Hananiah, Mishael, Azariah, and Daniel

Emily: Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson here with Greg Uttinger and Rachel Voytek, and our next ancient empire of note is Babylon, which is a very cool empire just for being cool and also for being extremely important to the biblical narrative.

Maybe we should start with the origins of Babylon. We kind of touched on this last week with Assyria, but let’s do a quick refresher on the origins of the Babylonian empire.

Greg: Something I don’t think the average Bible reader gets, because I know I didn’t for a long time, was that the word Babylon is simply the Greek form of the word Babel. They’re not two different places or things. It’s the same thing, spoken of by two different people, so to talk about the origins of Babylon is to talk about the tower of Babel.

In the wake of the flood, people decided that they did not like the promises and the commands that God had given them through Noah. They were fearful and decided that they would build a community, a city, and at its heart a tower whose top was into heaven – that is, a temple, a religious device that would allow them to bring themselves into the very presence and essence of divinity. God was unimpressed and God scattered the builders, altered their languages, and we know the story.

In the wake of that, Nimrod, who the non-biblical histories tell us was intimately involved there, apparently stayed and collected whoever he could and made it the beginning of his empire. Then he went out and collected and built other cities. We saw that one of them was Nineveh. So this is the beginning of this thing.

It was God who called it Babel, which the Bible says means “confusion.” The Greeks and other pagans said, “Babel, the gate of the gods.”

Emily: That sounds so much more appealing.

Greg: Yes, doesn’t it? A lot more. So this was the first seemingly democratic attempt at world government. As you read the text it’s all about, “Let us do this and let us do that and let us all do this.”

Emily: Although if it was so democratic, it’s amazing that Nimrod got to be the guy after it was all over.

Greg: Exactly. Just because a movement has a front, a façade of popular government, it means nothing. Anybody who understands politics is sure to know that the first step toward tyranny is someone playing the role of a demigod and saying, “We’re all in this together. This is all us. This is the people. Power to the people!” and slogans like that that echo through the last couple hundred years of history.

Emily: “Power to the people. It’s me. I’m the people.”

Greg: Yes, so this stands at the beginning of the second age of mankind, this new beginning after the flood. The idea there is that man can, by his own efforts, technology, magic, philosophies, religions – something can bridge the gap between humanity and divinity, if there is a gap. Maybe it’s just that we don’t perceive the reality.

It’s a rejection of the biblical doctrine of the discontinuity of being or the Creator/creature distinction, the belief that man and God are ultimately of the same essence and we just need to cultivate that. And oddly enough, cultivating it for the masses generally means, as you say, one person gets to be the unity and pull everything together.

That’s the origins, and from here we can trace the history of Babylon in and out, up and down for a long time, and we generally don’t. Not even secular historians do because it’s not terribly interesting. There’s a Babylonian king, and we think of the name Hammurabi and his code of laws. He’s often thought of as the first law-giver, but a reconstruction of chronology along biblical lines would put Hammurabi actually in the days of Joshua or later. So no, the Bible didn’t get its law code from the Babylonians. The Babylonians stole it like they stole so many other things from other people – in this case, from God’s people.

It just kind of percolates there in the background. Assyria becomes more important. Babylon is a little city within the Assyrian empire. It has a king named Merodach-Baladan who keeps revolting and keeps getting smushed, slapped down, knocked out of the park by the Assyrians, and finally the Assyrians actually destroyed Babylon. It would be about the time of Hezekiah, a little bit after.

Then they foolishly rebuilt it in the days of Esarhaddon, king of Assyria, and it becomes a real threat, so at the time the Assyrian empire is winding down we begin to see Babylon cutting deals with other peoples. We run into some names, and if you know history at all and you’ve read your Bible a lot you might recognize some of these, like Nabopolassar. All the Babylonian kings were named after their gods, so you can figure out who’s who and what’s what.

Nabopolassar was a great Babylonian general and he cut deals with the Medes and the Scythians and other peoples, and they all decided to get together and attack Nineveh all at once. Assyria was in such a state of moral decay that it crumpled and collapsed. The royal family and army fled to a city on the Euphrates called Carchemish, which we run into in the books of Kings and Chronicles, and Assyria makes its last stand there.

This is where the biblical story of Pharoah Necho dashing up through Palestine to lend aid and the king of Assyria comes in, and where Josiah dies at Megiddo trying to interfere when he shouldn’t have. And the king of Egypt, Pharoah Necho, having got there and having lost, turns back around and runs like a bunny all the way back to Egypt and we get this interesting game of freeze tag. As Necho was coming back, he stops briefly at every major city and says, “You’re mine. You’re mine. You’re mine. You’re mine,” and keeps on running.

