TODAY WE discuss the fall of Babylon. It wasn’t just divine punishment for the hubris of King Belshazzar; this was a smackdown in the spirit realm.
Interestingly, the target of God’s wrath wasn’t Marduk, city-god of Babylon and head of the Mesopotamian pantheon, it was the moon-god, Sîn. Belshazzar’s father, Nabonidus, was the king of Babylon in 539 B.C., but he’d been living at Teima, an oasis in Arabia that was a center of the moon-god cult. Nabonidus was from Harran, another major center of moon-god worship, and his mother was a priestess in the temple of Sîn there.
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THE ROLE and responsibility of a watchman opens this week’s study. But beyond the burden watchmen carry for sounding the alert when enemies approach is a deeper sense of the word, a meaning rooted in the similarity of the Aramaic and Hebrew words for “Watcher” (
