Again, Daniel was being asked to do what no other wise man in Babylon could do, all having failed before Daniel was summoned.
‘Art thou Daniel…’ better translated Thou art Daniel (in the original you can not determin this except by the context of the text, and the Talmud and Mishnah and the Rabinic traditions say it should be properly interpreted ‘Thou art Daniel’.
Belshazzar would have to have known the Daniel who had such wisdom, they reason.
Hey! Daniel is called Daniel here! His Babylonian name is all but forgotten here! This could be another proof that Nebuchadnezzar truly did believe and began to call Daniel by Daniel!
So what about the writing on the wall?
The Talmud and the Mishnah give some very cryptic methods the writing could have been written. It is widely believed that the wisemen could understand the script, they just couldn’t make sense of the phrase.
If Daniel was able to fulfill the king’s request, there would be a reward. The king promised royal clothing, a gold necklace, and a position of power directly under him. Obviously, the king was eager to know what those words on the wall meant.
Daniel would again be the voice of God to a proud king.
Daniel’s Lecture
(5:17-24)
Daniel begins by turning down Belshazzar’s reward. Let the king keep his gifts or give them to someone else. Why would he decline Belshazzar’s offer? Daniel knows that the king’s gifts are virtually useless. What good would it do Daniel to be given the third highest office in the administration of Belshazzar when his reign would end that very night?
Verses 18-24 are profound - Belshazzar would be judged because he failed to learn from history and continued to be proud and disregard the God of Judah!
In Hebrews we have our ‘hall of faith’ and we should learn from their faith - we study the Bible because it is God’s Word firstly, and because it is a historical record that we can glean truth from to live pleasing to Yaweh, the God of Judah!
The queen mother’s words in 5:10-12 focus on Daniel’s wisdom during the days of Nebuchadnezzar. Now, when Daniel rebukes this king, he does so because he ignored the lesson’s he should have learned from the past, through his father’s experiences with Daniel and his God.
Belshazzar was the zenith of a man proud and drunk and desecrating holy things. He exalted himself against the God of heaven, as evidenced in his profaning the holy vessels taken from the temple.
His sin was shared by those who ate and drank toasts with him that night. Rather than glorifying the God of heaven, whom he had heard about in relationship to his forefather, Nebuchadnezzar, Belshazzar blasphemed the name of God. The blasphemous use of the vessels and the writing on the wall were inseparably related. Judgment day had arrived.
25 “Now this is the inscription that was written out: ‘MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN.’ 26 “This is the interpretation of the message: ‘MENE’— God has numbered your kingdom and put an end to it. 27 “‘TEKEL’— you have been weighed on the scales and found deficient. 28 “‘PERES’— your kingdom has been divided and given over to the Medes and Persians.”
Scholars have spent considerable effort to explore the origin and meaning of each of these three terms.13
25-28 Daniel then translated and interpreted the four words on the wall (v. 25).
The first two were identical: mene, meaning "numbered," "counted out," "measured" (passive participle of mena, "to number").
This signified that the years of Belshazzar's reign had been counted out to their very last one, and it was about to terminate (v. 26).
Note, it could have been read as mena or mina--a heavy weight equivalent to sixty Babylonian shekels.
The second word (v. 27) was "Tekel" (teqel, cognate with the Hebrew "shekel" [seqel] and coming from teqal, "to weigh"). Following after a m- n- ' (which might mean "mina" or "maneh"), "Tekel" would look like "shekel" (a weight of silver or gold slightly over eleven grams). But Daniel explained it as the passive participle teqil ("weighed") and applied it to Belshazzar himself. God found him deficient in the scales and therefore rejected him.
This would be a striking word picture - for everything would be put to the balance and weighed in all their commerce, and there was no tolerance for commodities that came up lacking.
The third word is peres, or ufarsin which is derived from a root peras, meaning "to divide." Daniel read it as a passive participle (peris, "divided") and interpreted it to mean that Belshazzar's kingdom, the Babylonian Empire, had been divided or separated from him and given over to the Medes and Persians besieging the city.
This word too might have been taken as meaning a monetary weight, like the two words preceding it; for the Akkadian parsu meant "half mina," and this may have been borrowed into Aramaic with that meaning.
But more likely, as Eissfeldt and others have argued, it means "half shekel," since the root simply indicates division into two parts; and the usage in each individual language would determine what weight was being halved. In the descending scale of "mina," "shekel," the next weight to be expected would be something lighter than a shekel, namely "a half shekel."
If, then, all that the diviners could make out of the strange inscription on the wall was "Mina, mina, shekel, and half-shekels" (reading uparsin), then they might well have concluded that this series of money weights (this was, of course, still prior to the introduction of coined money into the Middle East) made no sense and conveyed no intelligible message.
Daniel, however, being inspired of God, was able to make very clear sense of these letters by giving them the passive participle vowel pattern in each case.
One very important aspect of this third word, p- r- s, has a direct bearing on chapter 6. The same radicals that spell out peres ("half shekel") furnish the root for the word "has been divided," perisat. But furthermore p- r- s also points to the word for "Persian," Paras.
This means that the author of this Book of Daniel believed that the kingdom that followed right after the Babylonian (over which Belshazzar reigned) was the Persian, without any intervening, independent Median Empire.
Nothing could be plainer, in the light of this triple wordplay, than that the author understood the Persians to be the dominant element in empire number two, with the Medians being associated with them as a federated nation. The theory of a Median kingdom as empire number two is devoid of support in the text of Daniel itself.
Critics hold the second empire is the Median, the third is the Persian, and the fourth is the greek ending with Antiuchus Ephiphanies, and that Daniel stops being ‘ prophetic at this point.
The important consequence of this identification of the combined Medo-Persian Empire as the second kingdom in Daniel's series of four (embodied in Nebuchadnezzar's four-part dream-image in ch. 2) is that the third kingdom must be the Greek one; therefore, the fourth empire must be the Roman Empire--which, of course, did not actually take over the Near East till 63 B.C., a century after the Maccabean uprisings. Therefore, this handwriting on the wall demolishes the Maccabean date hypothesis, which insists that nothing in Daniel prophesies any event later than the death of Antiochus Epiphanes in 164 B.C., a hundred years before Pompey annexed Palestine-Syria to the Roman Empire.
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