God's Graffiti: On the Social Aesthetics of Divine Writing

This article proposes that the methodology of social semiotics can be used to study how traditional narrative schemes are adopted and shaped into new versions in order to give voice to particularly critical moments in the life of a community. The focus here is on how Jewish and Christian civilisations have posited the relation between the invisibility of abusive and arrogant power and the manifestation of social judgment and condemnation under the form of mysterious messages that, unbeknownst to those in power, are disclosed to them by a just interpreter whose revelations also determine the ruler’s fall. The textual point of departure for this is Daniel 5, the passage of the Bible in which graffiti mysteriously traced on a wall announces to Belshazzar the end of his kingdom during a sacrilegious feast. By examining Talmudic and later Jewish interpretations, Christian exegeses, medieval and early-modern Christian iconography, and modern and contemporary intertextual transpositions of this biblical episode, this article condenses the essential elements of the relation between religious aesthetics and power. Each new retelling of this story serves the symbolical and aesthetic needs of a specific community, and yet all versions share a common narrative kernel in which the arbitrary use of power is condemned through the reimagination of a transcendent message deciphered by an immaculate hero.