In his wake is Nabopolassar’s son, a young man named Nebuchadnezzar (Nebuchadnezzar II actually). He is a great general, but in the end he values himself not so much as a military leader and conqueror but as an architect and builder. We’ll come back to that later.

He’s chasing Pharoah Necho all the way back through Palestine, and unfreezing anybody’s he’s frozen and taking them for Babylonian territory, which is why when you’re going through the last chapters of 2 Kings we get these really quick-changing kings.

The king of Egypt gets rid of the former king and makes his own guy king. He leaves. Nebuchadnezzar comes along and gets rid of that king and puts his own guy on the throne, until his own guy turns on him and then he puts someone else on the throne. Nebuchadnezzar pursues on into Egypt, when he hears that his father Nabopolassar has died.

It is the way of empires that when your emperor dies it’s a free-for-all, because strangely enough an empire is based on conquest. No one respects constitutional succession of office, funny that. So he knew, and it’s a pattern we’ll see repeated in the Persian empire, that he had to get back home real fast.

So he dashed back home, secured his position, shook hands with all the gods and made it clear that he’s in charge, and meanwhile had to deal with Jerusalem that was not being nice. I’ll leave the story there for those of you who want to read it in 2 Kings 24-25 and so on.

Nebuchadnezzar defeats Pharaoh Necho at Carchemish and thus gained a free hand to subdue all of Palestine. Twice Jerusalem rebelled against him. Twice he came against it and carried captive many of its inhabitants and much of their wealth.

We often speak of the captivity, and if we don’t know the Bible very well we get the idea, “Well, Nebuchadnezzar just came, destroyed the city, and took everyone away.” That’s not at all what happened. He subdued the city, made it tributary to him, put his guy on the throne (his guy being one of Josiah’s heirs), and then went about his own stuff.

His first guy, Jehoiakim, was not really getting the picture, so he gets taken back and is there for Nebuchadnezzar’s coronation, and somewhere in there Nebuchadnezzar grabs the best and the brightest and brings them to Babylon. I think we’ve kind of implicitly agreed that we want to talk about Daniel a good deal tonight, because this is where the Bible spends most of its time as far as Babylon is concerned – in Babylon with God’s prophets.

Now, Jeremiah had been prophesying when Jerusalem fell, and the tail end both of Kings and of Jeremiah tell us what happened with him. That’s more the end of the history of Israel because he doesn’t go to Babylon. Ezekiel does, so his story is related to Daniel’s. He’s prophesying about the same time Daniel is, but he’s out amongst the common people, amongst God’s people. He doesn’t see the palace or the throne. For him it’s about a people in captivity, not about the empire that captured them.

So we run into these young folks like Daniel….and you turn and ask everybody in the room, “And what were the names of his friends?” and in most cases you’re going to hear…

Emily: Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego. Or “Rack, Shack, and Benny” if you were brought up on Veggie Tales like I was.

Greg: We’re recovering from that one.

Emily: Although, let me put in a good word for Veggie Tales on the fiery furnace. A lot of the Veggie Tales versions are very trivializing and don’t show the weightiness of sin. They sort of substitute sin with something else, but in Rack, Shack, and Benny the crime for which the vegetables are thrown into the fiery furnace is actually not bowing to a giant chocolate bunny, which is about as ridiculous as idolatry is, and it’s actually idolatry, so there you go.

Greg: There are a lot of us who would prefer chocolate to gold, and bunny over golden calf or an obscure statute or obelisk or whatever the thing was, so it’s a good point. It does not matter what you bow to if the thing isn’t the God of the Bible. It is still idolatry and still sin.

Nebuchadnezzar is operating in terms of idolatry, but the idolatry is that of ancient Babel. The power, the hope, the virtue of the state, of humanity ultimately is vested in the priest-king, himself. To betray the king, to war against him, to resist him is not merely to resist a would-be conqueror. It’s to resist the future, the hope of mankind, the new world order, our destiny, so he’s not pleased with this.

We’re going to see that when he gets word from Daniel about his first dream, he is only confirmed in that. “Oh, God says I’m the head of gold. Well, things get worse after me, but right now for the moment I’m God’s man. How good can this be? Let’s build a statue and worship it.”

But first Daniel and his friends. Their names were not originally Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. They were Mishael, Hananiah, and Azariah, names that reflected the God of the Bible, Jehovah. Why’d they get their names changed?

Remember that Assyria was very violent in its approach to creating this new world order. They tried to eliminate all differences and fuse everything into some kind of stew pot of “We’re all Assyrians and that’s the only claim to unity we have.”

