Does King Nabonidus Reflect Daniel’s “Nebuchednezzar”?
by
Damien F. Mackey
The Book of Daniel is charged with all sorts of
historical inaccuracies, a fault more likely of the perceived history rather
than of the Book of Daniel itself. Admittedly, some of the things that the
author of Daniel attributes to “King Nebuchednezzar” appear to be better suited
to Nabonidus, the supposed last king of the Babylonian (Chaldean) empire.
Yet there might be a good reason why this is the
case.
Introduction
Reading once again Paul-Alain Beaulieu’s book, The Reign
of Nabonidus, King of Babylon, 556-539 B.C. (1989), I noticed various “Nebuchednezzar”
characteristics in King Nabonidus.
Not least was the fact that, Nabonidus had, like
“Nebuchednezzar”, a son named “Belshazzar”.
There was also a seeming tendency on Nabonidus’s
part towards a kind of monotheism - revering Sîn, the El of
the Aramaeans - and a seeming rejection of the national god, Marduk. Coupled
with this was, not unnaturally, a discomfort with the Babylonian clergy and
wise men.
Nabonidus, like king Nebuchednezzar II, had conquered
Cilicia. We read about this at: https://www.biblicaltraining.org/library/kue “KUE ku’ ĭ (קְוֵ֕ה). An ancient name for E Cilicia (Rom.:
Cilicia Pedias), in SE Asia Minor. …. A document of Nebuchadnezzar II (dated
between 595 and 570 b.c.), mentions the land of Hu-m-e, pronounced Khuwe or
Khwe. It also occurs in the Istanbul Stele of Nabonidus”.
One also encounters many cases of Nabonidus’s
recounting his own dreams.
I found so many similarities beginning to loom
that I eventually came to the conclusion that Nabonidus probably was king
Nebuchednezzar (or Nebuchedrezzar) II ‘the Great’ - that what we have recorded of
Nabonidus simply represents the first phase of the long reign of Nebuchednezzar
II.
This revised view will necessitate that I now modify
some of my previous articles on this era.
Admittedly, there appear to be some immediate problems
with this unexpected new scenario. For one, there is Nabonidus’s own obvious reverence
for a past king, “Nebuchednezzar”. However, my revision might be able to
account for that:
As is apparent from Beaulieu,
Nabonidus considered himself to be the successor of the great Assyrian empire –
a viewpoint that would have more clout perhaps if he had ruled closer to that
period (c. 605 BC) than Nabonidus is conventionally considered to have done (c.
556 BC).
Then there is Nabonidus’s
strange disappearance to Teima (Tayma) in Arabia for ten years. During some of
this time he was ill. It is due to this situation that scholars think that the
Book of Daniel has confused Nebuchednezzar with Nabonidus. Indeed a Dead Sea
Scrolls fragment tells of a protracted illness suffered by Nabonidus. We shall
read about this in the next section.
The Madness of Nabonidus
Nabonidus (Akkadian Nabû-nāʾid) ….
Although his background is uncertain,
his mother may have been a priestess of the moon god Sîn to whom Nabonidus was
unusually devoted. He took the throne after the assassination of the boy-king
Labashi-Marduk. It is not clear whether Nabonidus played a role in
Labashi-Marduk's death.
As king, Nabonidus was maligned by the
priests of the chief Babylonian deity Marduk. It is believed this was
caused by Nabonidus overt devotion to Sîn and his lack of attention to the
city's important New Year's festival. During several years of his kingship,
Nabonidus was absent at the Arabian oasis of Tayma. During this period his son
Belshazzar reigned in his place. The reasons for his long absence remain a
matter of controversy, with theories ranging from illness, to madness, to an
interest in religious archaeology.
….
In his own inscriptions, Nabonidus
himself makes no claim to known royal origins … although he refers to his
otherwise unknown father, Nabu-balatsu-iqbi, as "wise prince." His
mother was connected to the temple of the moon god Sîn in Harran, but her ancestry, too, is unknown. The fact that Nabonidus
makes repeated references to Ashurbanipal,
the last great Neo-Assyrian king, has been cited as evidence that he may have
been of Assyrian origin. However Nabonidus' Persian successor, Cyrus the Great, also referred to Ashurbanipal, so this is hardly
conclusive evidence.
In most ancient accounts, Nabonidus is
depicted as a royal anomaly. He worshiped the moon god Sîn (mythology) beyond
all the other gods, and paid special devotion to Sîn's temple in Harran, where
his mother was a priestess. After successful campaigns in Edom and Cilicia (modern Turkey) early in his reign, he
left Babylon, residing at the rich desert oasis of Tayma, (Temâ) in Arabia, returning only after
many years. In the meantime, his son Belshazzar ruled from Babylon.
