Weighed in the Balances
25 “This is the writing that was inscribed: ‘MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN.’ 26 “This is the interpretation of the thing: MENE: God has counted your kingdom, and brought it to an end. 27 TEKEL: you are weighed in the balances, and are found wanting. 28 PERES: your kingdom is divided, and given to the Medes and Persians.”
Four words on the plaster turn out to be a set of weights, and each is read as a verdict — counted, weighed, divided.
“This is the writing that was inscribed: ‘MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN.’
Four words, and by themselves they are almost nothing: a list of measures. A mina, a mina, a shekel, and halves — the vocabulary of a counting house, the sort of notation a clerk would scratch on a tablet to record silver by weight. That may be exactly why the wise men could not read it Daniel 5:8. There was nothing occult to decode; there was a set of weights on a palace wall, and no one could see what an accounting had to do with a feast. What Daniel supplies is not translation but meaning — the recognition that a king was the thing being weighed.
“This is the interpretation of the thing: MENE: God has counted your kingdom, and brought it to an end.
Counted. The word is repeated on the wall, and the sense Daniel draws from it is that the reckoning is complete — the sum is not still running. Empires think in reigns and dynasties; heaven has been keeping a total, and the total is closed. Babylon had a number on it, given by a prophet to this king's predecessor decades earlier Jeremiah 25:12 and known to Daniel from the books he read Daniel 9:2. The gold head had a duration.
TEKEL: you are weighed in the balances, and are found wanting.
Weighed. And note the change of object — the kingdom was counted; you are weighed. Judgment in Scripture is personal before it is national, and the figure of the scales is one the prophets and the wisdom books use for exactly this: a life set against the standard and coming up light Job 31:6 Proverbs 16:2 Psalms 62:9. Found wanting is the quietest sentence in the chapter and the most searching. Not found monstrous, not found guilty of some singular atrocity — found insufficient. A man with every advantage, weighed, and there was not enough of him.
PERES: your kingdom is divided, and given to the Medes and Persians.”
Divided. The word on the wall was plural — UPHARSIN, the halves — and Daniel gives its singular in the verdict, and in the giving of it the prophecy of chapter two arrives on schedule: the silver takes the gold Daniel 2:39 Daniel 8:20. The recipients are named, that night, before the walls are breached; and the verb is the one that has run through the whole book. The kingdom is given. It was given to Nebuchadnezzar Daniel 2:37, and it is given away now, by the God who removes kings and sets up kings Daniel 2:21 and gives it to whomever he will Daniel 4:17. The hand that wrote on the plaster was settling an account the king did not know was open.
settled What this mark means