The Babylonians were more subtle and careful, and perhaps more politic in what they did. Their idea was, “We’re going to conquer these nations, but then we’re going to take the best and brightest of their young men and we’re going to bring them to Babylon and we’re going to give them a free education at Babylon University. We’re going to look after them and give them the best clothes, the best food, the best lifestyle, the best women, high connections.

“We’re not going to violate their consciences or force them to do anything. I mean you can have all this stuff or you can sit there and have bread and water, for all we care. But if you pass your classes, if you get with the program, if you’re willing to come on-board and sign the contract, one day you’re going to be a great ruler within Babylon, and you may even go back to your own people and be our agents there. How cool is that? You’ll be there working for us but taking care of your people so you can make sure that they get a fair shake and that they’re always heard. Isn’t that great? Isn’t this a wonderful deal? Just let us educate you for a few years.”

Rachel: We see this so many times in history, that it’s actually a culture obsessed with luxury and not domineering power that often falls apart because they’re too distracted by all their perks and their nice things. It makes it a lot easier to get them to accept you if it seems like they’re giving you nice things, even if they’re taking away what you had before. But then with many cultures, as that becomes the obsession of the culture, it destroys the culture.

I’m thinking also of Aldous Huxley’s warning in Brave New World, that when we become obsessed and are focused on all the nice things, we miss the reality of what’s really going on because it’s easier to get people when it’s all sugar-coated like that, rather than the domineering that says, “You will not do this.”

Greg: There’s a movie called Skulls that plays out this story in the context, a fictionalized version of an old Yale secret society fraternity. A young man is picked up by this secret society, and he doesn’t really fit in with the crowd but they offer him everything. They see some use that they have for him and they do what I’ve just described. They give him the best car, a letter that will get him into any Ph.D. program or law school or whatever he was after. It was just one thing after another.

This society is made up of former graduates who are all very wealthy because the society made sure they’re wealthy, so it becomes very much this thing and we see played out this kind of decision. “You can have it all. Just remember you owe us,” and the young man has to decide what to do with that and how that’s going to affect his life and his romance with his girlfriend and a whole bunch of other things.

The movie is not far removed from reality. This is not only a tool that’s been used in the distant past, it’s still the kind of thing that fraternities and secret societies and such do use to snag people. It’s not too far from some of the descriptions the Illuminati used back in the 1700-1800s or however long they may have existed, depending on who you believe. It’s a way to pull people in, get them connected, get them involved, until they’re so far in they can’t see a way out.

Then you justify it. “But you’re helping people. You’ll help your people, your family, your ethnic group, your nation. Yes, omelets and eggs and all that, but in the long run you will do a lot more good, and certainly you’ll do a lot more good for yourself because the alternatives stink.”

This was the program that Daniel and his friends were up against. Some of it they accepted. There’s no record that they objected to using the new names that were forced upon them, that they insisted on dressing like Hebrews or any such thing. Obviously at some point they learned Chaldean, the language of Babylon. There was simply one point where they drew a line and said, “Here’s the line,” and it was not an obvious line. It was not a clear line. It was not a scripturally explicit line. It had to do with food.

A lot of Bible commentaries have said, “It apparently had to do with Jewish food laws,” and yet the king of Babylon had cows, deer, goats, chickens and all kinds of things, so it’s not an issue of clean or unclean. Veggies are not unclean. Fruit is not unclean, but what was offered to idols. Paul tells us that that in itself does not matter, as long as you don’t involve yourself in the idol worship, and these young men obviously didn’t.

Emily: And that was not given as a restriction in the Old Testament, because it was contextually not super relevant at that point.

Greg: The only thing the text actually says is that it was the king’s food. They did not want to eat the king’s food. In our culture that seems just kind of bizarre. Why not? What’s the big deal? There was a movie called Tea with Mussolini, so think of it in those terms. How about dinner with the anti-Christ? Christians I think would say, “No, I wouldn’t do that.” Why not? The Bible doesn’t say you can’t. Besides, you could tell him about Jesus. “Oo, oo, no!” Yeah, no kidding.

So they ask if they can refuse. They go through channels. They don’t throw a food strike. They don’t have a hissy fit, but they go to the guy over them and ask, “Can we do this?” and he’s reluctant. “You’re asking to eat a bunch of ground-up seeds and have water, when we have all this wonderful food. That’s not healthy.”

If the issue had been something else they could have said, “Could you give us some food that didn’t go before Baal and Marduk, before your idols?” That would have been a different conversation and it might have flown or it might not have, but they don’t even do that. They just say, “We don’t want any food that comes from the king.” The meal is communion and the king is a religious figure, so they say, “Give us this.” He cuts them a deal and at the end of the set time they are healthier, fatter, and fleshier than all the other people.

