God’s Word for You

Daniel 5:10-12 Queen and mother

by Pastor Timothy Smith on Saturday, October 18, 2025

10 Hearing the voices of the king and his nobles, the queen came into the banquet hall. “O king, live forever!” she said. “Do not be alarmed! Do not look so pale! 11 There is a man in your kingdom who has the spirit of the holy gods in him. In the time of your father he was found to have insight and intelligence and wisdom like the wisdom of the gods. King Nebuchadnezzar your father—your father the king—appointed him chief of the magicians, enchanters, astrologers and diviners. 12 He has a good mind, knowledge and understanding, and also the ability to interpret dreams, explain riddles and solve difficult problems. This man is Daniel, whom the king called Belteshazzar. Call for Daniel, and he will tell you what the writing means.”

The entrance of the queen is unexpected. She comes in something like a mom, scolding her son for all the noise coming from his party. But immediately that idea is squashed and we discover that she is compassionate, wise, and knowledgeable. Who is she? Since she wasn’t already present, we can judge that she was not Belshazzar’s wife, because his wives and concubines were already present (Daniel 5:2-3). She could have been Belshazzar’s mother, which would make her the wife of King Nabonidus and the daughter of the great Nebuchadnezzar. Or she could have been Nebuchadnezzar’s widow; Belshazzar’s grandmother. It is also possible that she could have been another wife of King Nabonidus who was not a daughter of Nebuchadnezzar but who had been present to see the deeds of Daniel and his companions in those days.

Whichever of these is correctly and technically her position, her rank of “queen” and “mother” are hers within the kingdom and the family. She has the dignity of motherhood, the distinction of motherhood, the honor of motherhood, and the glory of motherhood (these are all frequent terms used by Luther). She loves, nurtures, and cares for her children, and as a grandmother, for those children as well, because she is the nurturing trunk of that family tree, from which all those children are brought in and nourished. And if one is grafted in by adoption or simply by family affection, then she loves that one, too, as one of her own, unless she is a cruel monster. But usually and in almost everyone’s experience the mother is the one who loves and loves and who cares and cares. Her love is the highest virtue. “It is ready to be of service,” Luther writes, “not only with what its tongue says, but with its hands, its money, and its abilities, but with its body and its very life. This love is neither called forth by anything that someone deserves nor deterred by what is undeserving and ungrateful. A mother cherishes and cares for her child simply because she loves him” (LW 27:58).

And under the Fourth Commandment, Luther also instructs us about mothers and fathers who might not seem to us to be ideal, but who can be a cross for their children to bear, truly terrible and even cruel or heartless. Yet we owe them our love. For each of us must remember “that, however lowly, poor, feeble, and eccentric they may be, they are our own mother and father, given to us by God. They are not to be deprived of their honor because of their ways or their failings. Therefore, we are not to think of their persons, whatever they are, but of the will of God, who has created and ordained them to be our parents” (Large Catechism, I:108). For to be a wife and a mother is to receive and to produce within her body “the blessing of the womb which the wiser among the heathen have also wondered at and gloriously extolled. There still remain the other gifts: that we are all nourished, kept warm, and carried in the womb of our mothers; that we nurse at their breasts and are protected by their effort and care” (Luther on Genesis 3:16).

Now we have gone far afield from our text, but something must first be said about those women and girls who do not marry, or who have their husbands taken away from them in too soon a death or other tragedy. The Lord does not forget them, but blesses them and tells them to sing (Isaiah 54:1) as they share the gospel with people in their lives as the best kind of good neighbor, and who care under the Fifth Commandment for the eternal soul as well as the living body of their friend or neighbor, and love their neighbor, setting the example of the Christian life and of love and contentment, bearing burdens but with the love of Christ always in their hearts and on their lips.

Let us return to this mother in the throne room of the terrified Belshazzar. This pagan mother, this heathen queen, is nevertheless capable of tender and motherly love for Belshazzar. She assures him, not because he is the king, but because she is a mother. She knows someone who can help. In the days of his grandfather Nebuchadnezzar, there was a man who became chief of all the wise men of Babylon. “He has a good mind,” she tells the quaking king. “He has knowledge and understanding, and also the ability to interpret dreams, explain riddles and solve difficult problems.” She does not say anything more except to give this man a name. Nebuchadnezzar had called him Belteshazzar, but his real name is Daniel. “Call for Daniel,” she says, and with the confidence of a woman and a mother who had seen it all before, she assured him: “He will tell you what the writing means.”

If a pagan queen, a heathen mother, can love and help her son or grandson or stepson as this woman did, how much more a Christian mother or sister or friend does for the people in her life! A believing woman is a servant of God that the devil too often ignores. The devil does not think much of women. He does not respect them, honor them, cherish them, or value them. But God created women, and in eternity he made plans for them, set many millions in his heart as his special daughters, to nourish and cherish and care for all of the members of his holy church during their lives on earth. It is they who teach and remind the little ones in their laps of who their Savior Jesus is, of what heaven is, and tell them the story of God’s love. Thank God for the women, mothers, sisters, neighbors, wives and friends, who have been blessings in your life. I doubt you will be able to name them all, but thankfully the Holy Spirit fills in those gaps when we pray. Thank your heavenly father for all of those earthly mothers. And do not forget Jesus’ words about them all: “Whoever does God’s will is my brother and sister and mother” (Mark 3:35).

In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith

 

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