Biblion Bible Commentary
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The Queen Remembers Daniel
Daniel 5:10-16
10 The queen by reason of the words of the king and his lords came into the banquet house. The queen spoke and said, “O king, live forever; don’t let your thoughts trouble you, nor let your face be changed. · WEB
An older woman's memory supplies what the empire's records had lost, and the king who summons Daniel reveals he had known about him all along.
The queen by reason of the words of the king and his lords came into the banquet house Daniel 5:10.
She was not at the feast. She comes in because of the commotion, and she comes in speaking — steady, formal, and entirely unafraid: O king, live forever; don't let your thoughts trouble you, nor let your face be changed. In a hall full of paralyzed nobility, the composure belongs to a woman whose memory reaches further back than anyone else's in the room. Her rank and relation the text does not specify beyond the title; what she has is recollection of the previous reign.
There is a man in your kingdom in whom is the spirit of the holy gods; and in the days of your father, light and understanding and wisdom, like the wisdom of the gods, were found in him Daniel 5:11.
She uses the old court vocabulary — the spirit of the holy gods was Nebuchadnezzar's own phrase for Daniel Daniel 4:8 — and she reconstructs the man's whole standing: appointed master of the magicians, enchanters, Chaldeans, and soothsayers by the king's own father, and possessed of an excellent spirit, knowledge, understanding, interpreting of dreams, showing of dark sentences, and dissolving of doubts Daniel 5:12. She even remembers both names. Now let Daniel be called, and he will show the interpretation — no hedging, no perhaps.
What the scene quietly establishes is that Daniel had been set aside. Chief of the wise men under the previous reign, he is not among the wise men summoned tonight; a new administration had shelved him, and the empire's institutional memory of its greatest asset survived only in the head of an old woman. Faithful service is often filed away like this, and remains available.
Are you that Daniel of the children of the captivity of Judah, whom the king my father brought out of Judah? Daniel 5:13.
The question is a snub with a fact inside it. He greets the man as a prisoner of war — of the children of the captivity, brought out of Judah — establishing the pecking order before asking for help. And then, three verses later, he gives himself away: I have heard of you, that you can give interpretations and dissolve doubts Daniel 5:16. He had heard. He knew there was such a man and had not sent for him; the summons came only when a queen shamed the court into it. This is the same reluctance his predecessor showed — but at last, Daniel came in Daniel 4:8 — hardened into policy.
You shall be clothed with purple, and have a chain of gold around your neck, and shall be the third ruler in the kingdom.
The offer is repeated word for word from the earlier proclamation Daniel 5:7, now made directly to an old man in a hall where the wine has gone cold. It is a considerable fortune, offered by a monarch with roughly a few hours left to pay it. Daniel's first sentence will decline it Daniel 5:17.
held with reason What this mark means