You can think of how the other young Jewish men would have reacted to all of this. “Daniel, what are you doing? First of all, you missed a great meal. There were 12 kinds of steak, and the wines were incredible. You’ve never tasted anything like it. Besides, how are you ever going to have any influence here if you keep playing the monk over in some corner? This ascetism is unworthy of someone with a biblical view of dominion and conquest. You’ve got to get in the game or you’re going to be left behind. The Bible doesn’t even talk about this. You’re being really legalistic here, Daniel. Come on, let’s get with the program. Let’s make a difference for Yahweh.”

The interesting thing is that all those young men – we don’t know a thing about them. Their names have perished and whatever influence they had is forgotten. Daniel and his friends stood before kings and made a difference culturally and spiritually, and Daniel got to write a major book of the Bible and foretell in some detail the coming of Messiah. So what Daniel did was right and God blessed it, but that doesn’t mean it was necessarily fun or that it was at all easy. That’s how things stood.

When he and his friends stood before the king we’re told the king found their wisdom 10 times better than that of all the wise men of Babylon. It was not hard to see they believed in a cause-and-effect universe in which God’s providence kept things moving in an orderly fashion, as opposed to the chaotic magic of the Babylonian system. The Babylonians could do something like, “The reason, your majesty, that there is no rain is that the gray pig of heaven has eaten half of the moon and has spit it out, and it has fallen and disturbed the cycle of the water goddess.”

Daniel’s friends were saying, “Umm, there hasn’t been any rain in the mountains. Why don’t we start building a system of reservoirs and canals to preserve the water and channel it.”

“Them, we’re going with what they say. What are you saying – pig? What are you talking about?”

Emily: Also the moon gets eaten every single month, so why in this month is there no rain?

Rachel: One other possibility that we can see in looking at the other young men of Babylon is there could be the opposite attitude, not “we’re going to make a difference for Yahweh” but “Yahweh has abandoned us. We’re here because we’re being judged, and there’s nothing left for us but to become Babylonians. God sent us here, that’s who are now, forget about our past, we’re never going home. Why are you even trying to hold onto these things?”

I think one of the points we make is the whole thing with them eating the pulse and being healthy is not because that’s actually a fabulous diet, but because God does a miracle to confirm that he is still with them, and therefore it gives Daniel and his friends the confidence to use those biblically-based wisdom and arguments and things, because they know that God is still the God here.

We can link that into some of Ezekiel’s prophecies where he actually sees the presence of the Lord leaving Jerusalem but it’s coming east to Babylon. I could see it going both ways of people being like, “Oh yeah, we’re going to do something here,” or “There’s nothing left for us. We might as well get some good food out of it and just get a good job or something.”

Greg: Within that I can see two possibilities as well. One is, “God has judged us and we’re just going to sit here and sulk about it and do the best we can with what we’ve got.” The other is, “Obviously the gods of Babylon are superior to who we thought Yahweh was. Apparently Yahweh is just a phantom, a myth, or he would have spared Jerusalem. He can’t save his own house. He couldn’t protect us. He doesn’t exist, so let’s eat, drink, and be merry and grab what we can. Go for the gusto. You only go around once in life,” something along those lines. There were probably some other justifications, because people play all kinds of mind games when they don’t want to obey God.

Daniel and his friends stood by faith because it was not obvious. About the only thing that was obvious in this is that Isaiah many decades before had said this was going to happen, so there’s that.

”Well, God said this was going to happen and it’s happened, so maybe that means God is in control and that his word is accurate and that we’re getting what we deserve, but that God has a plan that stretches through Babylon and back again. If we’re willing to trust him, we can be part of it.”

In the line of the death and resurrection of Jesus and his reign from heaven, it is sometimes a lot easier for us to at least theologically see where we’re standing. Jesus has come. He’s already won. He rose from the dead. He beat death, he beat sin, he’s on the throne. For them it was harder. He hadn’t come. It had been a long, long time. “Where is the God of Elijah? The God of Moses? Where are the promises? Where are the prophets? The vision fails.”

It would have been a hard time, and these young men were probably around 20 because that was about the age of majority in most cultures in that time, as 21 is for us, so they were still very young when they were promoted in the affairs of Babylon.

When we come to chapter 2 of Daniel, this chapter is important for lots of reasons. One is that it outlines the future of the world to the coming of Christ. Nebuchadnezzar has a dream. He knows it’s weird and special, calls the wise men of Babylon and says, “I need you to interpret my dream.” They say, “That’s what we do. Tell us the dream.” He says, “No, I don’t remember it. The thing is gone from me. I know, you tell me the dream and the interpretation and then I’ll know that you really know what you’re talking about.”

