fire wrote and disappeared! Heine.

The fact that the king saw the “hollow” of the hand would suggest that no pen seemed to be used, but the writing was accomplished by the stroke of the “fingers.” The “hand” was the organ of divine power (compare Ezekiel 8:3). In a famous Egyptian papyrus the hand, with its fingers as digits, represents certain mystic numbers and stands, in different positions, for certain well-known deities. The symbol of the “hand of might” has always been common in the Orient and may he seen in Jerusalem to this day sculptured, or colored with vermilion, on the lintel or above the arch of the door. While this symbol might, among the Jews, have been connected with the tradition of the deliverance of Israel from the last Egyptian plague, yet the uplifted open hand was prominent above the doors in ancient Carthage, and remains as an emblem of power in modern Turkey and Persia. So Siva, the Destroyer, in the Hindu triad, had as his symbol a hand “token of might and life.” The king of Babylon could not be recognized as a legitimate ruler until he had lifted up his hand and clasped the hand of the image of Bel, his “father.” This mysterious hand, which the Assyrians as well as the Phoenicians, Egyptians, and other ancient nations regarded as a divine symbol of power, and which often, if not always, includes the thought of covenant relations between God and man (Trumbull, Threshold Covenant, 1896), here appears to write the doom of the king and dissolve his covenant with life.