The Handwriting on the Wall

by John Comer

It would be risky guesswork for us to point on a map and say, “This is where the land of Eden was, where God planted his garden and human history began.” But the Bible does mention the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers in conjunction with Eden, which gives us some sense of direction. Eden, with its famous garden, may have been located in what we now know as Iraq. Whether home to the storied Eden or not, Iraq’s geography has hosted some fascinating events. Here are a few of them.

The great flood was past, and the descendants of Noah’s sons moved eastward and settled on the plain of Shinar, where they planned a great city with a tower reaching to heaven. God confused the one language they spoke, and they abandoned plans for the city which was called Babel. We don’t know the exact location of old Babel, but it was within present-day Iraq, an area that still generates a considerable amount of confusion.

Some generations later, and probably not too far away, a man named Abram lived in the city of Ur. Later in Abram’s life, and far from the land of his birth, we know him as Abraham. The ruins of Ur are in southeastern Iraq, near where the Euphrates begins to find the Persian Gulf.

Long after Abraham’s time, God sent Jonah to prophesy against the great city of Nineveh, a job that Jonah performed only after considerable and futile resistance. The ruins of Nineveh lie near the city of Mosul in northern Iraq, near Turkey.

About 600 years before Christ, King Nebuchadnezzar conquered Judah. Among the captives he took to Babylon was Daniel, God’s prophet. The ruins of the city of Babylon lie along the banks of the Euphrates River, about fifty miles south of the Iraqi capital of Baghdad.

Nebuchadnezzar’s successor, King Belshazzar, gave a great banquet during which a human hand appeared and wrote on the palace wall. Here’s a part of what Daniel said the handwriting on the wall meant:

God has numbered the days of your reign. You have been weighed on the scales and found wanting.

As I write, President Bush and Prime Minister Blair are leading a coalition, making war decisions regarding this land that felt the footsteps of such notables as Abraham, Daniel, and maybe even Adam and Eve. What does the handwriting on the wall say for Saddam Hussein?