“It doesn’t work that way, boss.”

Emily: I love this move from Nebuchadnezzar. It’s such a power move.

Rachel: I found out something interesting from my husband David. I guess there were a lot of myths at that time about the kind of devolution progression of empires in that sense of going from greater to lesser. Some theories are if he had told it they would have just given him the standard canned answer, and he knew that it meant something more. So he figured, “If I tell it to you, you’re just going to tell me what I can already guess. You have to tell me both of them so I can really know what’s going on,” because some of those stories were common in some of their myths at the time.

Emily: Even today people are still into dream interpretation and it’s still a pile of canned answers.

Rachel: Or you just go for the, “Oh, this must be the…that’s what it always is, so we’ll go for the standard.” He’s going, “No, this is not normal. Something is going on. I need a real interpretation.”

Greg: So he insists that they tell him and they say, “We don’t do that. This is how it works. You tell us the dream, we tell you the answer.”

“No, no. You’re all a bunch of liars. You’ve got a canned answer so why do I need you? Why are you on the payroll? Why are you in my kingdom? I’m going to kill you all. We’ll just start over and cut out some of the cost here, eliminate some expenditures.” So word goes out that all of the wise men, all the king’s counselors and advisors are to be killed.

It comes to Daniel, who was not included in this conference. When he and his friends find out about this, Daniel goes to the king and says, “We were not consulted. Give us some time. Let us speak to our God and we will come up with an answer for you.” This was very bold of Daniel.

I’m glad you mentioned earlier that they had seen a miracle. God had done something incredible for them. They had not had a vision or a prophet or anything tell them, “Stop eating this food. Eat this food. That will be the thing that will make everything work.” They just did what they thought God wanted them to do and were faithful, and God had done a miracle.

Miracles at this point are becoming fewer and fewer. In fact, the last miracles of the Old Testament pretty much are those that are wrapped up in Daniel, the ones that we all know about – the fiery furnace and the lion’s den, and this food miracle.

Emily: Even many of the ones that we know from Elijah and Elisha are very small scale. It’s not like public news.

Greg: The last big one I suppose was wiping out the Assyrian army and moving the sun. Those were kind of big, but Daniel’s not got that. But now here he is, a captive in a strange land, and the king has a dream and here he is with some experience in this and with the favor of God already tipped in his direction. He knows the Bible. This has got to sound really familiar.

Emily: Could it be Joseph?

Greg: “Yeah, Joseph did something like this. Is that what God’s after? I can’t presume but I see a door with the word ‘opportunity’ written over it.”

Emily: “They misspelled my name tag. It says Joseph for some reason. I don’t know what that’s about.”

Greg: So they pray and God reveals the dream and Daniel goes back in and says, “All right, king, here’s the dream.” I won’t read the text. It’s repeated twice. What Nebuchadnezzar saw in his vision and dream was a humanoid statue, large, made of four different metals – a head of gold, chest and arms of silver, belly and thighs of brass, and legs of iron. Toward the feet they’re ceramic tacked on with mirey clay.

Intimidating, impressive, scary even, not clear what’s going on here. But then as Nebuchadnezzar watches he sees a stone cut out of a mountainside, cut out without hands. This would mean something to Daniel because stones that had not been touched by human hands could be used as altar stones. That stone comes and smashes the image on its feet and grinds it to powder. The wind carries what’s left away, and then the stone grows and becomes a mountain that fills the whole earth.

Nebuchadnezzar no doubt is impressed. “That was it! That’s the dream. How did you…oh, the spirit of the gods is in you,” so he’s listening. Daniel says, in so many words, “This is the future of the world. You’re the head of gold. This is Babylon and specifically it’s you. But after you there will come another kingdom inferior to your kingdom. And after that a kingdom still more inferior. And after that yet another, a kingdom of iron.”

Iron is not a valuable metal. Nobody trades just to get iron unless you want to make swords and tools and things that smash other things.

“In the days of these kingdoms, the God of heaven will set up a kingdom which shall never be destroyed. It will fill the world and replace all the kingdoms of this world.”

Nebuchadnezzar recognizes, “This is indeed the dream. This must be the interpretation,” but he’s interpreting it out of his pagan worldview. “I’m the head of gold. Well, I always knew that. Now God has confirmed it. Things apparently are going to decline after this.” You can think of Hesiod’s Works and Days as the world culture declines from gold to silver to brass to iron.

