Daniel4chapter 4

The chapter is written as a public proclamation from the king himself, addressed to all peoples and languages — the standard opening of a Babylonian or Persian royal decree. It is the only chapter of its kind in the Old Testament: a pagan emperor's own testimony.

His boast is documented. Nebuchadnezzar's building inscriptions, recovered by the thousand from stamped bricks and clay cylinders, say almost word for word what he says on the roof: that he built Babylon, that he made it magnificent. The city he describes had double walls, a processional way, and a bridge over the Euphrates — all of it dug up and standing in museums. The terraced gardens that later Greek writers counted among the wonders of the world are a different case: no Babylonian text mentions them, nothing has been excavated, and some historians now place them at Nineveh instead.

The madness described here — living outdoors, eating grass, hair and nails growing wild — matches a rare condition in which a person believes himself to be an animal. Babylonian records go quiet about the king's activity for a stretch in his later years, though the records are patchy and nothing survives that names the illness.

One nearby find is worth knowing about honestly: among the Dead Sea Scrolls is a short text called the Prayer of Nabonidus, in which a later Babylonian king is struck with a disease for seven years, is helped by a Jewish exile, and is told to honor God. Scholars argue about how the two accounts are related. Nobody has settled it.