O king Nebuchadnezzar, to thee it is spoken; The kingdom is departed from thee. And they shall drive thee from men, and thy dwelling shall be with the beasts of the field; they shall make thee to eat grass as oxen …
Within an hour, he was out in the wilderness, eating grass, his body ‘wet with the dew of heaven, till his hairs were grown like eagles’ feathers, and his nails like birds’ claws’ (4, 33).
‘Belshazzar made a great feast to a thousand of his lords, and drank wine before the thousand’.
DANIEL 5, 1
A grotesque end to Nebuchadnezzar’s ambition, then, but Babylonian power was not yet finished. History has Babylon being gradually overshadowed by the power of Persia rising to the east. But the Bible, typically, offers us a tale of overweening pride and catastrophic fall in the (perhaps not wholly mythical) figure of King Belshazzar.
A Feast and a Fright
Belshazzar, we’re told (5, 1):
made a great feast to a thousand of his lords, and drank wine before the thousand. Belshazzar, whiles he tasted the wine, commanded to bring the golden and silver vessels which his father Nebuchadnezzar had taken out of the temple which was in Jerusalem; that the king, and his princes, his wives, and his concubines, might drink therein.
The writing is – terrifyingly – on the wall for King Belshazzar and for Babylon. The use of the sacred utensils of the Jews for feasting has sealed his empire’s fate after a reign of overweening arrogance and oppression.
The sacrilege was compounded by the company’s using these vessels for the toasting of their pagan gods – their figures ‘of gold, and of silver, of brass, of iron, of wood, and of stone’ (5, 4).
‘In the same hour’, the story famously continues:
came forth fingers of a man’s hand, and wrote over against the candlestick upon the plaister of the wall of the king’s palace: and the king saw the part of the hand that wrote. Then the king’s countenance was changed, and his thoughts troubled him, so that the joints of his loins were loosed, and his knees smote one against another.
The message was written in mysterious characters: unable to read it, the king cried out for his astrologers and soothsayers, but they were no more able to decipher it than he had been. Then his queen recalled the presence in his kingdom of a man named Daniel, one of the Jewish exiles in Babylon.
Daniel deciphers the words which were written by the moving hand at Belshazzar’s Feast: the King, cast down, can only mourn his impending doom; the fact that he has been ‘weighed in the balances, and … found wanting’.
Belshazzar had Daniel summoned, offering him sumptuous rewards if he could read the message, but the prophet told him to keep them: he would interpret free of charge. The message was quite clear, he said: Belshazzar had known of Nebuchadnezzar’s fate – driven from the sons of men to live in beasthood. Far from heeding its warning, however, he had only outdone his predecessor’s pride. In this latest blasphemy, in drinking from God’s holy vessels to do honour to his idols, he had lifted himself up against the Lord of Heaven (5, 23).
‘This’, said Daniel, ‘is the writing that was written, MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN’ (5, 25). And this was ‘the interpretation of the thing’: God, he said, had set a limit on his kingship, ‘and finished it’. ‘Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting,’ he went on. Belshazzar’s realm was now divided, and was ‘given to the Medes and Persians’. That night, indeed, Belshazzar was killed, and ‘Darius the Median’ took his kingdom. The glories of Babylon had come to a bitter end.
A Persian Protector
The biblical account sits a little uneasily with that of secular history here. The Persians (a people whose rulers had early on formed familial alliances with their former overlords, the Medes) did indeed overwhelm Babylonia at about this time. And there was to be an Emperor Darius – although not until some time later. Darius the Mede has his only mention in the Book of Daniel: it was he who, famously, falling out with Daniel, whom he had made his official, had him thrown into the lion’s den.
Cyrus the Great, enthroned in Babylon, gives the order for the Jews to be set free and returned to their home where, with his help, they will be able to rebuild their ruined Temple.
