The Book of Daniel 4:28-33

Welcome back to my study/review of The Book of Daniel. If you missed the previous parts of this study, you can find them HERE.

Daniel 4:28-33

²⁸ All this came upon King Nebuchadnezzar. ²⁹ At the end of twelve months he was walking on the roof of the royal palace of Babylon, ³⁰ and the king answered and said, “Is not this great Babylon, which I have built by my mighty power as a royal residence and for the glory of my majesty?” ³¹ While the words were still in the king’s mouth, there fell a voice from heaven, “O King Nebuchadnezzar, to you it is spoken: The kingdom has departed from you, ³² and you shall be driven from among men, and your dwelling shall be with the beasts of the field. And you shall be made to eat grass like an ox, and seven periods of time shall pass over you, until you know that the Most High rules the kingdom of men and gives it to whom he will.” ³³ Immediately the word was fulfilled against Nebuchadnezzar. He was driven from among men and ate grass like an ox, and his body was wet with the dew of heaven till his hair grew as long as eagles’ feathers, and his nails were like birds’ claws.

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And here we have the humbling of King Nebuchadnezzar. After Babylon conquered Judah, the Babylonians thought that this proved the superiority of their gods to those of the now captive Jews. The Book of Daniel – among many other things – is a lengthy disabusing of that notion of Babylonian superiority. In many respects, the Book of Daniel is a callback to the history of the Israelites in Egypt. Despite being captives, the God of the Israelites proved His superiority over the gods of Egypt. Pharoah was brought low and was humbled. A similar thing is happening here. In this section, specifically, we see Nebuchadnezzar brought down to his lowest point. We’ll start by looking at verses 28 and 29, in The Pulpit Commentaries:

Daniel 4:28, Daniel 4:29

All this came upon the King Nebuchadnezzar. At the end of twelve months he walked in the palace of the kingdom of Babylon. The Septuagint here has the look of a paraphrase. In continuation of the preceding verse, “Attend (ἀγάπησον) to these words, for my word is certain, and thy time is full. And at the end of this word, Nebuchadnezzar, when he heard the interpretation of the vision, kept these words in his heart” (compare with this the phrase in Luke 2:19). “And after twelve months the king walked upon the walls of the city, and went about its towers, and answered and said.” The variations appear to be due to a desire to expand and explain. It seemed to the translator more natural that, after a survey of the walls and towers of Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar should speak his boastful words, hence he makes the suitable changes in the verse before us; so, too, with the effect of Daniel’s words on the king. The rendering of Theodotion coincides nearly with the text of the Massorites, save that haychal is translated “temple” rather than “palace”—a translation which usage quite permits. The Peshitta retains the double meaning. One, of the great buildings erected by an Assyrian or Babylonian monarch was his palace, which had also the character of a temple. In the ease of the Ninevite monarchs, the walls of the palace were adorned with sculptures, portraying the principal events of the monarch’s reign. This not impossibly might be the case with the palace of Nebuchadnezzar. Babylon as a city seems to have been practically rebuilt by him—his bricks are the most numerous of any found in Babylonia.

So these two verses essentially set the scene. A year after the warning from Daniel, the King is walking on the roof of his palace. Perhaps we has put Daniel’s warning out of his mind by this time. Then the King decides to credit himself for his successes.

That does not go well. Looking next at Ellicott’s Bible Commentary and its note for verse 30, describing this moment:

(30) Great Babylon.—The area of Babylon is said to have been 200 square miles. It was surrounded by walls 85 feet in width, 335 feet high. In these were brazen gates leading to various terraces which faced the river Euphrates. Within the walls the city was laid out in smaller towns, separated from each other by parks and plantations and gardens; in fact, it is stated that corn sufficient for the whole population could be grown within the walls. There were also magnificent public buildings. Nebuchadnezzar (Records of the Past, vol. v., pp. 113-135) mentions no less than eight temples which he completed, besides the huge temple of Merodach immediately across the Euphrates facing the royal palace. Walking on the flat roof of this palace, and with this grand spectacle before him, the king uttered these words. True, indeed, they were, but they show that during the twelve months which had been allotted to the king for repentance his pride remained unabated; he had not repented as Daniel had counselled him.

