Scholars have wearied themselves trying to figure out how Daniel got his interpretation from these three apparently Aramaic words. They have been as unsuccessful as Belshazzar's original wise men were. It seems best to me simply to take Daniel's interpretation at face value even though we may not be able to understand completely how he arrived at it. It has been said that Daniel could interpret these words because he recognized his Father's handwriting.183
This much seems clear. The words all referred to measures of weight.184Daniel interpreted the consonants by adding vowels, which are absent in Aramaic as in Hebrew, that made each word a passive participle. The Aramaic word "mene"means "mena,"or with different vowels, "numbered."Daniel understood this word to signify that the number of years that God had prescribed for the Neo-Babylonian Empire had expired. Its repetition probably stressed the certainty of this point.185"Tekel"(cognate with the Hebrew "shekel") also means "weighed."God had weighed Belshazzar and had found him deficient; he was not the ruler that he should have been because of his flagrant refusal to acknowledge the Most High God's sovereignty (v. 22). "Upharsin"means "half"or "and peres.""Peres"means "divided"and relates to the division of Belshazzar's kingdom into two parts, one part for the Medes and the other for the Persians. However, "paras,"the same consonants with different vowels, means "Persia."Persia was the dominant kingdom in the Medo-Persian alliance. Thus prshad a double meaning.186
"The important consequence of this identification of the combined Medo-Persian Empire as the second kingdom in Daniel's series of four (embodied in Nebuchadnezzar's four-part dream-image in ch. 2) is that the third kingdom must be the Greek one; therefore, the fourth empire must be the Roman Empire--which, of course, did not actually take over the Near East till 63 B.C., a century after the Maccabean uprisings. Therefore, this handwriting on the wall demolishes the Maccabean date hypothesis, which insists that nothing in Daniel prophesies any event later than the death of Antiochus Epiphanes in 164 B.C., a hundred years before Pompey annexed Palestine-Syria to the Roman Empire."187
Ironically as Daniel interpreted God's verdict against Babylon the Medes and Persians were already pouring into the city.
"As God had judged Nebuchadnezzar's pride by removing him from the throne, so He would judge Belshazzar's pride by taking the kingdom from him and giving it to another people."188