Nabonidus is harshly criticized for
neglecting the Babylonian chief god, Marduk and failing to observe
the New Year festivals in Babylon. The Nabonidus Chronicle complains that for
several years: "The king did not come to Babylon for the [New Year's]
ceremonies… the image of the god Bêl (Marduk) did not go out of the Esagila
(temple) in procession, the festival of the New Year was omitted."
Nabonidus' stay in Tayma
Why Nabonidus stayed in Tayma for so
long is a matter of uncertainty. He seems to have become interested in the
place during his campaign against Edom. Tayma was an important
oasis, from which lucrative Arabian trade routes could be controlled.
However, why Nabonidus stayed for so
long—about ten years, from circa 553-543—remains a mystery. One theory is that
he was not comfortable in Babylon, which was the center of Marduk worship,
where he was expected to perform public rites centering on Marduk's cult during the annual
New Year's festival. On the fifth day of the festival, the king was required to
submit himself to Marduk in the person of the high priest, who would
temporarily strip him of his crown and royal insignia, returning them only
after the king prayed for forgiveness and received a hard slap in the face from
the priest. Moreover, on the eighth day, the king had to implore all the gods
to support and honor Marduk, an act which may have been unacceptable to
Nabonidus if he was devoted to Sin as supreme. Some have suggested that Tayma was
attractive to Nabonidus as an archaeological site, where he might find sacred
inscriptions or prophecies related to his own spiritual quest.
[My comment]:
But it may also have been due to his sickness and madness.
This is where newworldencyclopedia
introduces that Dead Sea Scrolls document:
Another possibility is that the king had
become seriously ill and went to the oasis of Tayma to recover. In the Dead Sea Scrolls, a fragment known as the Prayer of Nabonidus relates
that Nabonidus suffered from an ulcer, causing him to retreat
from civilization and stay in Tayma until he was healed by a Jewish exorcist after praying to the Hebrew God:
I, Nabonidus, was afflicted with an evil
ulcer for seven years, and far from men I was driven, until I prayed to the
most high God. And an exorcist pardoned my sins. He was a Jew from among the
children of the exile of Judah… During my stay at Tayma, I prayed to the gods of
silver and gold, bronze and iron, wood, stone and lime, because I thought and
considered them gods….
This legend may explain a confusing
issue in the Book of Daniel, in which the king in question is called Nebuchadnezzar. However, this Nebuchadnezzar's son is named
Belshazzar, which was in fact the name of Nabonidus' son, who reigned in his
stead while Nabonidus was at Tayma. It may thus be the case that the Book of
Daniel confuses Nabonidus with Nebuchadnezzar. However, Daniel describes its king's
disease as a type of madness, rather than an ulcer, saying: "He was driven
away from people and ate grass like cattle. His body was drenched with the dew
of heaven until his hair grew like the feathers of an eagle and his nails like
the claws of a bird" (Daniel 4:33).
….
Although Nabonidus' personal preference
for Sîn is clear, scholars are divided regarding the degree of his supposed monotheism. In the Nabonidus
cylinder currently displayed at the British Museum, the king refers to the moon god as "Sîn, king
of the gods of heaven and the netherworld, without whom no city or country can
be founded." Some claim that it is obvious from his inscriptions that he
became almost henotheistic, considering Sîn
as the national god of Babylon superior even to Marduk.
Others, however, insist that Nabonidus,
while personally devoted to Sîn, respected the other cults in his kingdom,
pointing out that he supported construction works to their temples and did not
suppress their worship. …. In this theory, his negative image is due mainly to
his long absence from Babylon during his stay in Tayma, during which the
important, Marduk-centered New Year festival could not take place, a fact which
deeply offended the priests of Marduk. These priests, who were highly literate,
left records denigrating the king in a fashion similar to the priests of Jerusalem denigrating the Israelite kings who did not
properly honor Yahweh in
the Hebrew Bible.
In fact, there is no sign of the civil unrest during Nabonidus' reign, not even
during his absence, and he was able to return to his throne and assert his
authority with no apparent problem.
However, Nabonidus did remove important cultic statues and their attendants
from southern Mesopotamia and brought them to Babylon. ….
[End of quote]
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“…
within the canonical book of Daniel, Daniel 4 is widely agreed to be originally
a Nabonidus story”.
