One of my favorite turns of phrase is, "you have been weighed, measured, and found wanting." I find myself saying this all the time! This phrase is actually a paraphrase of Daniel 5:27. In this chapter of the Bible, King Belshazzar, who is a very corrupt king, totally consumed with pleasure and worldly gain, finds a strange writing which appears out of the smoke of a candle on the walls of his palace. The writing is in a language that he cannot interpret, he cannot find anyone within his court to translate this writing for him either. His wife suggests there is a man who is considered the, "magician of magicians, and sorcerer of sorcerers", and a good and holy man, and he may be able to interpret and translate this mysterious writing. That man is Daniel, known to the King as a man who had helped his father, before his father become terribly corrupt. So King Belshazzar calls for Daniel and he offers him a reward if he can translate this mysterious writing. He tells him, "he'll be clothed in scarlet, given a gold chain to wear around his neck and be made the third ruler of the land". Of course being a good and holy man, Daniel is totally uninterested in this reward, and tells Belshazzar, that he'll just get straight to the business of translating the writing. Daniel, being a Jewish holy scholar, recognizes the writing instantly, it was in an old form of Hebrew and cleverly drawn so some of words were backwards and above others, but they said, "Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin". Which translated to, "mene, mene" or, God has numbered and weighed your kingdom and found it doesn't add up to anything Holy, good, kind or beneficial, "Tekel", God finds you sorely without ethics and morals, and "Upharsin", God sees you've divided your kingdom and given part of it to Medes and the Persians who were considered to be evil and nefarious in all ways. "You've been weighed, measured, and found wanting", and literally, "the writing is on the wall!" That's where those familiar phrases we use today come from!
