“MENE, MENE, TEKEL, PARSIN”
Now this is the inscription that was written: MENE, MENE, TEKEL, PARSIN. (Daniel 5:25 BSB)
What it sounds like today
Mysterious magic words with no meaning.
The cultural key
The four words baffled Belshazzar's wise men because they read like a random list of monetary weights: MENE (a mina), TEKEL (a shekel), PARSIN (half-minas), roughly 'a pound, a pound, an ounce, and two half-pounds.' Daniel's genius is to hear them as a coded pun. Each weight sounds like a verb of judgment: mene from 'to number', 'God has numbered the days of your reign and brought it to an end'; tekel from 'to weigh', 'you have been weighed on the scales and found wanting'; peres (the singular of parsin) from 'to divide', 'your kingdom is divided and given to the Medes and Persians', and peres also puns on Paras, 'Persia.' So the graffiti is God tallying up the king on his own scales and finding the balance short. This is where the English idiom 'the writing on the wall', an unmistakable sign of coming doom, comes from. Without the wordplay it is gibberish; with it, it is a death sentence measured out in coins.
Recovered meaning
The words are weights of money, mina, mina, shekel, half, that Daniel decodes as puns: God has numbered, weighed, and divided the kingdom, handing it to Persia. It is the source of 'the writing on the wall.'