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.
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]
—————————————————————————————-
“… within the canonical book of Daniel,
Daniel 4 is widely agreed to be
originally a Nabonidus story”.
—————————————————————————————-
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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