280 Charles C. Torrey, 



as soon as its sound was heard ; — and if the three words had been 

 verbs, or passive participles, or names of weights, the inscription would 

 certainly have been as easy as it could have been made. There was, 

 in fact, no such obvious inter-relation of the words as there would have 

 been in any one of the other supposed cases. They did not form a 

 sentence, and, so far as we are able to judge, could not even have 

 formed a comprehensible series. They were vocalized uniformly, after 

 the pattern of the simplest Aramaic noun-form qetel ; the most natural 

 form for the narrator to choose, if he wished them to be non-committal. 

 The reason why the less usual root D'HS ^^'^.s chosen was (as Peters 

 and others have pointed out) because it could stand for both " dividing " 

 and " Persians." We can imagine how the hearers may have thought, 

 when they heard the first word of the riddle, MENE : " This means 

 counted^ And as the second, TEQEL, was pronounced, they must 

 then have hastened to add : " No ; the first was perhaps mina, and this 

 is weight." But as the third was uttered, they could only have said to 

 themselves in despair : " The whole thing is meaningless, for PERES 

 signifies nothing that is possible here ! " But Daniel was ready with 

 his interpretation. It might well have seemed to the others to be 

 unwarranted, but so much the better ; its correctness was very soon put 

 beyond all question. " In that night Belshazzar the Chaldean king was 

 slain, and Darius the Mede received the kingdom." 



6 : 1—3. " Darius the Mede " is Darius Hystaspis, who (in the Jewish 

 tradition) immediately preceded Cyms. His age at the time of his 

 receiving the Babylonian kingdom is given as " sixty-two " for the sake 

 of the chronology, in order to make up the " seventy years " of the 

 Babylonian captivity. We have in vss. 2 and 3 a real reminiscence of 

 the great reforms actually instituted by Darius I. On the other hand, 

 these two verses probably rest on i Esdras 3:2, 9, as their source, 

 and there the deeds of this Darius are transferred to Darius III Codo- 

 mannus. In Dan. 6 : 2, the old Greek version is probably right in 

 giving the number of the satraps as 127, the word '^V^1^^ having fallen 

 out of our massoretic text by accident ; cf. i Esdras 3 : 2. The 

 word X^I?^ is used in vs. 3 to mean " official report," exactl}- as in 

 Ezra 4 : 7 (the title UVf^ hv^i ^ 7pacpa>v xa upoarzmzoyxa}:. 5:5. In 

 support of the statements contained in this note, see my Ezra Studies, 

 pp. 41, 48, 135 f., 141 note 7, 200. 



6 : 19 MiSl? nii nnit^- This must not be confused with the phrase 

 which is found m 2 : 1, V^r nn":.!? in^t [cf. 8 : 27, ^n^\13 hn.^^ ^^H)- 

 The text is sound in all three of these passages. Kittel's Biblia 

 Hebraica proposes to omit the verb in 8 : 27, " with the old Greek 

 version"; but it is on the contrary obvious that the latter has lost by 



