donkey hee-hawing Balaam to think again before cursing the Israelites; Abraham’s hand stayed from slaughtering his son by the iron grip of the angel’s intervention. But in Belshazzar’s Feast painted in 1635, the agent of the drama which interrupts the Babylonian king’s banquet – profaned by using the Temple vessels, shaking his table, his company of courtiers and courtesans, and his empire – are Hebrew letters written on the wall by a mysteriously