The note clarifies perhaps why it was so difficult for the king to be humble. Babylon was a great city and empire, and Nebuchadnezzar played a large role in why it was so. Nevertheless, even the greatest men owe their successes to a higher power. The king had lost sight of that and gave himself credit for everything. Continuing to verse 31 in TPC:

Daniel 4:31, Daniel 4:32

While the word was in the king’s mouth, there fell a voice from heaven, saying, O King Nebuchadnezzar, to thee it is spoken; The kingdom is departed from thee. And they shall drive thee from men, and thy dwelling shall be with the beasts of the field: they shall make thee to eat grass as oxen, and seven times shall pass over thee, until thou know that the Most High ruleth in the kingdom of men, and giveth it to whomsoever he will. The Septuagint rendering has many points of interest, “While the word was yet in the mouth of the king—at the end of his speech—he heard a voice out of heaven, To thee it is said, O King Nebuchadnezzar, the kingdom of Babylon has been taken from thee, and is being given to another—a man set at naught in thy house: behold, I set him in thy kingdom, and thy power and thy glory and thy delicacy he takes possession of; that thou mayest know that the God of heaven hath dominion over the kingdoms of men, and to whomsoever he willeth he shall give it. To the rising of the sun another king shall rejoice in thy house and shall possess thy glory and thy might and thy dominion.” The differences between the Massoretic and Theodotion are inconsiderable. The Peshitta adds the clause, “wet with the dew of heaven,” to the description of the humiliation of Nebuchadnezzar; and to the account of the supremacy of the God of heaven adds, “and raises to it the humble man.” This latter clause seems like a faint echo of the more precise statement of the LXX. The Vulgate differs here only as in the former case, omitting the causative. The reference in the LXX. to a special person in the house of Nebuchadnezzar, exalted upon his throne, appears to support an idea thrown out by Lenormant. Neri-glissar, the son-in-law of Nebuchadnezzar and the successor of Evil-Merodach, claims to be the son of Bel-zikir-iskun, King of Babylon, but in the list of Ptolemy there is no such name; hence Lenormant imagines that this Belzikir-iskun usurped the throne for a short while, too short to be in the canon of Ptolemy. There is no trace of such a usurpation in the contract tables. Rawlin-son’s hypothesis is difficult to believe. It is that this Belzikir-iskun was king in Babylon before the fall of the Assyrian Empire, before Nabepolassar. But from the accession of Nabopolassar to the death of Evil-Merodach is sixty-five or sixty-six years. A man of the age implied was little likely to take part in a revolution or leave behind him an infant son. It is difficult to decide, but it must be admitted that Lenormant’s position is at all events a possible solution of the question.

To be great requires a lot of blessings, first. One of the most important of those blessings is health. The voice from heaven speaks and the King loses his health.

We do not know the duration of the King’s madness. We are told “seven times.” Perhaps it was 7 days, 7 weeks, 7 months, 7 years, or 7 of something else. “Years” is often the ascribed inference, as the note says. Seven might also have a symbolic meaning of completion.

You might ask yourself if there is an archaeological record of an event like this – because surely there would be. The answer, actually, is yes. Kind of. The record is challenging because it presents Daniel as a blend of historicity and historical fiction. via history.howstuffworks.com

Incredibly, there is an independent record of a Babylonian king going mad and wandering in the wilderness for years. But it wasn’t Nebuchadnezzar, says Frahm. In Babylonian texts, the “mad king” was Nabonidus, a king who ruled two decades after Nebuchadnezzar and ended up losing the Babylonian Empire to the Persians.

According to the records, King Nabonidus replaced the Babylonian gods with a new moon god and then led his troops on a strange campaign into the Arabian Desert to attack some towns, including Yathrib, the later Medina. He then dwelled the next 10 years in the Arabian city of Tayma.

