God’s Word for You

Daniel 5:25-28 Mene Mene Tekel Parsin

by Pastor Timothy Smith on Thursday, October 23, 2025

  25 “Now this is the inscription that was written: MENE, MENE, TEKEL, and PARSIN. 26 This is what it means:
  Mene: God has calculated the length of your reign and brought it to an end.
  27 Tekel: You have been weighed on the scales and found to be too light.
  28 Peres: Divided is your kingdom; it is given to the Medes and Persians.”

The reader may or may not be helped much by looking at the actual words as they appear in Aramaic, but here they are: מְנֵא מְנֵא תְּקֵל וּפַרְסִין. As with Hebrew and Arabic, these words are read from the right to the left. (If it happens that the words are printed at the end of a line of text, it will be the first half of the sentence in the first line, and the second half of the sentence in the next line down.)

The four words are all nouns. Each word has more than one meaning, just as “dollars” (in money) sounds like “dolors” (griefs) when said out loud: “thou shalt have as many dolors for thy daughters as thou canst tell in a year” (King Lear II:4). And, like “dollars” in English, each of these words has a usual meaning of some form of money or a weight of silver. This is surely one of the reasons that the king’s astrologers could not figure out what it meant. To have had the words “penny, penny, dollar and half-dollar” written out would baffle the ordinary soothsayers of Babylon.

MENE, MENE. These words (each has two syllables) mean a “mina” in Aramaic, an amount equaling either fifty or sixty shekels at this time in Babylon (Ezekiel 45:12). Jesus uses this word in his parable about the nobleman who gave ten servants ten minas to take care of while he was gone (Luke 19:12-27). But “mene” with the vowels spoken as “menah” is a passive verb meaning “to be numbered, calculated.” Throughout his interpretation, Daniel explains each of the nouns as passive verbs. The words would look just the same as they had been written.

Daniel’s application of “numbered, calculated,” is that the king’s reign had been calculated. The number of days and years were all counted up by the Lord himself, and they were now about to be brought to an end by God’s own hand.

TEKEL. As a noun, this is the Aramaic way of saying “shekel.” But as a passive verb, “takal” means to be weighed. Daniel says that Belshazzar and his reign, both the man and his actions, have been weighed by the Lord God on a balance scale. And the Lord has found that Belshazzar is “wanting,” or “too light.” He has not come up to the full measure of what God demands of him.

This is the language of God’s demand of perfection in us all. All sins are serious, because all sins bring death and damnation. In believers, an unintentional sin is also covered by God’s pledge to forgive (Matthew 12:19-21). Also, when a believer sins by mistake, he or she still grasps the merit of Christ’s forgiveness, and “there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:1). And in addition to this, the believing Christian has daily, constant remorse and repentance. “I acknowledged my sin to you and did not cover up my iniquity” (Psalm 32:5). Therefore even when Christians stumble into sin, “they,” as Professor Quenstedt put it, “have pardon closely connected with them.” But when an unbeliever who by definition rejects Christ’s merits and forgiveness of sins, even unintentional sins are mortal and fatal and damning, because they do not have “forgiveness closely connected with them.” Belshazzar was therefore weighed in the balance of “Be holy” (Leviticus 19:2), or as Jesus translated, “Be perfect” (Matthew 5:48), and he came up short, imperfect, and therefore unholy.

PARSIN. This was the word for a half-shekel, a common amount of money. As a noun, the “n” that ends the word makes it a plural, “half-shekels.” Daniel interprets it with the passive verb “parisat,” “you have been divided.”

This word has a triple significance. First, Daniel reveals that the kingdom of Belshazzar was now divided. But neither half of the kingdom was going to be left for Belshazzar. Why not? Because of the second meaning of the word. He, Belshazzar, was himself divided. He would be separated from the world of the living, because he was going to die this very night (we will see the fulfillment of this in verse 30). Thirdly, the term “Peres” comes back in yet another sense, because the nation that would divide Babylon was, in Aramaic, “Paras,” which is Persia.

There is a subject which this passage touches on that might seem obscure to some, but it is worth explaining. It is sometimes claimed that prophecy is one of the marks of the true church. Our passage stands opposed to this. The true marks of the Holy Christian Church are these: the pure preaching of the Word of God, and the proper (that is, legitimate) administration of the sacraments (baptism and the Lord’s Supper). This is proved by such passages as John 10:27, “My sheep hear my voice,” so that we know that wherever one hears the true Word of God, there is the church. Also, from Ephesians 5:25-26, where the cleansing Word is present, there the church is. Third, Matthew 18:20, “Where two or three, etc.,” the assembly is gathered in Christ’s name. And there are many more verse like these, such as Romans 1:16, “The Gospel is the power of God for salvation.” And besides all these, the other mark, the sacraments, is attested to in Acts 2:42, “They (the early church) continued to hold firmly to the apostles’ teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of the bread, and to the prayers.”

But to say that prophecy is a mark of the church is not correct. For example, on the basis of a single person endowed with prophecy, it does not follow that anyone who hears him must then be a part of the true church. There may not be “two or three gathered” as he preaches, and Daniel speaking to Belshazzar and his nobles is an example of this. That assembly was not the church. In addition, Professor Gerhard points out, “The high priest Caiaphas prophesied in the Sanhedrin at Jerusalem (John 11:51), yet that assembly was not the true church.”

We take comfort knowing that the only true church is made up of the very things that we have: the pure preaching of the Word and the proper administration of the sacraments. When we hear the law—as Belshazzar heard it from Daniel—we are led to repentance, and the gospel brings the beautiful news of forgiveness. Praise God and thank him that we are loved by him, that we were in his heart before the creation of the world, as Paul assures us (Ephesians 1:4-6). “There is a written scroll! I’ll read the writing!” And this is the writing of the hand of the Holy Spirit in the pages of our heart. He is ours, and we are his.

In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith

 

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