totally secure. Scripture records that during a feast for a thousand of his lords, King Belshazzar called for the vessels that Nebuchadnezzar had taken out of the temple in Jerusalem. At the very hour when the king and his guests drank out of the sacred vessels and praised their gods, the fingers of a man's hand appeared and wrote a message upon the plaster of the palace wall. It was a message announcing that God had decreed an end to the Babylonian kingdom. The entire story is related in Daniel chapter 5, drawing the curtain down in verses 30 and 31: In that night was Belshazzar king of the Chaldeans slain. And Darius the Median took the kingdom, being about three score and two years old. What had taken place, as recorded by ancient historians, is related in Halley's Bible Handbook: The Fall of Babylon is thus related by Xenophon, Herodotus and Berosus: "Cyrus diverted the Euphrates into a new channel, and guided by two deserters, marched by the dry bed into the city, while the Babylonians were carousing at a feast of their gods."! Babylon, as prophesied by Isaiah a hundred years before it rose to the zenith of its power, is nothing more than a The Secret Side of History came very suddenly during a time when her leaders felt Nebuchadnezzar had The city fell without a battle; and today Ancient