Did Nebuchadnezzar really go mad and eat grass?

The story in Daniel 4

Daniel 4 is a rare kind of chapter. It is a royal letter, written in the first person by a pagan king “to all the peoples, nations, and languages” (Daniel 4:1). Nebuchadnezzar tells how he dreamed of a tree tall enough to touch the sky, cut down at a holy “watcher’s” order to a stump bound with iron and bronze. The tree, Daniel explains, is the king. Then he gives advice instead of a sentence: “break off your sins by righteousness, and your iniquities by showing mercy to the poor” (Daniel 4:27).

Twelve months later the king walks in his palace, admires his city and asks, “Is not this great Babylon, which I have built?” The words are still in his mouth when a voice falls from heaven.

This was fulfilled the same hour on Nebuchadnezzar. He was driven from men and ate grass like oxen; and his body was wet with the dew of the sky until his hair had grown like eagles’ feathers, and his nails like birds’ claws.

“Seven times” pass over him, which most readers take as seven years. Then he lifts his eyes to heaven, his understanding returns, and he gets his kingdom back with greatness added. The chapter spells out its point three times: “the Most High rules in the kingdom of men” (Daniel 4:17, 25, 32).

What Babylon’s own records say

Nothing. Nebuchadnezzar left a long series of royal inscriptions, almost all about temples, walls and canals, and none hints at a breakdown. The Babylonian Chronicle, which follows his early campaigns year by year, breaks off in 594 BC, so most of his later reign has no annals at all. Berossus, the Babylonian priest whose history Josephus quotes, says only that he fell ill and died after 43 years on the throne. A gap proves nothing either way, but nothing outside the Bible confirms the story.

The king who left Babylon

The best clue points to another king. Nabonidus, Babylon’s last ruler, from 556 to 539 BC, lived for about ten years at Tayma, an oasis in the Arabian desert, in today’s Saudi Arabia, and left his son Belshazzar in charge of the capital. The Nabonidus Chronicle notes year after year that the king was in Tayma and the New Year festival was not held. A hostile Babylonian poem, the Verse Account of Nabonidus, attacks him for neglecting Marduk, the city’s god.

Then the Dead Sea Scrolls added a twist. Scraps of an Aramaic text from Qumran, now called the Prayer of Nabonidus (4Q242), have Nabonidus, king of Babylon, tell how he was struck with an evil disease for seven years at Tayma, until a Jewish diviner from among the exiles forgave his sin and told him to honor the Most High God. Seven years, Tayma, a proud king humbled, a Jewish exile, praise for the Most High: the pieces line up with Daniel 4.

Many scholars conclude that a story about Nabonidus was retold of the far more famous Nebuchadnezzar. Daniel 5 may keep a trace of the blend: it calls Belshazzar, Nabonidus’s son, the son of Nebuchadnezzar (Daniel 5:2, 11). Traditional readers answer that “father” can mean predecessor, and that a court would bury such an episode, not record it. The dating debate is its own story: when the book of Daniel was written.

A name for the madness

Doctors have a word for the delusion of being an ox, boanthropy, and Nebuchadnezzar is the case always cited. Around 1795 William Blake made a color print of him: a naked king on all fours, eyes wide with terror, his beard trailing in the grass. One impression belongs to Tate Britain, in London.

For Daniel the madness is temporary and the lesson permanent. The king who said “which I have built” ends his letter praising the King of heaven, who “is able to abase” those who walk in pride (Daniel 4:37).