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Carol A. Newsom has
discerned some intriguing parallels between Daniel’s “Nebuchednezzar” and King
Nabonidus ((WHY NABONIDUS? EXCAVATING TRADITIONS FROM QUMRAN, THE HEBREW
BIBLE, AND NEO-BABYLONIAN SOURCES. Emphasis added):
One of the most fruitful places
for examining the transmission of traditions and the production of texts is
surely the literature associated with the figure of Daniel. Even before the
discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, scholars explored the differences between
the versions of Daniel found in the Masoretic Text of Daniel and the
Septuagint, with its additional narratives and poems, as well as the different
version of Daniel 4–6 in the Old Greek manuscripts. The Qumran finds showed that
there was an even more extensive Danielic literature, with two compositions
featuring Daniel making historical and eschatological predictions in a court
setting (4Q243–244, 4Q245), and two compositions
using language or motifs similar
to those of Daniel 2 and 7 (4Q246, 4Q552–553).1 The longstanding suspicion of
scholars that Daniel 4 was originally a narrative about Nabonidus received
additional support from the discovery of 4Q242 Prayer of Nabonidus. ….
These texts are evidence both for
the complexity of the Danielic tradition and the creativity of its authors, as
they appropriated and recycled [sic] useful elements, combining them with
usable bits and pieces from other literary and oral traditions in order to
produce new compositions. Nowhere are we better positioned to examine this process
than with the texts that were originally associated with Nabonidus, for in
addition to the Jewish narratives, we also have an extensive neo-Babylonian literature,
including both Nabonidus’ own self-presentation in his inscriptions and
literary representations of Nabonidus by his enemies. …. Although this material
has been intensively studied, recent research on the historical Nabonidus may
shed additional light on the composition and development of the Jewish
Nabonidus literature. In addition, two questions have not heretofore received
sufficient attention. First, to the extent that one can peer through the Jewish
Nabonidus texts to the early stages of their composition, what can one say
about the motivation for their composition and their possible function as
social rhetoric? Second, since important comparative material exists, is it
possible to develop a model that suggests how the authors of this literature
actually produced new stories from their source material?
The Corpus of
Jewish Nabonidus Literature
One of the initial issues to be
explored is the extent of Jewish Nabonidus literature. The Prayer of
Nabonidus is the one text explicitly identified with him. But within the
canonical book of Daniel, Daniel 4 is widely agreed to be originally a
Nabonidus story. …. To this one can add Daniel 5, since it is a story about
Nabonidus’ son Belshazzar. It has also been suggested that other compositions
of the Daniel cycle may have originated as stories about Nabonidus, notably
Daniel 3. Although the details of the narrative do not correspond to anything actually
done by either Nebuchadnezzar or Nabonidus, the erecting of a strange image and
requiring worship of it may well preserve a parodic echo of Nabonidus’
notorious championing of the moon god Sin. …. Indeed, two of his most
controversial actions were the installation of a new and non-traditional cult
statue of the moon god in Sin’s temple in Harran and his attempt to persuade
the priests of Marduk that the Esagil temple in Babylon actually belonged to
the moon god, because of the iconography of the lunar crescent found there. …. In
addition, Paul-Alain Beaulieu has recently argued that the motif of the fiery
furnace in Daniel 3 is actually derived from a literary topos that was part of
the Neo-Babylonian school curriculum. Together, these elements strongly suggest
that the basic structure of the narrative may go back to the sixth century. ….
The case for Daniel 2 as
originally a Nabonidus narrative is weaker but not without plausibility. Of the Neo-Babylonian kings only Nabonidus
had an interest in ominous and revelatory dreams or recorded them in his
inscriptions. …. Dreams, however, are not uncommon elements in Israelite
and early Jewish storytelling, as the notable parallel of Pharaoh’s dream in
Genesis 41 demonstrates. Still, it is not the fact of the dream but the role it
plays in the narrative of Daniel 2 that is suggestive. The narrative is dated
to “the second year” of the king’s reign, and it is thus quite likely that the
king’s distress at the ominous dream is intended to suggest anxiety as to the
security of his reign. In Daniel, of course, the dream and its interpretation
are a Hellenistic era composition [sic], since they contain references to a
sequence of kingdoms, ending with that of the Greeks (vv. 36–44). Some scholars
have suggested, however, that this particular dream or elements of it are secondary,
since its eschatological orientation contrasts quite sharply with the way in
which the narratives in Daniel 1–6 in general tend to accommodate to gentile
power by representing the kings as recognizing the power of the Judean god. …. While
any argument about an earlier version of Daniel 2 must be speculative, it is
the case that Nabonidus, a usurper who was not part of the dynastic family, was
anxious about the legitimacy of his kingship. In an inscription composed during
his first regnal year, Nabonidus himself reports an ominous dream he had concerning
the conjunction of the moon (Sin) and the great star (Marduk). A “young man” in
the dream tells him that “the conjunction does not involve evil portents.” …. Nabonidus
goes on to report that in the dream Marduk “called him by name.” The similarity
to Daniel 2, which concerns an ominous royal dream interpreted by a young man in
an agreeable fashion, is thus quite intriguing.
[End of quote]
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