Biblion Bible Commentary
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Weighed in the Balances
Daniel 5:25-28
25 “This is the writing that was inscribed: ‘MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN.’ · WEB
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" Daniel 5:25.
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.
MENE: God has counted your kingdom, and brought it to an end Daniel 5:26.
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 Daniel 5:27.
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 Daniel 5:28.
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