Daniel chapter 4 recounts the story of a dream of King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon, involving a mighty tree being chopped down and the stump lying dormant for seven "times." Nebuchadnezzar presses Belteshazzar (Daniel) into service to interpret the dream, and of course, it is about Nebuchadnezzar himself. The account continues:
Dan 4:24 this is the interpretation, O king, and this is the decree of the Most High, which has come upon my lord the king: Dan 4:25 that you be driven away from mankind and your dwelling place be with the beasts of the field, and you be given grass to eat like cattle and be drenched with the dew of heaven; and seven periods of time will pass over you, until you recognize that the Most High is ruler over the realm of mankind and bestows it on whomever He wishes.
Now one year later, the text continues, while on the rooftops tempting fate by boasting aloud, no less, the word comes down from heaven, and so it comes to pass that Nebuchadnezzar is struck with divine madness.
Dan 4:33 "Immediately the word concerning Nebuchadnezzar was fulfilled; and he was driven away from mankind and began eating grass like cattle, and his body was drenched with the dew of heaven until his hair had grown like eagles' {feathers} and his nails like birds' {claws.} Dan 4:34 "But at the end of that period, I, Nebuchadnezzar, raised my eyes toward heaven and my reason returned to me, and I blessed the Most High and praised and honored Him who lives forever; For His dominion is an everlasting dominion, And His kingdom {endures} from generation to generation.
Happy endings, at least, for Nebuchadnezzar, to round out the story and give us a satisfying (sic) lesson of "history."
Or so we were taught to believe.
Nabonidus, monarch of Babylon from 556 to 539 BCE, is nowhere mentioned by name anywhere in the biblical texts or in the pseudepigraphical texts or in the books of the apocrypha. Yet his story is crucial in understanding one of the most egregious of historical errors made by the author of the book of Daniel, if one attempts to read it as an historical account at all, as many, including the WTS do. Oddly enough, depite his absence from the Bible, Nabonidus does, in fact, show up in an article in Insight on the Scriptures, in a carefully edited and highly selective (what else) article merely attempting to explain away the obvious problem that Daniel refers to Nebuchadnezzar as Belshazzar's father, when in fact, he wasn't. WTS's answer, like other interpreters who have read these texts as historically reliable accounts and thereby must occasionally (and ironically) resort to interpretive liberties, is that when the text says "father" it has the meaning of "grandfather" or ancestor. But that is a mundane issue which we will not linger on too long.
Of greater importance and interest to this post about Nabonidus is that there is a text referring to him, from the Dead Sea Scrolls. The following is from http://fontes.lstc.edu/~rklein/Documents/Praynab.htm
Prayer of NabonidusThis Aramaic text belongs to the famous Dead Sea scrolls: four scraps of parchment from Cave 4, usually called 4Q242, copied from an older original in the second half of the first century BCE. The story is similar to the preceding one: a king of Babylon is ill, lives isolated for seven years and becomes convinced of the truth of the monotheistic creed.There must have circulated a Jewish story about the mad king Nabonidus who went to Temâ to recover his wits, and recognized the supreme God. Two people reworked this original: one of the authors of Daniel changed the name of the monarch, the author of the Prayer changed the illness (to make the story fit Leviticus 13?). The reconstructed story independently confirms two points made by the author of the verse account: Nabonidus suffered from a mental disease and insulted the Babylonian clergy by his monotheistic ideas . This does not prove that Nabonidus was mad, but it makes it extremely plausible that the accusation was very old.
Words of the prayer, said by Nabonidus, king of Babylonia, the great king, when afflicted with an ulcer on command of the most high God in Temâ:
'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, and said: "Recount this in writing to glorify and exalt the name of the most high God." Then I wrote this: "When I was afflicted for seven years by the most high God with an evil ulcer during my stay at Temâ, I prayed to the gods of silver and gold, bronze and iron, wood, stone and lime, because I thought and considered them gods..."' [the end is missing](It is interesting to notice that the line 'have praised the gods of silver and gold, bronze and iron, wood and stone' returns in Daniel, just twenty-two lines below the story of the madness of Nebuchadnezzar.)
