³ So the servants brought in the gold cups. The cups had been taken from God’s temple in Jerusalem. The king and his nobles drank from them. So did his wives and concubines. ⁴ As they drank the wine, they praised their gods. The statues of those gods were made out of gold, silver, bronze, iron, wood or stone.

⁵ Suddenly the fingers of a human hand appeared. They wrote something on the plaster of the palace wall. It happened near the lampstand. The king watched the hand as it wrote.