Daniel — Chapter 5
Belshazzar's profane feast using the Temple vessels, the mysterious writing on the wall (MENE MENE TEKEL UPHARSIN), and his death that night. Lapide reads the feast as an image of sacrilege — using sacred things for profane purposes. He applies this to those who receive the sacraments unworthily, drinking judgment upon themselves (1 Cor. 11:29).
Verse 1
Belshazzar the king made a great feast for a thousand of his lords: Lapide uses the feast as the occasion for a homily on the abuse of festivity and prosperity. The same luxuries that God gave as blessings are perverted into instruments of idolatry and sacrilege. He connects to Paul's warning that all things are lawful but not all are expedient (1 Cor. 6:12).
Verse 5
The fingers of a human hand write on the plaster of the wall: Lapide draws on patristic sources (Jerome's commentary) for the supernatural character of the writing, and reads it as a type of all moments when God makes His judgment visible in history through seemingly natural events interpreted by prophetic insight.
Verse 23
You have praised the gods of silver and gold, of bronze, iron, wood, and stone, which do not see or hear or know, but the God in whose hand is your breath you have not honored: Lapide gives his most concentrated denunciation of all idolatry as metaphysically incoherent — worshipping what is beneath the worshipper in being. He cites Wisdom 13-15 and Rom. 1:19-23 as parallel indictments.
Verse 26
MENE: God has numbered your kingdom and brought it to an end; TEKEL: weighed in the balance and found wanting; PERES: divided and given to the Medes and Persians: Lapide's moral reading — every soul's life is numbered by God, its works weighed on the divine scale, and its final state determined accordingly. He applies this to the particular judgment at death.
Verse 30
That very night Belshazzar the Chaldean king was killed: Lapide's powerful application of the sudden death motif — 'in nocte illa interfectus est' — to the unpredictability of divine judgment. He cites Lk. 12:20 ('Fool! This night your soul is required of you') and develops the traditional Catholic argument for the necessity of being always in the state of grace, ready for death.