In fact, historians of ancient Babylon, in particular R. H. Sack, recognize that the tradition (quite apart from documented history) of a seven (or ten) year period of alleged madness was not in regard to Nebuchadnezzar at all. This in light of the fact that, of Nebuchadnezzar's reign, there is very little attested to in primary documents from Babylon itself, yet the most of all Babylonian monarchs in secondary, non-Babylonian sources. The world around Nebuchadnezzar was obsessed with his Larger Than Lifeness, his building projects, and military exploits. But there was no story (other than in Daniel in 164 BCE) of Nebuchadnezzar the raving lunatic. Rather, the period of madness and the disdained reputation was widely associated with Nabonidus, since various records, including the Nabonidus Chronicle, show that he left Babylon for the city of Tema, and thereby offended the Marduk worshipping priests when he abandoned the capital city in favor of worship of the god Sin of Harran.
This seems to have resulted in both political and religious turmoil in the empire, especially since the two dimensions were inextricably intertwined. To the people of Tema (and likely the surrounding one fourth of his empire) Nabonidus would probably have seemed as carrying on in a way expected of any worshipper of Sin; to the Marduk worshippers of the capital city, this king was a deranged madman who must have completely lost his mind and endangered the status quo to not return for the annual festival, to which his presence would have been required for it to go forward.
And this is what happened to Nabonidus' reputation after his reign, when it gave way to the subterfuge of Cyrus (note, NOT Darius the Mede, which most scholars agree is just a confusion with Cyrus). To many of those in the empire, particularly those in Babylon who fell under Persian rule, the Marduk priests, and the Jews "liberated" by Cyrus, Nabonidus' legacy was a complete disaster, and the great King who neglected his capital city and kingly religious duties must have been suffering punishment from a god to explain his aberrant behavior. Cyrus, for his part, surely worked hard to preserve a favorable reputation, and spun his own propaganda.
In fact, no such episode of madness for Nebuchadnezzar, outside of the book of Daniel, is attested anywhere. Has the author of Daniel completely gaffed? Liberal-minded scholars see in it an artistic license, an adaptation of history to fit folkloristic elements, where historical accuracy is not the primary objective, but establishment of a motif in the telling of an inspirational story. The historical (in)accuracy is beside the point, these scholars argue, because the author is making a broader point about opposition to Yahweh, the same point, tellingly, made in the Prayer of Nabonidus cited above.
Were even the story to end here, and we went home (or away from this webpage) knowing that, surprise! the book of Daniel is not historically accurate, we might be slightly edified, a little comforted in knowing that there's always more to the story than meets the eye, and that our suspicions of this strange story were at once confirmed and denied in that there existed such an historical reputation, albeit assigned to a different monarch. But no, for those of us growing up under the closed-mind system of the WTS, we remember how fascinating, and how mighty Jehovah's power was vaunted to be, when we looked at the pictures of the bound tree stump, the mad Nebuchadnezzar grazing in the fields, the incredible historical fulfillment of prophecy! and read the following bizarre information, in a classic Watchtower One Step Too Far--though it appeared in earlier literature, this information continues to be published in the Insight on the Scriptures book:
"Regarding his [Nebuchadnezzar's] mental derangement, a French medical dictionary states: 'LYCANTHROPY...from [ly'kos] lupus, wolf; [an'thro.pos], homo, man. This name was given to the sickness of people who believe themselves changed into an animal, and who imitate the voice or cries, the shapes or manners of that animal. These individuals usually imagine themselves transformed into a wolf, a dog, or a cat; sometimes also into a bull, as in the case of Nebuchadnezzar.' (Dictionnaire des sciences medicales, par une societe de medicins et de chirurgiens, Paris, 1818, Vol. 29, p. 246.)
What's that? An almost TWO HUNDRED YEAR-OLD FRENCH MEDICAL DICTIONARY confirms that Nebuchadnezzar was ancient Babylon's answer to Lon Chaney? ARE YOU KIDDING ME?
To summarize, not only is Nebuchadnezzar not the king in question in Babylon, or the father of Belshazzar, but Nabonidus, the king who did have the reputation of going mad, actually suffered from a reputational stigma for failing to maintain religious popularity. In fact, neither Nabonidus nor Nebuchadnezzar, historically speaking, was the Bull-Man King of Tema. Not the Werewolf of London. No full-moons, no watching the king foaming at the mouth while Babylon burns. A scurrilous story invented by religious enemies is "misassigned" to the wrong monarch in the book of Daniel and the WTS calls it history by citing a Medical dictionary from 1818!
Euripides