On mneh, tqel, ufarsin in Daniel 5.24-25. I would suggest that this hand appears on the wall of the reception room of the king in his heykhal like a palimpsestic hand, because the walls of this hall, like the apadana of Persepolis, are already decorated with the statuary of bas-reliefs that are made possible precisely by (and obviously disguised to a degree), the “count(ed), weigh(ed), and divide(d) or separat(ed)” (products) of the tributary economy.

To this monumental representation, whether Persian (but represented as “antiquisante”—as if it were Babylonian, when the situation was surely different), or Greek (Seleucid), or a compound of both (in memory), the author of Daniel opposes this metaplastic hand that inscribes. The inscribing of Daniel is only on parchment or papyrus, the story of a dream, a fiction of heroism, carrying with it, precisely because of the weakness of its support (when compared with the heaviness and pretentiousness of palatial reception halls) a spirit of resistance, une idée de derrière la tête, a voice or image that can be repeated or adapted, when the apadana-like structures are doomed and destined to be de-edified (but the modern shah who was re-installed by Washington on the Iranian throne will resurrect these edifices…). The voice, resistance echoed on thin scrolls of paper or parchment, this is already a long story, as Ezekiel had begun a similar process nearly four centuries before. But in the first chapters of Ezekiel it was not a hand appearing en filigrane behind impressive tributary processions… rather it was the Babylonian thrones and gates, the heavy statuary of temples and palaces, that was made to fly, volatilized. The glory of empires, their heaviness (kavod, heftiness, is glory in Hebrew), becomes an electric wheeled, crystalline throne in the air, here one moment, there the next….