Nebuchadnezzar is hyper about this and promotes Daniel and his friends, but he doesn’t get it and the next chapter proves that. But for long-range purposes we are told in so many words that there are four kingdoms/empires that remain until the coming of the kingdom of heaven, the kingdom that the God of heaven will set up. The kingdom of the God of heaven could be called the kingdom of God or the kingdom of heaven, and the New Testament calls it both.

Babylon is identified. We’re not told the names of the others at this point, but as we go further into Daniel’s prophecy the next two kingdoms are named. In fact, Daniel lives to see the next kingdom, Medo-Persia. After that it’s told in a couple prophecies that a great king is going to arise out of Greece and come and subdue the Persian empire.

Then there’s another kingdom after that that remains unnamed. It’s different from all other kingdoms. It’s obviously brutal. It stomps on things. It’s very powerful. It’s not glorious and glamorous but it’s stronger than the other nations. And in the days of that kingdom the Messiah will appear. The kingdom the God of heaven will set up will come and it will replace it and fill the earth. There’s an idea here of gradual growth, not of suddenly, “Oh, here it is,” and everything changes. On the other hand, it does replace those kingdoms. It does have political and cultural ramifications, but by its nature it is a different sort of kingdom.

The other kingdoms are human kingdoms. They come together in the shape of a man. They’re all extensions each after the other of the same humanity which God will use for a time, and then in turn discipline, destroy, and remove in favor of the next kingdom because his goal is to preserve his people and his promise and his worship for the coming of Messiah.

As long as these kingdoms faithfully perform the job of cherub guardians, God works with them. When they turn on his people, God gets rid of them. Babylon is the first

When we say head of gold we think, “Wow, they must have been the greatest kingdom ever.” People are often surprised when they actually turn to a map in the back of their Bibles and see the extent of Babylon. It’s smaller than Medo-Persia, which was smaller than Greece, which was a lot smaller than the Roman empire.

You have to stop and think, “Wait, why gold?” God doesn’t value what we value, does he? We’re going to follow the history of this king Nebuchadnezzar. We’re going to see his conversion and we’re going to see that he gets to write scripture. This is a Gentile writing scripture in the Old Testament. We won’t get much of that again until Dr. Luke writes his gospel.

This is an incredible privilege and this man becomes, as it were, a type of Messiah in caring for God’s people, protecting them, even though all they can see is, “He’s the one who destroyed our city and our temple,” because that eventually does happen. They keep rebelling against him and finally that ends that, but it ended when Daniel was his right-hand man, so Daniel would not have been very popular.

Emily: He’s a sell-out.

Greg: Yeah, he’s a sell-out. He’s a Benedict Arnold. He’s a quisling or pick your favorite historical figure. But what he would have been doing is telling Nebuchadnezzar, “Here’s what God says has to happen. The temple has to go, but you need to care for God’s people, and there’s this one guy you’re going to find in Jerusalem. His name is Jeremiah. Make sure your guys take care of him, please. Jeremiah – you got that?”

“All right, Jeremiah, we’ll look for him.”

“Take really good care of him.”

“Oh yeah, we’ll make sure he’s okay.”

Emily: And I don’t want to read too much into this, but I do love that Babylon is remembered as the head of gold, the best that human empire has to offer, and we remember it for its gardens. I just think that’s beautiful.

Rachel: Those are very fun to look up. They keep trying to guess because they don’t actually have any remnants of them.

Greg: I’ve heard all kinds of variations on the theme of late. The ancient historians say that Nebuchadnezzar had married a Median wife who was from the hill country, and in this big metropolis she missed her homeland with its gardens, trees, and waters and such, so he set out to build that for her, thus the hanging gardens of Babylon which became one of the great wonders of the world.

Emily: How sweet. “My wife misses her homeland. Let’s build her a garden.”

Greg: Yes. Girls, marry some guy like that.

At the same time he also refurbished whatever was left of the tower of Babel. There probably wasn’t a whole lot left at this point. It’s been a long, long, long time, but he began to raise another ziggurat which archeologists would find at the end of the 19th or beginning of the 20th century.

He records that Babylon, the city he created, that’s what it was all about. That’s what was important to him. Yes, he conquered a good part of the world that he knew, and yet he was most proud and pleased with this incredible city he had built.

Here’s a quote from Herodotus: “Babylon lies in a wide plain, a vast city in the form of a square with sides nearly 14 miles long and a circuit of some 56 miles. In addition to its enormous size, it surpasses in splendor any city of the known world. It’s surrounded by a broad deep moat full of water, and within the moat there is a wall 50 cubits wide and 200 high.” The royal cubit is 3” longer than the ordinary one.

“On top of the wall they constructed along each edge a row of one-room buildings facing inward, with enough space for a 4-horse chariot to pass. There are hundreds of gates in the circuit of the wall, all of bronze with bronze uprights and lintels.”

