Looking for some confirmation from any ancient language experts:
Daniel 5:25-28
25 " And this is the inscription that was written: MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN.
26 "This [is] the interpretation of [each] word. MENE: God has numbered your kingdom, and finished it;
27 "TEKEL: You have been weighed in the balances, and found wanting;
28 “PERES: Your kingdom has been divided, and given to the Medes and Persians.”*
I get the gist of the translation, and the connections with units of weight, etc.
But when Daniel translates “upharsin,” it is rendered as ‘peres.’
I heard this explanation once, but I was never able to corroborate it:
The “u” prefix is a conjunction indicating “and.”
“Peres” is the singular form of “pharsin.”
Accurate?
Hope this doesn’t run afoul of copyright infringements.
nothing to add, but I just want to point out that the Google ads for this thread are for the “Daniel” hotel chain in Israel and hotels in “San Daniel”.
nice word play, but developing real artificial intelligence is gonna take a while…
Depends on the translation. Many modern translations are still in copyright, and would permit a quote such as the one in the OP provided that the translation is mentioned.
Now I’m geting China Translation Company. At least it’s not Greek yet.
I just wanted to mention that the language of Iran (formerly Persia) is Farsi, kind of similar to (u)pharsi(n) .
~we mean well~
And it’s a pun. Menes= Medes, Peres= Persians. And his kingdom was divided btween them.
From wiki=“Immediately, the disembodied fingers of a human hand appear and write on the wall of the royal palace the words מנא ,מנא, תקל, ופרסין (Mene, Mene, Tekel u-Pharsin). Although usually left untranslated in English translations of Daniel, these words are known Aramaic names of measures of currency: MENE, a mina, TEKEL, a spelling of shekel, PERES, half a mena…In consequence of this, during the festivities, a hand was seen writing on the wall of the chamber a mysterious sentence mene mene tekel upharsin, which defied all attempts at interpretation. Some Rabbinic interpertations (notably the mention in the Babylonian Talmud) say that the words were written in code, one possibility was that it was an atbash cipher. Still, their natural denotations of weights and measures were superficially meaningless: “two minas, a shekel and two parts.”. In the verb form, they were: mene, to number; tekel, to weigh; upharsin, to divide - literally “numbered, weighed, divided”. When the Hebrew Daniel was called in, he read and interpreted the words. 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: in the last verse we are told that Belshazzar was slain in that same night, and that his power passed to Darius the Mede.”
