The Writing on the Wall & Weighed in the Balance

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.
Then the king's countenance was changed, and his thoughts troubled him, so that the joints of his loins were loosed, and his knees smote one against another.
The king cried aloud to bring in the astrologers, the Chaldeans, and the soothsayers....

-- Daniel 5: 5-7 (KJV)

When you "see the writing on the wall," you have no doubt that you're doomed: the message has become crystal clear. Such is not the case with the original writing (or "handwriting") on the wall, which is found in the book of Daniel though the actual phrase is not.

In this chapter we find Nebuchadnezzar's successor, King Belshazzar, carousing with his court and sipping wine from golden goblets purloined from the Jerusalem Temple. Suddenly a mysterious, detached hand appears in the air to write on his chamber walls. Belshazzar, so terrified that his knees start knocking, promises great power and wealth to whoever can interpret the writing.

Once again, the assorted astrologers and soothsayers are at a total loss. So Daniel is summoned for a repeat performance. The prophet warns Belshazzar to stop profaning the holy objects of the Lord's temple and to give up his idol worship. The hand that appeared in his chamber was that of the one true God, who holds the king's "breath" in his hands (5: 23-24).

As for the message, it reads, in Aramaic, "mene, mene, tekel, upharsin." In slightly garbled form, these are the names of various coins, listed according to descending value (a pharsin is two pheres, which make a tekel; sixty tekels made a mene). There are five coins in all (two menes, one tekel, two pheres), and these perhaps represent five successors of Nebuchadnezzar, each less substantial than his predecessor.

But Daniel knows there's more to this list than pocket change. Each of the three names is similar and perhaps etymologically related to an Aramaic verb, so that the entire phrase might be translated as "numbered, numbered, weighed, and divided." Daniel transforms each verb, in turn, into a sentence, in both senses of the term. From mene ("numbered") Daniel extrapolates: "God hath numbered thy kingdom, and finished it." From tekel ("weight"): "Thou are weighed in the balance, and art found wanting." Finally, from pheres ("halved" or "divided," with a pun on "Persian"): "Thy kingdom is divided, and given to the Medes and Persians" (verses 25-27). It doesn't take long for Daniel's predictions to come true: that very night, Belshazzar is slain and his kingdom overrun by King Darius of Media.

This whole strange episode has not only lent us "writing on the wall" but is also the primary source of our phrase "to be weighed in the balance." The image, as a metaphor for judgment, dates in English at least to the fourteenth century, but Daniel made the precise wording famous and fixed the phrase with its ominous overtones.

 
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Michael Macrone is Associate Site Producer of GraceCom and the author of nine books on language, literature, and ideas, including the best-selling Brush Up Your Shakespeare!