8 The Fundamentals, is left for an entire essay on the discoveries of the last, five years to be treated by another hand, specially competent for the task. • Passing by the monumental evidence which has removed objections to the historical statements of the New Testament, as less needing support, attention will be given first to one of the Old Testament narratives, which is nearest to us in time, and against which the harshest judgments of modern critics have been hurled. We refer to the statements in the Book of Daniel concerning the personality and fate of Belshazzar. THE IDENTIFICATION OF BELSHAZZAR. In the fifth chaper of Daniel Belshazzar is called the “son of Nebuchadnezzar,” and is said to have been “king” of Baby lon and to have been slain on the night in which the city was taken. But according to the other historians he was the son of Nabonidus, who was "then king, and who is known to have been out of the city when it was captured, and to have lived some time afterwards. Here, certainly, there is about as glaring an apparent dis crepancy as could be imagined. Indeed, there would seem to be a flat contradiction between profane and sacred historian.;, But in 1854 Sir Henry Rawlinson found, while excavating in the ruins of Mugheir (identified as the site of the city of Ur, from which Abraham emigrated), inscriptions which stated that when Nabonidus was near the end of his reign he asso ciated with him on the throne his eldest son, Bil-shar-uzzur, and allowed him the royal title, thus making it perfectly credi ble that Belshazzar should have been in Babylon, as he is said to have been in the Bible, and that he should have been called king, and that he should have perished in the city while Na bonidus survived outside. That he should have been called king while his father was still living is no more strange than that Jehoram should have been appointed by his father, Je- hoshaphat, king of Judah, seven years before his father’s death
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