Here is Josephus quoting from a Chaldean historian: “Then he adorned the temple of Belus, and the rest of the temples, in a magnificent manner with the spoils he had taken in the war. He also added another city to that which was there of old and rebuilt it that such as would besiege it hereafter might no more turn the course of the river, and thereby attack the city itself.

“He therefore built three walls round about the inner city and three others about that which was the outer, and this he did with burnt brick. And after he had, after a becoming manner, walled the city and adorned its gates gloriously, he built another palace before his father’s palace but so that they joined to it. To describe whose vast height and immense riches it would perhaps be too much for me to attempt. Yet as large and lofty as they were, they were completed in fifteen days.” That’s probably an exaggeration.

Emily: I don’t know. If you can’t get it done in two weeks, what are you doing, man?

Greg: “He also erected elevated places for walking, of stone, and made it resemble mountains; and built it so that it might be planted with all sorts of trees. He also erected what was called a pensile paradise because his wife was desirous to have things like her own country, she having been bred up in the palaces of Media.”

Now, before we return to this there is the history of the three young friends who refused to bow. Nebuchadnezzar gets obsessed with this idea, “I’m the head of gold,” and he raises a gold image and wants everyone to bow. Meshach, Shadrach and Abednego (Mishael, Azariah, and Hananiah) refused to bow.

Of course, they have political enemies by now because these young Jews are growing in power and esteem. The enemies point them out and Nebuchadnezzar gives them a second chance, but they refuse, get thrown in the fiery furnace, and Jesus rescues them. Nebuchadnezzar calls them out and he’s getting more serious, but not serious enough yet. He realizes this God of theirs is a force to be reckoned with. “Okay, I thought I was doing what he wanted. I wasn’t apparently, and I guess that’s okay. He can do what he wants. I’ll try to get it right next time.”

He has another dream. This is a dream of a great tree, a tree of life, a world axis that gets chopped down, and again he realizes, “There’s something really big going on here.” He calls the wise men again, but not Daniel, probably because he’s got a sneaking suspicion what this one means. This time the wise men don’t even try to bluff. “We don’t know what this is, boss. We ain’t got a clue on this one.”

Daniel comes in and says, “Okay, the tree would be you being chopped down. You’re about to lose your position, power, and even your reason. You’re going to have the heart of a beast until God is done with you, so that you can learn the Most High rules in the kingdoms of men and gives them to whomsoever he will. My advice to you is humble yourself and conform your political office to the standards of God’s word.”

This is huge. Here is a Hebrew prophet telling a pagan king that not only your private duties but your public political and judicial duties need to be conformed to the law of God. Nebuchadnezzar doesn’t go very far with that apparently, because one day he walks out on his balcony and says, “Is not this great Babylon that I have built for the glory of my house and all that.”

God says, “That’s it. We’re done here,” and Nebuchadnezzar loses his reason. He takes on the mind of a cow. Boanthropy it’s called. It’s kind of like lycanthropy.

Emily: He was a were-cow.

Greg: At some point God grants him regeneration. He lifts his eyes to heaven, and I would like to read what he says –

And at the end of the days, I Nebuchadnezzar lifted up mine eyes unto heaven, and mine understanding returned unto me and I blessed the most High, and I praised and honoured him that liveth forever, whose dominion is an everlasting dominion, and his kingdom is from generation to generation. And all the inhabitants of the earth are reputed as nothing. He doeth according to his will in the army of heaven and among the inhabitants of the earth, and none can stay his hand or say unto him, What doest thou?

His reason returns and now in a public proclamation to the entire kingdom, which was a pluralistic culture that worshiped all sorts of gods, he writes this –

Now I Nebuchadnezzar praise and extol and honour the King of heaven, all whose works are truth, and his ways judgment. And those that walk in pride he is able to abase.

Imagine an American president making a formal edict along those lines. We haven’t in the 200-odd years of our existence.

So Nebuchadnezzar raises the kingdom to the heights of its power. He’s a masterful architect, author of scripture, a godly man we can hope to see in heaven one day, a friend to Daniel, but he dies and the kingdom passes through a succession of weak hands upon his death until it comes to his son-in-law, a man named Nabonidus. Nabonidus has a quarrel with the local priesthood in Babylon and goes into the wilderness and builds a new commercial center and leaves his son, Belshazzar, in charge of Babylon.

That would be a good place to stop and to make the transition. We’ll probably need to spend at least one podcast talking about the fall of Babylon and the coming of Cyrus, Cyrus’s own background, and Daniel in the lion’s den.

