The writing on the wall
Encyclopedia
Idiom
Idiom is an expression, word, or phrase that has a figurative meaning that is comprehended in regard to a common use of that expression that is separate from the literal meaning or definition of the words of which it is made...
, is a portent of doom or misfortune. It originates in the Biblical book of Daniel
Book of Daniel
The Book of Daniel is a book in the Hebrew Bible. The book tells of how Daniel, and his Judean companions, were inducted into Babylon during Jewish exile, and how their positions elevated in the court of Nebuchadnezzar. The court tales span events that occur during the reigns of Nebuchadnezzar,...
—where supernatural writing foretells the demise of the Babylonian Empire. The phrase is widely used in language and literature.
Daniel 5
This Biblical narrative is the source of the popular phrase "the writing on the wall" as a euphemism for impending doom that is so obvious only a fool would not see it coming. It also provides the origin for the similar expression "your days are numbered."The Greek historians Herodotus and Xenophon also record that there was a festival in the city of Babylon the same night it fell to the Persians.
Belshazzar's feast
For a list of artistic and musical references to the feast, see: Belshazzar's FeastBelshazzar's Feast
Belshazzar's Feast is described in the Book of Daniel. The Babylonian king Belshazzar profanes the sacred vessels of the enslaved Israelites. As prophesied by the writing on the wall, and interpreted by Daniel, Belshazzar is killed and Darius the Mede succeeds to his kingdom.There are many...
.
In the Book of Daniel
Book of Daniel
The Book of Daniel is a book in the Hebrew Bible. The book tells of how Daniel, and his Judean companions, were inducted into Babylon during Jewish exile, and how their positions elevated in the court of Nebuchadnezzar. The court tales span events that occur during the reigns of Nebuchadnezzar,...
5:1–4, the passage describes "Belshazzar's Feast" in which the sacred vessels of Solomon's Temple
Solomon's Temple
Solomon's Temple, also known as the First Temple, was the main temple in ancient Jerusalem, on the Temple Mount , before its destruction by Nebuchadnezzar II after the Siege of Jerusalem of 587 BCE....
in Jerusalem, which had been brought to Babylon by Nebuchadnezzar at the time of the Captivity were profaned by the company. The narrative unfolds against the background of the impending arrival of the Persian armies.
- "King Belshazzar gave a great banquet for a thousand of his nobles and drank wine with them. While Belshazzar was drinking his wine, he gave orders to bring in the gold and silver goblets that Nebuchadnezzar his father had taken from the temple in Jerusalem, so that the king and his nobles, his wives and his concubines might drink from them. 3 So they brought in the gold goblets that had been taken from the temple of God in Jerusalem, and the king and his nobles, his wives and his concubines drank from them. 4 As they drank the wine, they praised the gods of gold and silver, of bronze, iron, wood and stone."
Writing on the wall
During the drunken feast, Belshazzar uses the holy golden and silver vessels, from Solomon's TempleSolomon's Temple
Solomon's Temple, also known as the First Temple, was the main temple in ancient Jerusalem, on the Temple Mount , before its destruction by Nebuchadnezzar II after the Siege of Jerusalem of 587 BCE....
, to praise 'the gods of gold and silver, brass, iron, wood, and stone'. Soon afterward, disembodied fingers of a human hand appear and write on the wall of the royal palace the words:
The advisors' attempt to interpret the meaning. However, their natural denotations of weights and measures were superficially meaningless: "two minas, a shekel
Shekel
Shekel , is any of several ancient units of weight or of currency. The first usage is from Mesopotamia around 3000 BC. Initially, it may have referred to a weight of barley...
and two parts.". In the verb form, they were: mene, to number; tekel, to weigh; upharsin, to divide—literally "numbered, weighed, divided".
Therefore, the King sends for Daniel
Daniel
Daniel is the protagonist in the Book of Daniel of the Hebrew Bible. In the narrative, when Daniel was a young man, he was taken into Babylonian captivity where he was educated in Chaldean thought. However, he never converted to Neo-Babylonian ways...
