Bees Knees and Barmy Armies--Origins of the Words and Phrases we Use Every Day by Harry Oliver

Author:Harry Oliver [Harry Oliver]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781857829440
Publisher: John Blake Publishing
Published: 2012-04-09T16:00:00+00:00

Writing is on the Wall

To say ‘the writing is on the wall’ is to warn of impending disaster. The phrase has Old Testament origins. Daniel 5:4 tells how King Belshazzar, in the midst of a drunken feast, took sacred golden vessels out of the temple of Jerusalem and drank from them, toasting ‘the gods of gold and silver, bronze, iron, wood and stone’. Just as soon as he’d committed this act of blasphemy, the fingers of a human hand appeared and proceeded to write upon the palace wall in Hebrew. Unable to read the text, Belshazzar had the prophet Daniel translate the words: ‘God has numbered the days of your kingdom and brought it to an end; you have been weighed on the scales and found wanting; your kingdom is divided and given to the Medes and Persians.’

That night Belshazzar was slain, and Darius the Mede became King. It wasn’t until the eighteenth century that the figurative sense of ‘the writing on the wall’, as we know it today, was first recorded in our language. Jonathan Swift, the political satirist and author of Gulliver’s Travels, used it in his poem ‘The Run Upon the Bankers’ in 1720.

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