Emily: That will be next week. Sounds good. Let’s have some recommendations, shall we?

Rachel: I have something different that is very much not politically correct anymore in our time period, but it was five years ago.

Greg: Wow, there’s a commentary right there.

Emily: Times change very quickly these days.

Rachel: It’s true. I would say one of my favorite modern novels is called The Help. When it first came out it was wildly popular and sold millions of copies, but because of the whole woke critical race theory thing it was cancelled because a white lady helps two black ladies to basically rise above their position in Jackson in the 1960s.

I enjoy it because I absolutely love the characters. I like the two black ladies more than the white lady. They represent two very different approaches to service and the civil rights movement. I thought of it partly because I’ve been reading it again recently, but also because it’s another example where they don’t try to fight the oppression that comes to them by taking up arms and harming people. Instead they write a book and tell their stories. It actually changes a lot of people just by giving those alternative narratives, and yet they’re also considered revolutionary because they shouldn’t ever tell about what their white ladies do.

I find the characters very endearing and I think it’s well-written also, if you want to read something that used to be considered one of the popular books. It’s actually most fun listening to it as an audio book because you get different narrators for the three ladies who each narrate different parts. Kathryn Stockett is the author.

Emily: I will also recommend a re-read. I’m re-reading The Lord of the Rings. Something that’s striking me this time, as we start out with Mr. Frodo in Hobbiton and his hobbit friends Pippin and Fatty Bolder and Sam, and Merry, of course – what strikes me about hobbit culture is J.R.R. Tolkien sat down and wrote these poems like, “I want to write a song about taking a bath. I want to write a poem about walking and trees and walking out to get the mail. There should be songs about that.”

I think that’s one of the most beautiful things about the entire narrative of The Lord of the Rings. Nobody wants to live through the war of the rings. The ideal that’s held up, the whole reason that the war is worth fighting, the whole reason it’s worth enduring the struggles and the suffering is so that people can go and get the mail and write songs about it and live in a world where people sing.

Greg: There’s a line, and I don’t remember which book it’s in or where exactly it occurs in the narrative. It may be Aragorn describing the owner of the Prancing Pony, Butterbur. “If only he knew those rangers he disdains, if he only knew that they’re there living the life they do so that the people in the Shire can have their tea and go get the mail and sing their songs, and they’re willing to sacrifice their comfort, their happiness, even their lives, just so these people can enjoy the blessings of freedom.”

Emily: It’s a very Nebuchadnezzar thing too, right? “Hey, we should have a city where there are gardens. That would be nice.”

Greg: I don’t have anything profound, but as you know we all know a number of young ladies right now who are with child. Whenever that happens in our house, a discussion comes up of, “What books are we going to get the new mama?” because that is obviously the most important gift you can give a young child or give his mother or father – books. But they have to be chosen carefully.

There are a lot of books that our family has enjoyed and that we read to our kids. The first thing I ever bought for my daughter before she was born was a copy of Make Way for Ducklings, which is a lovely story, but that’s not what I’m going to recommend. That’s actually a little classier than what I’m going to recommend. I’m going to recommend Sandra Boynton’s But Not the Hippopotamus.

Emily: Oh yay!

Greg: It’s a little board book and it’s a little silly and the cartoons are sweet and such. It takes you a while if you’re not looking carefully to realize that all of these animals are on Noah’s ark. We’re never told that. You just have to watch the background and figure out what’s going on.

Emily: You may be thinking of The Going To Bed Book. Sorry, I’m a Sandra Boynton aficionado now. That’s on Noah’s ark. The hippopotamus also?

Greg: I’m pretty sure. We’ll have to look and see. Anyway, The Going to Bed Book is also wonderful. So there we go. That wraps it up for this week.

Emily: I can’t let that go by without saying that Sandra Boynton is an unmitigated comedic genius and you should also look her up on Spotify.

We’ll see you next week with further discussions of heavy theological and historical topics like Babylon and the destruction of Belshazzar and all that.

Thank you so much for this conversation, both of you. It’s been a delight as always. A big thanks also to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband. Thanks to our transcriptionist. If you’d like to receive the transcripts of the show in your email inbox you can head over to our Substack and sign up there. If you would like to send us an email, you can do that at haltingtowardzion@gmail.com.

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Thanks so much for listening. Tell a friend about us if you think they would enjoy this stuff. We do. Hope you do too. Join us next time.

SHOW NOTES

Scripture: 2 Kings 24-25, Daniel

Recommendations:

Greg: But Not the Hippopotamus and The Going to Bed Book – Sandra Boynton

Emily: The Lord of the Rings – worth a re-read

Rachel: The Help by Kathryn Stockett, especially the audiobook