, an exiled Jew taken from Jerusalem, who had served in high office under Nebuchadnezzar. Rejecting offers of reward, Daniel warns the King of the folly of his arrogant blasphemy before reading the text. The meaning that Daniel decrypts from these words is based on passive verbs corresponding to the measure names.
Although usually left untranslated in English translations of Daniel, these words are known Aramaic names of measures of currency: MENE, a mina
Mina (unit)
The mina is an ancient Near Eastern unit of weight equivalent to 60 shekels. The mina, like the shekel, was also a unit of currency; in ancient Greece it was equal to 100 drachmae. In the first century AD, it amounted to about a fourth of the wages earned annually by an agricultural worker...
(from the root meaning "to count"), TEKEL, a spelling of shekel
Shekel
Shekel , is any of several ancient units of weight or of currency. The first usage is from Mesopotamia around 3000 BC. Initially, it may have referred to a weight of barley...
(from the root meaning "to weigh"), PERES, half a mina (from the root meaning "to divide", but additionally resembling the word for "Persia"). The last word (prs) he read as peres not parsin. His free choice of interpretation and decoding revealed the menacing subtext: "Thou art weighed in the balance and art found wanting". The divine menace against the dissolute Belshazzar, whose kingdom was to be divided between the Medes and Persians, was swiftly realized. That very night King Belshazzar is slain, and Darius the Mede
Darius the Mede
Darius the Mede is a biblical person in the Book of Daniel, Chapters 6-9, who rules over Babylon after King Belshazzar is deposed. The author of the book of Daniel indicated that Darius was about 62 years old when he was 'made king over Babylon.[5:31] He is best known for having been forced into...
becomes King.
Historical criticism
Though the narrative and its details stand outside history, the setting of the feast at which the temple vessels from Jerusalem were desecrated has been remembered from actual Neo-Babylonian cult practice. In Babylon, the image of MardukMarduk
Marduk was the Babylonian name of a late-generation god from ancient Mesopotamia and patron deity of the city of Babylon, who, when Babylon became the political center of the Euphrates valley in the time of Hammurabi , started to...
was served meals daily in a style befitting the divine king, including musical accompaniment and beautifully-arranged desserts of fruits. After the god's meal, water in a basin was brought and offered to the idol to wash its fingers. According to several extant descriptions, the dishes of food that had been presented to the image were then sent to the king for his consumption. The food had been blessed by its proximity to the god, and the blessing was now transferable to the king. One exception is recorded, on a tablet from Uruk
Uruk
Uruk was an ancient city of Sumer and later Babylonia, situated east of the present bed of the Euphrates river, on the ancient dry former channel of the Euphrates River, some 30 km east of modern As-Samawah, Al-Muthannā, Iraq.Uruk gave its name to the Uruk...
, which mentions that the crown prince— this was Belshazzar— enjoyed the royal privilege.
The ritual importance of the god's sacred leftovers is illustrated in an inscribed claim of Sargon II
Sargon II
Sargon II was an Assyrian king. Sargon II became co-regent with Shalmaneser V in 722 BC, and became the sole ruler of the kingdom of Assyria in 722 BC after the death of Shalmaneser V. It is not clear whether he was the son of Tiglath-Pileser III or a usurper unrelated to the royal family...
:
- "the citizens of Babylon [and] BorsippaBorsippaBorsippa was an important ancient city of Sumer, built on both sides of a lake about southwest of Babylon on the east bank of the Euphrates. The site of Borsippa is in Babil Governorate, Iraq and now called Birs Nimrud, identifying the site with Nimrod...
, the temple personnel, the scholars [and] the administrators of the country who [had] looked upon him (Merodach-baladan) as their master now brought the leftovers of Bel [and] Sarpanitu [of Babylon and] NabuNabuNabu is the Assyrian and Babylonian god of wisdom and writing, worshipped by Babylonians as the son of Marduk and his consort, Sarpanitum, and as the grandson of Ea. Nabu's consort was Tashmetum....
