What does “the writing on the wall” mean?

The feast

It is October 539 BC, Babylon’s last night, in the book’s telling. A Persian army is near. Belshazzar throws a feast for a thousand lords and sends for the gold and silver cups taken from the temple in Jerusalem. His guests drink from them and praise gods of gold and stone.

In the same hour, the fingers of a man’s hand came out and wrote near the lamp stand on the plaster of the wall of the king’s palace. The king saw the part of the hand that wrote.

The king’s face goes white and his knees knock together. None of his wise men can read the words. He promises purple robes, a gold chain and the rank of “third ruler in the kingdom” to anyone who can.

What the words mean

The queen remembers a man from Nebuchadnezzar’s days. Daniel, now an old man, is brought in. He waves the gifts away and reads the wall.

This is the writing that was inscribed: ‘MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN.’ This is the interpretation of the thing: MENE: God has counted your kingdom, and brought it to an end. TEKEL: you are weighed in the balances, and are found wanting. PERES: your kingdom is divided, and given to the Medes and Persians.

The words are Aramaic. Many scholars read them as units of weight and money: a mina, a shekel and halves. Daniel reads them as verbs instead. Counted. Weighed. Divided. And peres echoes Paras, Persia. Then the book adds a single line: “In that night Belshazzar the Chaldean King was slain” (Daniel 5:30).

How the phrase is used today

In English, “the writing is on the wall” means the end is obvious to anyone willing to look. A failing company, a losing team, a doomed relationship. A second phrase comes from the same scene: “weighed in the balance and found wanting,” for anything judged and found not good enough.

Was Belshazzar real?

For a long time critics doubted it, because Babylon’s last king was Nabonidus, and no one else was known. Then Belshazzar’s name surfaced in Babylonian records. A cylinder from Ur names him as Nabonidus’s eldest son. Nabonidus spent ten years at the desert oasis of Tayma, in today’s Saudi Arabia, and left Belshazzar in charge of Babylon. That explains the odd reward. Belshazzar could offer only the third place in the kingdom, because he himself was second.

Babylon did fall to Cyrus of Persia in 539 BC. The Nabonidus Chronicle says the city was taken without a battle. The book of Daniel tells the same night as a judgment written on a wall.