Moving finger

A cultural allusion to the moving finger may refer to at least two different things.

• In the story of 'Belshazzar's Feast', part of the biblical story of Daniel, the blasphemous king Belshazzar is visited during a feast he is giving his lords (using Jewish sacred vessels) by mysterious "fingers of a man's hand" (Daniel ch 5, v 5), which writes on the wall a message of doom. The 'moving finger' here is used figuratively to convey any prophecy of ill fate.
• Stanza 51 in The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (1859) by Edward Fitzgerald (1809-83) reads as follows.

The moving finger writes; and, having writ,

Moves on: nor all thy piety nor wit

Shall lure it back to cancel half a line,

Nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.

This is an evocation of the immutability of history and the inevitability of time, in Fitzgerald's free translation/adaptation of verses by the Persian astronomer, philosopher and poet Omar Khayyam (1048-1125).