Page 116 - The Prophet-statesman a Drama of Daniel

The attitude of indifference to the worship of Jehovah which characterized King
Nabonidus and Queen Hanniel, had become contempt and opposition in the young

King Belshazzar.

As his early years had given promise, he became in some ways an astute ruler,
handling his subordinates with deftness. But it was all political chicanery and he was

filled with a desire for pleasure and with personal ambition.

He would not take a queen, but had many paramours among the ladies of the
court, and his appeal for popularity among the official classes was the well-known

method of lavish functions for the lords and ladies of the court.

This moral decadency was a source of poignant grief to the eighty-year-old Queen
Rhea, and even a concern to Queen Hanniel who viewed with some alarm the

debauchery of her son during the long absence of Nabonidus, who had headed a
gigantic army to the lands of the East, and committed all domestic rule into the hand
of his dissolute heir. The ornate images of Bel which had long adorned the immerse
throne-room and had later been removed by Nebuchadnezzar, were now restored for

the pleasure of the Babylonish lords and the priests of Bel. This was something that
even Neriglissar had not done. Such was the state of Babylon, when the rapidly-rising
power to the North, the Kingdom of the Medes and Persians, refused to pay tribute
any longer and declared their complete independence of the Babylonish government.

And this was not all Shortly after their manifesto of independence and defiance,
there actually appeared before the walls of Babylon, a magnificently trained and
equipped army of one-hundred thousand men under the command of the Median

General, Gobryas, who demanded the surrender of the city to the Medes and Persians
and the submission of the people to the rule of King Cyrus.