God’s Word for You

Daniel 5:6 Knees

by Pastor Timothy Smith on Thursday, October 16, 2025

6 Then the king’s face changed color. He was so frightened that his legs gave way and that his knees began knocking together.

I have tried to make Daniel’s Aramaic understandable here. These four expressions are each so idiomatic in almost any language that we understand what they mean even if the idiom is difficult to express literally. For example, his face “changed color,” where we would probably say that he became pale.

The king “was so frightened.” More literally, “his thoughts-of being frightened.” This doesn’t mean that he was thinking about being scared, but that he was frightened, and that all of his thoughts were of this fear and nothing else. This is an idiom that uses a pael verb (equal to the Hebrew piel) which in this case turns the transitive verb bahal which means “to frighten” into the intransitive “be frightened.”

Also, the king’s “legs gave way.” The language suggests that the joints of his hips loosened, so that he had no way to easily stand; either he couldn’t get up at all or else he could not remain standing. Now, since fear usually brings on a constriction or tightening of the muscles, could it be that the king’s hips loosening means that something else to do with his hips became loose other than his legs? I would be careful about saying such a thing in the pulpit, but there is an idiom here that is very close to saying that the man’s bowels suddenly became loose.

Finally, the king’s knees were knocking. Here the Aramaic expression was that they knocked “this one to that one.” This is not merely shaking, but the knees actually knocking against each other—something we generally only see in cartoons.

The overall image of Belshazzar, then, is that he was frightened, terrified; horrified. His grandfather may have talked about having visions and dreams and that one weird episode of losing his mind and living like an ox for seven years, but it doesn’t really seem as if Belshazzar believed any of that. He may not have thought of religion as anything more than an “opiate for the masses,” which means that he thought of religion as a substitute for drugs that helped to calm down the poor people. But now something supernatural hit him right between the eyes. He saw for himself the hand writing letters on his wall, letters he could read but could not understand. And it was all directed at him. It was as if a Sherman Tank had driven through the wall of his dining hall with its long gun pointed right at his nose.

There were two or three things contributing to the king’s fear and bringing on all of these trembling, knee-knocking symptoms.

First: The end of the chapter and several historical accounts tell us that the city on this very night was surrounded by enemies. Although Belshazzar may have felt secure behind the city’s thick, high walls, the fact was that an army was at his gate, and they were devising and carrying out a plan at this very moment to enter the city with very little loss of life.

Second: The king may have finally been caught by guilt for his sacrilegious treatment of the holy goblets and drinking vessels of the Israelites and their holy temple. Those things were the plunder or loot from the temple in Jerusalem, which Isaiah calls matmon (meaning “buried treasure,” Isaiah 45:3) and which some think is the root for the New Testament word “mammon.” “You cannot serve both God and mammon” (Matthew 6:24).

Third, the hand itself. Even though Belshazzar couldn’t understand the letters that were being written, he certainly knew that he was in trouble. Deep, deep trouble. The fear of punishment overcame him.

This is the fear that God permits us to feel as our sins are exposed. Sometimes we make what we think are little mistakes, things “everybody does” and that nobody gets in trouble for. But we should know better; God despises and is enraged over all our sins. It’s usually only when we commit something really big or terrible (or public) that we find out what shame and guilt should really feel like all the time. There are really two kinds of guilt. The first is imputed from the outside: God proclaims us guilty for what we have done. Scripture teaches this by using words like “not counting sins” against us (Psalm 32:2) and “forgiving guilt” (Matthew 6:12). Guilt weighs down on the sinner, whether he is aware of it or not, just as a “kick me” sign slapped on the back as a prank is there for everyone to see. Except that guilt ascribed to a person is no prank. It is deadly serious—in an eternal sense. Lutheran theologian David Hollaz called it “a moral filthiness or ugliness rebounding from a shameful act and sticking to the sinner as an ugly stain.”

The second kind of guilt is what the sinner feels, an evil or guilty conscience. The conscience of man, as it feels guilt and shame, is aware of God who reveals himself as holy in the law and who demands holiness. Paul says, “Their consciences bear witness, accusing them” (Romans 2:15). This law is written in the hearts of everyone, not only believers, and the conscience testifies to us about God’s wrath.

This is what Belshazzar felt, perhaps for the first and only time in his life. He had spent every single hour of his life opposing God, ignoring God, sinning against God, oppressing and ridiculing God’s people, and now even desecrating things from God’s holy temple. And it was now that this petty little kingling was made aware of it.

A friend of mine has spent a lot of time visiting people in hospitals, nursing homes, and places where there were many people who were close to death. He isn’t a minister. He is just a very kind man with a good Christian heart who spends time with people when they need him to be around. He has told me several accounts of his visits, where this or that friend of his was in a room next to someone who hated God, spoke out against God, and just never wanted to talk about God or their soul or what happens when we die. And quite a few times he has been there quietly comforting a friend when the unbeliever in the next room or down the hall would suddenly scream out in terror. And that was their dying moment. Like Hamlet’s father, did they feel the terror of standing before the Holy One bearing all of the sins of their life? “No reckoning made, but sent to my account with all my imperfections on my head: O, horrible! O, horrible! most horrible!” (Hamlet, I:5).

The Christian has nothing to fear of the dying moment. We have Christ, who has prepared a place for us, who has promised to come back for us (John 14:2-3), who already paid the price for our sins (Isaiah 40:2). Our Jesus loves us, and when we are summoned from this life, we are called home to glory, to joy, to bliss, and to eternal and everlasting peace. So be at peace, and live a life that thanks Jesus for what he has already given you.

In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith

 

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