[and] Tasmetu [of Borsippa] to me at Dur-Ladinni and asked me to enter Babylon"-
- (Oppenheim, pp 188ff)
-
Idols of conquered cities were ordinarily brought to Babylon and set in positions of reverence to Marduk within his temple. The Jews, having no idol of YHWH, had been forced to give up the vessels of Solomon's Temple, which, it appears, were used to serve Marduk's sacred repast, ritually shared by Belshazzar.
Jewish interpretations
Some Rabbinic interpretations (notably the mention in the Babylonian Talmud) say that the words were written in code, one possibility was that it was an atbash cipher, another being that the written Aramaic and Hebrew looked very different, even though they were pronounced similarly.Influence
- The Oxford English DictionaryOxford English DictionaryThe Oxford English Dictionary , published by the Oxford University Press, is the self-styled premier dictionary of the English language. Two fully bound print editions of the OED have been published under its current name, in 1928 and 1989. The first edition was published in twelve volumes , and...
entry on writing has literary references to this phrase in English, including the following verse from the poem "The Run Upon The Bankers" by Jonathan SwiftJonathan SwiftJonathan Swift was an Irish satirist, essayist, political pamphleteer , poet and cleric who became Dean of St...
:
- In John CheeverJohn CheeverJohn William Cheever was an American novelist and short story writer. He is sometimes called "the Chekhov of the suburbs." His fiction is mostly set in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, the Westchester suburbs, old New England villages based on various South Shore towns around Quincy,...
's short story "Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin," the narrator encounters graffiti (one example running several pages) in various public washrooms.
- In Robert Louis StevensonRobert Louis StevensonRobert Louis Balfour Stevenson was a Scottish novelist, poet, essayist and travel writer. His best-known books include Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde....
's book Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Jekyll explains that his experience as Mr. Hyde was "like the Babylonian finger on the wall, to be spelling out the letters of my judgment . . . "
- In Samuel BeckettSamuel BeckettSamuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet. He wrote both in English and French. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human nature, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humour.Beckett is widely regarded as among the most...
's Endgame Hamm asks of Clov "and what do you see on your wall? Mene, mene? Naked bodies?"
- In Voltairine de CleyreVoltairine de CleyreVoltairine de Cleyre was an American anarchist writer and feminist. She was a prolific writer and speaker, opposing the state, marriage, and the domination of religion in sexuality and women's lives. She began her activist career in the freethought movement...
's last poem "Written in Red", the first verse begins:
- In Jose RizalJosé RizalJosé Protacio Rizal Mercado y Alonso Realonda , was a Filipino polymath, patriot and the most prominent advocate for reform in the Philippines during the Spanish colonial era. He is regarded as the foremost Filipino patriot and is listed as one of the national heroes of the Philippines by...
's second novel El FilibusterismoEl filibusterismoEl filibusterismo , also known by its English alternate title The Reign of Greed, is the second novel written by Philippine national hero José Rizal. It is the sequel to Noli Me Tangere and like the first book, was written in Spanish. It was first published in 1891 in Ghent, Belgium...
, Crisostomo Ibarra, disguised as Simoun, planted an explosive disguised as a kerosene lamp in a reception party in Captain Tiago's house, in an attempt to kill all high-ranking officials of the society and the church which will attend. He also leaves a note behind, "Mene, Thecel, Pares", plus his name in his own handwriting.
- In the novel City of AshesCity of AshesCity of Ashes is the second installment in The Mortal Instruments series, a young adult urban fantasy series set in New York written by Cassandra Clare. The first four books of the series have been published, with two left...
, part of The Mortal Instruments series by Cassandra Clare, Clary uses her stele to write a rune on Valentine's boat. Although the rune simply means "Open", Clary's extraordinary powers amplify it so as to destroy the ship by ripping apart its bolts. Valentine looks on in awed horror and says, "mene mene tekel upharsin", because he realizes that Clary's powers represent a massive change in the order of things, which will lead to his doom.
- In the movie Knight's Tale the characters appear in an illusion reciting the words "You have been weighed, you have been measured and you have been found wanting", the rough English translation of Daniel's interpretation.