What Does Daniel 5:12 Mean?
Because an excellent breath, and knowing, and understanding, interpreting of dreams, and showing of hard sentences, and loosing of knots, were found in the same Daniel, whom the king named Belteshazzar. Now let Daniel be called, and he will show the interpretation.
Key words are shown with the Hebrew or Greek and what each word meant.
Selah Decoded Version The Selah Decoded Version renders what the Hebrew and Greek words meant to the people who first heard them.
King James wording
King James Version
Forasmuch as an excellent spirit, and knowledge, and understanding, interpreting of dreams, and shewing of hard sentences, and dissolving of doubts, were found in the same Daniel, whom the king named Belteshazzar: now let Daniel be called, and he will shew the interpretation.THE KEY
The verse calls the hardest mystery a knot, and makes interpretation the act of loosening it.
THE MEANING
Understanding is more than gathering facts: it brings what is tangled into view and loosens it into meaning. The verse speaks now of insight as a living capacity that makes the hidden legible.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
Confusion is not proof that meaning is absent; the verse presents what is tangled as something that can be opened.
THE ROOT
קִטְרִין
qitrin
GROWS FROM
קטר
q-ṭ-r
To tie or bind; a knot or bond.
The Aramaic word translated “doubts” is qitrin, “knots.” The verse pictures difficult matters as bound together, so interpretation is not merely answering a question: it is loosening what is tangled.
ALSO GROWS
qĕṭar: To tie or bind.
קְטַר
The verb names the binding that makes the matter a knot.
qitrin: Knots or bonds.
קִטְרִין
This is the word in the verse; “doubts” carries the image of something tied up.
מְשָׁרֵא
meshare
GROWS FROM
שׁרא
š-r-ʾ
To loosen, unfasten, or release.
“loosing of knots” in this verse is meshare. The word rendered “dissolving” means loosening or unfastening. Read beside “knots,” it shows the verse’s own movement: what is bound can be released into understanding.
ALSO GROWS
sherāʾ: To loosen or release.
שְׁרָא
This verb supplies the action beneath “dissolving.”
meshare: Loosening or unfastening.
מְשָׁרֵא
This form describes the act of untying the knots named in the verse.
רוּחַ
ruach
GROWS FROM
רוח
r-w-ḥ
Breath, wind, moving air.
The word the KJV renders “spirit” is ruach, also the word for breath and wind. Daniel’s excellence is joined to a word that holds those meanings together in one living image.
ALSO GROWS
ruach: Breath.
רוּחַ
The same word rendered “spirit” here can name breath.
ruach: Wind.
רוּחַ
The same word can name moving air, as the connected verse makes visible.
THE PATTERN
Restoration begins by loosening what is bound.
Is this not the fast I have chosen, to open the bonds of wickedness, to untie the cords of the yoke, to send the crushed away free, and to tear away every yoke?The one who had died came out, his hands and feet bound in strips of cloth, and a cloth wrapped his face. Jesus said to them, Untie him, and let him go.And suddenly there came a great shaking, so that the foundations of the prison were shaken, and at once all the doors were opened, and every one's bonds were untied.THE THREAD
Then he said to me, Prophesy to the breath, prophesy, son of man, and say to the breath, Thus says the Lord GOD, Come from the four winds, O breath, and blow upon these struck ones, that they may live.Daniel’s Aramaic “spirit” and Ezekiel’s Hebrew “wind” and “breath” are all ruach. The KJV’s different English words reveal one image: moving breath that animates what is lifeless.
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