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You remember correctly, FRiend.

While Belshazzar partied hearty, and the handwriting appeared on the wall, the Medes and the Persians dammed up the river that flowed through the middle of Babylon under its massive walls.

The Medes and the Persians marched in on the riverbed and took over Babylon.

Belshazzar’s knees knocked in fear, because in the midst of the unrestrained debauchery,in which some of the sacred vessels captured from the Temple of Solomon almost 70 years before were used, a man’s disembodied hand appeared and wrote on the wall: Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin.

Then he called in 86 year old Daniel to decipher the handwriting on the wall. Daniel was even offered a third of the kingdom.

Daniel interpreted the meaning of the words to Belshazzar, and that night, Belshazzar was killed.

History changed that night. The feared and powerful Babylonian Empire ended, and the reign of the Persians and the Medes began. Twi hundred years later, Alexander the Great and the Greeks would succeed them as the ruling empire of the ancient world.

Eventually, under the protection of ths new empire, Nehemiah was allowed to go back and to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem and the Temple(although it was only a shadow of it’s former glory under Solomon).

The Jews alone among all of the ancient peoples who were captured by empires and enslaved were allowed to go back to their homeland and to rebuild their cities.

God had a plan and a purpose, and He used even heathen rulers to execute it.