Daniel 4

The fourth chapter of Daniel is one of the most unusual in the Hebrew Bible, both in its literary form and in its theological content. It is narrated largely in Nebuchadnezzar's own first person — the chapter begins and ends with the king addressing all peoples, nations, and languages in what reads as a royal proclamation, and the central sections recount the dream and its fulfilment from the king's perspective. The device gives the chapter an extraordinary rhetorical effect: the most powerful king of the most powerful empire in the world is the direct witness to his own humiliation and restoration, and his final testimony is the strongest affirmation of God's sovereignty in the book's court-tale section. The dream is of a great tree reaching to heaven and visible to the end of the whole earth, under which every beast and bird finds shelter, and from whose branches the food of all flesh comes — a classic symbol of a great empire in ancient Near Eastern iconography (compare Ezekiel 31's cedar of Lebanon). A holy watcher descends and commands the tree to be cut down, its stump left with a band of iron and bronze in the tender grass, the man (for the tree is also a man) given the mind of an animal for seven periods of time, that all who live may know that the Most High rules in the kingdom of men.

Daniel's interpretation is direct: the great tree is the king himself, and unless he breaks off his sins by practising righteousness and his iniquities by showing mercy to the poor, the dream will be fulfilled. A year later — the deferral is itself a significant theological note, as if God is giving the king time to repent — the word falls while Nebuchadnezzar is on the roof of his palace, boasting. The madness comes immediately. The account of the madness is brief and clinical: he is driven from men, eats grass like an ox, is wet with the dew of heaven, his hair grows like eagles' feathers and his nails like birds' claws. The parallel in the Dead Sea Scrolls Prayer of Nabonidus recounts a similar affliction visited on the last Babylonian king, Nabonidus, who was healed by a Jewish exile. The parallel suggests that the Daniel tradition drew on a circulating story about a mad Babylonian king, possibly originally about Nabonidus, and transferred it to the more famous Nebuchadnezzar. At the end of the seven seasons Nebuchadnezzar lifts his eyes to heaven, his reason returns, and he praises the Most High in terms that are among the most exalted theological statements in the book.