³⁰ In that night Belshazzar the Chaldean King was slain.

³¹ One post shall run to meet another, and one messenger to met another, to show the king of Babylon that his city is taken on every quarter:

³⁹ When they are heated, I will make their feast, and I will make them drunken, that they may rejoice, and sleep a perpetual sleep, and not wake, says Yahweh.

⁵⁷ I will make drunk her princes and her wise men, her governors and her deputies, and her mighty men; and they shall sleep a perpetual sleep, and not wake up, says the King, whose name is Yahweh of Hosts.

⁴ My heart flutters, horror has frightened me; the twilight that I desired has been turned into trembling to me.

⁵ They prepare the table, they set the watch, they eat, they drink: rise up, you princes, anoint the shield.

⁶ For thus has the Lord said to me, Go, set a watchman: let him declare what he sees:

⁷ and when he sees a troop, horsemen in pairs, a troop of donkeys, a troop of camels, he shall listen diligently with much heed.

⁸ He cried as a lion: Lord, I stand continually on the watch-tower in the day-time, and am set in my ward whole nights;

⁹ and, behold, here comes a troop of men, horsemen in pairs. He answered, Fallen, fallen is Babylon; and all the engraved images of her gods are broken to the ground.

⁹ but these two things shall come to you in a moment in one day, the loss of children, and widowhood; in their full measure shall they come on you, in the multitude of your sorceries, and the great abundance of your enchantments.

¹¹ Make sharp the arrows; hold firm the shields: Yahweh has stirred up the spirit of the kings of the Medes; because his purpose is against Babylon, to destroy it: for it is the vengeance of Yahweh, the vengeance of his temple.

¹ Belshazzar the king made a great feast to a thousand of his lords, and drank wine before the thousand.

² Belshazzar, while he tasted the wine, commanded to bring the golden and silver vessels which Nebuchadnezzar his father had taken out of the temple which was in Jerusalem; that the king and his lords, his wives and his concubines, might drink from it.