Who was Nebuchadnezzar?

The crown prince of Carchemish

Nebuchadnezzar was the son of Nabopolassar, who freed Babylon from Assyria and helped destroy Nineveh in 612 BC. In 605 BC the crown prince met the army of Pharaoh Necho at Carchemish, on the Euphrates, where Turkey meets Syria today, and broke it (Jeremiah 46:2). Then news came that his father was dead. The Babylonian priest Berossus, quoted by Josephus, says he left the captives and heavy baggage to his officers and raced across the desert to Babylon with a few companions to take the throne.

In Babylonian his name was Nabû-kudurri-uṣur, which means Nabu, protect my heir: a prayer to the god of writing. The Hebrew of Jeremiah and Ezekiel often spells it Nebuchadrezzar, which is closer to the original.

What he did to Jerusalem

Judah sat on the road between Babylon and Egypt, and its kings kept betting on Egypt. Nebuchadnezzar answered three times.

• Around 604 BC. King Jehoiakim submits, then rebels after three years (2 Kings 24:1). The book of Daniel places the first young hostages, Daniel among them, in these years (Daniel 1:1–6).
• 597 BC. Babylon besieges Jerusalem. The eighteen-year-old king Jehoiachin surrenders, and Nebuchadnezzar strips the Temple treasury and deports the court, the soldiers and the craftsmen. A tablet of the Babylonian Chronicle dates the capture to the second day of Adar, in March 597 BC, and says the king set up a ruler of his own choosing.
• 586 BC. That ruler, Zedekiah, rebels too. After a long siege the walls are breached. At Riblah, in Syria, Zedekiah watches his sons killed before he is blinded, and Babylon’s captain of the guard burns the Temple (the destruction of the Temple).

He carried away all Jerusalem, and all the princes, and all the mighty men of valor, even ten thousand captives, and all the craftsmen and the smiths. No one remained except the poorest people of the land.

Babylon kept its royal hostage. Clay ration tablets from Nebuchadnezzar’s palace list oil for Jehoiachin, still titled king of the land of Judah. And 2 Kings ends with Nebuchadnezzar’s son, Evil-merodach, freeing the old king from prison and seating him at his own table (2 Kings 25:27–30).

“My servant,” says Jeremiah

The prophets read him in a surprising way. Jeremiah, who lived through both sieges, calls the destroyer of Jerusalem God’s instrument.

Now I have given all these lands into the hand of Nebuchadnezzar the king of Babylon, my servant.

For Jeremiah, resisting Babylon meant resisting God, and he urged Zedekiah to surrender (Jeremiah 38:17). In Daniel the king is something stranger: a tyrant who can be taught. He demands that his wise men tell him his own dream, throws three men into a furnace and then praises their God. Daniel 4 is written as a letter from the king himself, telling how he lost his mind and got it back, a story with a puzzle of its own.

The builder of Babylon

His own inscriptions boast of bricks, not battles. Countless bricks in Babylon carry his stamped name. He finished the city’s double walls and the Ishtar Gate, glazed blue and paraded with dragons and bulls, now rebuilt in Berlin. Berossus adds a palace with terraces of trees, built for a queen who missed the mountains of Media: the Hanging Gardens of later Greek legend. No Babylonian text describes them, and no excavation has found them.

He died in 562 BC, after an illness, Berossus says, and his son followed him. Twenty-three years later Babylon belonged to Cyrus of Persia. The king lives on in odd places: Verdi’s opera Nabucco (1842), whose chorus of Hebrew exiles, “Va, pensiero,” Italians still sing like an anthem, a champagne bottle of fifteen liters, and the ship Morpheus captains in The Matrix.