Aramaic word · H4484
מְנֵא
mene'
mina
As a noun, 'mina': a standard weight used in Mesopotamia and the Levant (Akkadian manû, Hebrew maneh). It was worth 60 shekels in the Babylonian system (cf. Ezekiel 45:12) and 50 in some Israelite reckonings. Weighed silver served as money, so a mina was also a sum of money.
A Biblical Aramaic word, from the parts of the Old Testament written in Aramaic. Why Aramaic?
Appears 3 times in 2 verses of the Aramaic of the Old Testament. ·
What it means
1) (P'al) mina, maneh
1a) a weight or measurement; usually 50 shekels but maybe 60 shekels
Abridged from Brown, Driver and Briggs, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (1906), via STEPBible.org (CC BY 4.0).
In depth
- Range of meaning
As a noun, 'mina': a standard weight used in Mesopotamia and the Levant (Akkadian manû, Hebrew maneh). It was worth 60 shekels in the Babylonian system (cf. Ezekiel 45:12) and 50 in some Israelite reckonings. Weighed silver served as money, so a mina was also a sum of money. The same consonants (m-n-ʾ / m-n-h) form the verb 'to count, number, reckon, appoint'.
- Against the English
Most English versions transliterate it ('MENE'), so readers never learn it is an everyday word. YLT and some older paraphrases translate it as 'Numbered'. That gives the pun Daniel draws out but drops the plain meaning a Babylonian would have heard first: a weight.
- How it drifted
English Bibles left the four words untranslated because the story presents them as a riddle. The transliteration came to sound like an exotic spell, and readers lost sight of the fact that the words were ordinary Aramaic terms from weights and money.
- Used elsewhere in the period
Attested widely as a weight and money unit in Akkadian, Hebrew (1 Kings 10:17; Ezra 2:69; Nehemiah 7:71–72) and Aramaic. In 1886 Charles Clermont-Ganneau argued that all three words of the inscription are weights: mina, shekel, half-mina. Most modern commentators (Montgomery, Collins, Goldingay) accept this. Josephus (Antiquities 10.243–244) already explained mane as 'number'.
Where it appears
Daniel · 3
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Daniel 5:25 מְנֵ֥א מְנֵ֖א mene
Now this is the inscription that was written: MENE, MENE, TEKEL, PARSIN.
Here: Read plainly, 'a mina', a large weight of about 50–60 shekels. It sounds like the verb 'to count, number', and Daniel builds his interpretation on that in v. 26: God has 'numbered' the kingdom.
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Daniel 5:26 מְנֵ֕א mene
And this is the interpretation of the message: MENE means that God has numbered the days of your reign and brought it to an end.
Word data: STEPBible.org (CC BY 4.0), main text only.