“This sojourn of Nabonidus in Arabia for 10 years is clearly the background of the story of Nebuchadnezzar in the wilderness,” says Frahm.

There’s even physical proof of the Nabonidus story also being tied to a Hebrew sage. Four fragments discovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls contained what’s now known as the Prayer of Nabonidus:

I was afflicted [with an evil ulcer] for seven years…and an exorcist pardoned my sins. He was a Jew from among the [children of the exile of Judah, and said,] “Recount this in writing to [glorify and exalt] the Name of the [Most High God].”

Frahm says that the “exorcist” in the Nabonidus account is clearly Daniel, and it’s easy to understand why the authors of Daniel would have substituted the “tyrant” Nebuchadnezzar in their retelling. (There’s no evidence that Nabonidus ate grass.)

“In this theology, where you have to be punished for the sins you committed, it makes sense that it’s Nebuchadnezzar and not Nabonidus who is said to have had this strange episode,” says Frahm.

The Hebrew Bible is an incredible document, not only for the faithful, but for historians like Frahm. In books like 2 Kings and Jeremiah, there are accounts of Nebuchadnezzar and later Babylonian kings that have been independently confirmed by ancient cuneiform tablets recovered from Babylonian sites.

But then you have the stories in Daniel about the fiery furnace, Nebuchadnezzar’s dreams and being cursed with a seven-year madness, all of which Frahm describes not as history, but literature.

What does the example of Nebuchadnezzar teach us about the historicity of the Bible? That it’s neither entirely factual nor entirely made up, Frahm says.

“You have to look at the details,” says Frahm. “When we have these independent sources, as we do for the sixth century B.C.E., you do have a good chance of figuring out what is historically correct and what is later theological interpretation.”

Is is possible that the Babylonian records are less accurate than the Judean ones? Yes, of course. Is it possible that the Judean account changed the name of the afflicted King on purpose (or that an early scribe changed the name in error)? Yes. Does the possibility that the text might be wrong about the name of the king call into question its place in the Biblical canon? I think the answer to that relies on deciding how you feel about religious authority and also upon what the purpose of the Scripture actually was. If you’re a Christian, does Church leadership (with and through a guiding from God) – rather than individual determination – decide what gets to be in the canon? Does it make a difference if the purpose of the text was to instruct morally rather than to present a completely accurate historical account? All of those are difficult questions. Most people allow for a certain degree of literary license, even in Scripture, but how much? (For example, if everything was historically accurate, but rather than eating grass, the king was eating something else in a beast-like way, would that matter?)

These are probably not questions to be answered here, but Daniel spurs the question. Continuing on to verse 33’s note from Ellicott:

(33) The thing fulfilled.—The malady of Nebuchadnezzar has frequently formed the subject of discussion, and it is now for the most part agreed that it was a form of mania known as lycanthropy. The peculiar features of it mentioned in this verse are partially connected with the life which the sufferer’s delusion forced him to lead. It appears, however, from the account in Daniel, that he retained his consciousness, as “he lifted up his eyes to heaven” (Daniel 4:34) before “his understanding” returned to him. Of this sickness nothing is recorded by Berosus, unless the vague statement “Nebuchadnezzar fell sick and died after a reign of forty-three years” be pressed. It is remarkable to observe that an interval is mentioned in his inscription during which he executed no great public works.

As the note here tells us… we should not necessarily dismiss the Biblical account that this madness befell Nebuchadnezzar. There is a gap in the Babylonian king’s own record. It might also be the case that the Babylonian records preferred to shift this history to a rival, or successor, rather than attribute the shame of it to him. So inasmuch as it is a good idea to be open to the latest archaeology when studying Scripture, we should also be careful in ascribing too much weight to that work, too. It’s always subject to revision, as new things are discovered.

Nebuchadnezzar is restored in the next section of verses. We’ll see there whether he learns humility and perhaps we’ll see going forward whether that humility lasts.