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Tyndale Open Bible Dictionary

MENE, MENE, TEKEL, PARSIN

Mysterious prophetic words in Daniel 5:25 pointing to the judgment of God against Babylon and her king. A decade or so following the death of King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon (562 BC), a man of lesser moral stature, Belshazzar, became monarch of the empire. The fifth chapter of Daniel tells of a great banquet that Belshazzar made to which 1,000 of his nobles and their wives had been invited. Under the influence of wine, Belshazzar ordered his servants to bring the gold and silver vessels taken from the temple in Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar a generation earlier. The sacred vessels, kept in storage until then, were distributed to the guests at the feast and sacrilegiously used to offer praise to the gods of Babylon (Dn 5:4).

In the midst of the revelry, the fingers of a man’s hand appeared and wrote upon the plaster of the banquet room wall. The king’s composure was altogether shattered by the event and he cried out for someone to interpret the writing. None of his wise men were able, however, to discern the meaning of the words. Finally, the queen proposed a solution to the dilemma: Daniel the prophet—a gifted man in matters such as these—could be summoned to interpret the writing.

Daniel was brought in before the king and immediately rebuked him for his foolish and godless arrogance. His sermon before Belshazzar (Dn 5:17-23) powerfully proclaimed the judgment of God against all sinful pride, a message decisively revealed in the enigmatic words that Daniel then proceeded to interpret.

The words, given in the Aramaic script, are transliterated into English as “Mene, Mene, Tekel, Parsin” (“Upharsin,” KJB). The mystery of the words lay not in the decipherment of the language but in the significance attached to each of the words. Superficially, they simply denoted a series of weights or monetary values. In truth they prophesied the immediate judgment of God against Babylon and its king.

Daniel’s explanation of the inscription is recorded in Daniel 5:26-27. Mene means “numbered” and its double entry indicated that God had both numbered the days of Belshazzar’s kingdom and had reckoned its termination. Tekel means “weighed.” Applied to Belshazzar, it signified his moral and spiritual inadequacy. He was, as it were, too light to balance out on the scales of God’s standard of righteousness. The final participle, parsin means “broken” or “divided.” Daniel gives the singular form of the word in his interpretation peres, indicating that Belshazzar’s kingdom was about to be divided between the Medes and the Persians. There is a bit of wordplay in that the noun for Persians (paras) is virtually the same as the root used here. Daniel 5:30-31 notes that the words of this prophecy were fulfilled later that evening.