Daniel 5:25

25. This was intended to be a puzzle, and it has thoroughly served its purpose. Formerly there were great discussions among exegetes as to whether the grammatical forms used (for example, Peres for Persians) could be defended; but since it has been seen that this was a Babylonian pun or play on words this criticism has been abandoned. It was supposed by the rabbis that these words must have been written in a strange language which the magicians did not understand, or in the form of an acrostic or anagram; but although the incantations and magic charms of ancient Babylon were written generally in a dead language, which needed translation even for the priests, and although the double system of Babylonian writing (phonetic and ideographic) favored philological riddles, and although there is at least one example of a Babylonian acrostic in the British Museum, yet it is now seen that the “puzzle” was not chiefly in the deciphering of the words (though this was a part of it, see Daniel 5:8), but in their explanation. The first clue to this Babylonian riddle was found by Clermont Ganneau, who published in 1886 his discovery that these words Mene, Tekel, Peres were simply names of Babylonian weights ( Journal Asiatique; Hebraica, iii). This article was quickly followed by a careful philological discussion of the whole question by Noldeke ( Zeits. fur Assy., 1886), and the general conclusions of these scholars have been accepted by Sayce, Hommel, Haupt, Prince, and other Assyriologists. The puzzle, therefore, written upon the wall was this: A mina, a mina, a shekel, and half-minas. A mina was a well-known Assyrian weight consisting of sixty shekels, or five hundred and thirteen grains (Hilprecht). The parsu, or barsu, although inadvertently stated by Sayce to have been “part of a shekel,” was really equal to the half of a mina. Numbers had a mystic significance among the Babylonians (see Introduction to Ezekiel, VIII), and it is not impossible that the double mina (1+1) may represent Nebuchadnezzar, the shekel (1) Nabonidus, and the divided mina (½) Belshazzar; although Paul Haupt has recently suggested that the mina, which is the largest Babylonian weight, was a cryptic representation of Nebuchadnezzar, the shekel of his little “son,” Belshazzar, while the broken minas referred to the division of Nebuchadnezzar’s empire between the Medes and Persians. (Compare Daniel 2:39; Daniel 8:5.) All the gods had their “numbers” in ancient Babylon, and it is not at all improbable that an unworthy son could then, as in later Talmudic times, be described as a “peras [half-mina], the son of a mina.” The doubling of the mina may be for the reason suggested above, or merely for emphasis, or, as Meinhold thinks, because a double meaning is hidden in the cryptogram; or, as Haupt has conjectured, the first “mina” may be an introductory verb meaning “reckon” or “there have been counted.” The latter supposition, however, does not approve itself to the writer. In the cuneiform inscription, therefore, the puzzle stood, mana, mana, sitkla, ( u) parsn; that is, “A mina, a mina, a shekel (and) halves,” or, transliterated into the sacred Semitic tongue often used in the incantations and other religious texts “Numbered, numbered, weighed, divided;” while by another slight change of vowels the word which had already meant “half-minas” and “divided” was seen to be the very name of the conquerors of Babylon, Paras, “the Persians!” This, then, was a typical Babylonian puzzle, so archaic in its construction that no ancient version or commentary was able to catch its root meaning. Itis an interesting fact in connection with the above that Nebuchadnezzar boasts in one inscription that he had fixed the weight of the mina in his day to conform with the heavier standard established by king Dungi about 3000 B.C. It may also seem suggestive that at the beginning of many Babylonian incantations stands this mystic word Sitkalu, sitkalu, “Shekeled, shekeled,” or “Weighed, weighed.”