The phrase writing on the wall (or sometimes handwriting on the wall) is an expression thats suggests future doom or misfortune, visible to almost anyone. For example, She saw the handwriting on the wall and left the company before it collapsed.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the expression originates from chapter 5 of the Old Testament Book of Daniel. The following excerpts are from the Revised Standard Version:

King Belshazzar made a great feast for a thousand of his lords and drank wine in front of the thousand...they drank wine, and praised the gods of gold, and silver, of bronze, of iron, wood, and stone. Immediately the fingers of a man's hand appeared and wrote on the plaster of the wall of the king's palace.

Further down in the same chapter, we learn that the writing was in Aramaic.

And this is the writing that was inscribed: MENE, MENE, TEKEL and PARSIN.

This cryptic message was interpreted by Daniel, who told Belshazzar:

This is the interpretation of the matter: MENE, God has numbered the days of your kingdom and brought it to an end; TEKEL, you have been weighed on the scales, and found wanting; PERES, your kingdom is divided and given to the Medes and the Persians.

Fulfilling that prophecy, Belshazzar was slain in the night, and according to the Bible Darius the Mede took control of the kingdom. It is likely that Darius actually referred to Cyrus the Persian.

The Oxford English Dictionary entry on writing has literary references to this phrase in English, including the following verse from the poem The Run Upon The Bankers by Jonathan Swift:

A baited banker thus desponds,

From his own hand foresees his fall,

They have his soul, who have his bonds;

'Tis like the writing on the wall.

References

• The New Oxford Annotated Bible, Revised Standard Version, Oxford University Press, 1972.

External links

• The scene of Belshazzar's feast and the writing of the cryptic message is depicted in Rembrandt's 1635 painting Belshazzar's Feast at the National Gallery in London. An image of this painting, with background information can be seen here.