In the same hour came forth fingers of a man's hand, and wrote over against the candlestick upon the plaister of the wall of the king's palace: and the king saw the part of the hand that wrote.
In the same hour - that the cause of God's visitation might be palpable-namely, the profanation of His vessels and His holy name.
Came forth fingers of a man's hand. God admonishes him, not by a dream (as Nebuchadnezzar had been warned), or by a voice, but by "fingers coming forth," the invisibility of Him who moved them heightening the awful impressiveness of the scene, the hand of the Unseen One attesting his doom before the eyes of himself and his guilty fellow-revellers. And wrote over against the candlestick - the candelabra; where the mystic characters would be best seen. Barnes makes it the candlestick taken from the temple of Jerusalem, the nearness of the writing to it intimating that the rebuke was directed against the sacrilege.
Upon the plaster of the wall of the king's palace. There are to this day found written in cuneiform letters on slabs on the walls, and on the very bricks, the perpetually recurring recital of titles, victories, and exploits, to remind the spectator at every point of the regal greatness. It is significant that, on the same wall on which the king was accustomed to read the flattering legends of his own magnificence, he beholds the mysterious inscription which tells his fall (cf. Proverbs 16:18, "Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall." So in the case of Herod directly after his beheadal of James and persecution of Peter; he sat on his throne in dazzling apparel of silver tinsel, and made an oration, in which "he gave not God the glory," but accepted the fulsome adulation of the mob, "It is the voice of a god, and not of a man;" therefore "immediately the angel of the Lord smote him, and he was eaten of worms, and gave up the ghost," Acts 12:21-23).
And the king saw the part of the hand - the anterior part-namely, the fingers.