Sam Smith's Writing's on the Wall won the Academy Award for Best Original Song after Spectre's release in 2015 — the first James Bond theme to do so. The lyric is a love song with the wariness of a person who has seen the danger ahead and is asking the lover whether they will walk in anyway. The title is a quotation. The phrase the writing's on the wall has been a fixed English idiom for at least four hundred years, used to mean a sign that disaster is coming, plain enough that anyone with eyes can see it. The phrase is older than that, though. It is older than English itself.
It comes from a single scene in the book of Daniel, set roughly 539 BC. King Belshazzar of Babylon throws a feast. He drinks from vessels his predecessors had taken from the Jerusalem temple. While the room is loud and gold, a hand appears at the wall and writes. The king sees the fingers but cannot read what they have written.
"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."
A Verse That Names the Sign
The verse is striking for its restraint. It does not give us thunder. It does not give us angels. It gives us fingers, which is to say a hand without an arm, and plaister, which is to say wall surface — the most ordinary substance in the room. The Babylonian palace has been dressed with paintings and gold, and the warning comes on the cheapest material the building used. The fingers write where the candlestick happens to be lighting the wall. The verse takes care to specify what the king sees: not the meaning, only the writing hand.
This is what makes the idiom usable in any language since. The phrase does not describe the message. It describes the moment when the message becomes physically present. The writing's on the wall is the same posture in 539 BC and in 2015. The world has changed; the situation has changed; the wall — the moment when the danger becomes visible — is the same.
What Belshazzar Could Not Read
The story continues past the verse. Belshazzar calls his counselors; they cannot read the message. Daniel is brought in. The text on the wall is Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin — counted, counted, weighed, divided. Daniel reads it as judgment: the kingdom has been numbered, weighed, found wanting, and will be split between the Medes and the Persians. That night, the verse continues, Belshazzar is killed and the kingdom changes hands.
The song is not about Belshazzar. But the song's narrator is in his moment — the moment between seeing the writing and being able to read it. If I risk it all, could you break my fall? is, in idiomatic shorthand, the prayer of a person who has seen the fingers but does not yet know whether the message is judgment or rescue.
Why the Idiom Stuck
English absorbed the writing's on the wall in the early seventeenth century, after the King James Bible was distributed widely enough that the phrase became part of common reading. The idiom has survived because the situation it describes is not unusual. People see signs they cannot yet read. The signs are clear enough that they cannot be ignored, but unclear enough that they require interpretation. The Bond film, which is about an agent reading the room of an organization that has been preparing his destruction, fits the verse exactly. Sam Smith's narrator is closer to the dinner guest who saw the hand and waited for someone to translate.
What the Song Risks
The lyric ends not in resolution but in question. The narrator is willing to walk into the wall's warning if the lover walks too. The verse, taken in full chapter, does not promise that. Belshazzar is judged whether or not he understands. But the verse does not condemn the question. It commends the seeing. The first step in Daniel 5 is for the king to see the fingers. He is praised for that, briefly, even before he is judged. He looked.
The song is, in this small sense, a prayer of looking. It is asking the listener — and the lover, and perhaps God — to be there when the meaning of the wall arrives.
The Forty Seconds
Read Daniel 5:5 once. 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. Forty seconds. In that time the song's title is restored to the room it came from. The plaster is cheap. The fingers are real. The seeing is given to anyone who looks.
The wall is the spectacle. The verse is the source. The writing is what the song is asking the lover to read with it.