Notes on the Aramaic Part of Daniel. 277 



But the theorv is untenable, and even absurd, for the following reasons. 

 (1) The man who wrote this tale must be supposed to have known 

 what the solution was. It is quite necessary that Belshazzar and his 

 magicians should have been mystified by the inscription ; but it certainly 

 requires desperate courage to reject the interpretation given us by the 

 author of the story, and defend another in total conflict with it. The 

 advocates of the theory assume, it is true, that the narrator found the 

 mvstical sentence somewhere, but failed to find the explanation with it ! 

 But this assumption is altogether too great a tax on our credulity, 

 especially when the perfect transparency of the " mina-shekel " riddle 

 is borne in mind. (2) The word Spfl does not mean " shekel." The 

 shekel was as well-known among the Babylonians as among the Jews, 

 and the technical term appears frequently on weights and in documents, 

 always in the same form, Babylonian siqlu, Aramaic hpVS-^ The 

 standard shekel also appears in the Jewish Aramaic documents from 

 Egypt ; and there, too, the word is written with ^.' (3) " Half-minas " 

 would be i^D'lS- That is, the advocates of the theory must alter the 

 vowel-pointing of the word. (Marti, Gramm., p. 73, pronounces the 

 ending -?;/ of this word a dual ending !) (4) The original text of vs. 25 

 did not contain the word pDIS a-t all, but DIS* as will be shown. 

 (5) There is no difficulty or discrepancy in the interpretation which the 

 author himself gives us. 



First, as to the original form of the text. Theodotion had before him 

 in this verse, as the writing on the wall, the t/wee words D"1D SpH X3tt' 

 and nothing else. The word J<3J2 was not repeated, and D'ns was 

 not in the plural number. Of this we can be absolutely certain, knowing 

 Theodotion as we do. And this text, again, was precisely what Jerome 

 had before him when he made his Latin translation. In this case also 

 we know our man. He was a faithful translator, and one who never 

 could have committed the folly of deliberately altering the words of 

 this God-sent inscription, which he was professing to transliterate ! The 

 old Greek translator is another witness who tells the same straight story. 

 In the summary account (whatever its history) which is prefixed to 

 chap. 5, the words of the ominous legend are given, and the inter- 



^ See, for example, the weights described in the ZDMG., vol.61, p. 949. 



* The word J^'^pri* " weight,'" was used to some extent among the Jews 

 at a later date to designate a definite weight, as certain passages in the 

 Targams and the Talmud show. This weight was the half-shekel (formerly 

 called J7p2), as the Targum of Gen. 24 : 22 and Ex. 38 : 26 proves. The 

 term was used at the time when S{I?Sd ^^^ supplanted the older JiiS[^W 

 as the name of the full- weight sHekel. 