IN THE LIONS’ DEN
DARIUS, THE BIBLE tells us, had come to love his leading official, Daniel, but became enraged when – after he had issued an imperial prohibition – Daniel insisted on continuing to say his Hebrew prayers. So furious was Darius that he allowed his advisers to persuade him to cast Daniel into a pit or dungeon in his palace that he kept furnished with a pride of lions.
That night the Emperor could not speak for his guilt at how he had treated an official he loved as a friend; first thing in the morning, then, he hastened to the lions’ den. There, crying out to Daniel ‘with a lamentable voice’ (Daniel 6, 20), he ‘spake and said to Daniel’:
O Daniel, servant of the living God, is thy God, whom thou servest continually, able to deliver thee from the lions? Then said Daniel unto the king, O king, live for ever. My God hath sent his angel, and hath shut the lions’ mouths, that they have not hurt me: forasmuch as before him innocency was found in me; and also before thee, O king, have I done no hurt.
Now it was the turn of those who had denounced Daniel to be thrown into the lions’ den on Darius’ orders – not just his advisers but ‘their children, and their wives’ (6, 24). They did not enjoy the Lord’s protection:
and the lions had the mastery of them and brake all their bones in pieces or ever they came at the bottom of the den.
As far as history is concerned, the conqueror of Babylon (in 539 BCE) was Cyrus II – Cyrus the Great. His Achaemenid dynasty, named after a semi-mythical seventh-century BCE ancestor, King Achaemenes, was to dominate the Middle East for a couple of centuries. (It was also, of course, to make its mark on the history of classical Greece.)
‘My God hath sent his angel, and hath shut the lions’ mouths, that they have not hurt me’.
DANIEL 6, 22
Cyrus, although a conqueror, was hardly an oppressor. Like other imperialists of his time, he was happy enough to administer his realms at arm’s length through a system of satraps, or client kings. As for his treatment of the Jews, whether out of altruism or political calculation he acted well enough to be afterwards acclaimed as a ‘Messiah’.
His Jewish subjects had no doubt at all that ‘the Lord stirred up the spirit of Cyrus’ (2 Chronicles 36, 22). ‘He made a proclamation throughout all his kingdom, and put it also in writing, saying’ (36, 23):
Thus saith Cyrus king of Persia, All the kingdoms of the earth hath the Lord God of heaven given me; and he hath charged me to build him an house in Jerusalem, which is in Judah.
Cyrus didn’t just bring an end to the Babylonian Captivity, in other words, allowing the exiles to return to their homeland: he rebuilt the Temple that Nebuchadnezzar had destroyed.
Thrown into the lions’ den by the angry Darius, the Prophet Daniel is left unscathed. The Angel of the Lord shuts the lions’ mouths. His ‘innocency’, the fact that he has ‘done no hurt’, is his protection.
Esther, Queen of Persia
Ahasuerus, better known in western history by the name the Greeks gave him, Xerxes, ruled over a vast proportion of the ancient world. He also, in his wife Vashti, had possession of one of its most exquisite prizes. Her breathtaking beauty added lustre to his reign. And so he liked to show her off: one day, says the Book of Esther (1, 11), he summoned her from a banquet she was giving for women visitors to the kingdom, so that his guests could see her beauty and envy him. Whether through vanity and disobedience or (as modern feminists have suggested) a feisty independence of spirit, Vashti ‘refused to come at the king’s commandment’ and the king was ‘wroth’, or angry. So much so that he put aside his wife and sent out his messengers across his empire to bring him ‘fair young virgins’ from whom he might choose a replacement.
Though summoned by her lord and husband, the King, the beautiful Vashti refu
ses to be shown off to the guests at his banquet. For this display of disobedience (or spirit!) she will be unceremoniously put aside.
A SONG OF SEX
SUPPOSEDLY THE WORK of Solomon, the Song of Songs is a loosely constructed dialogue between two lovers. A work of transporting passion and poetic beauty, there’s nothing ‘dark’ about it, but to more puritanical readers it’s often seemed oddly un-scriptural in its celebration of sexual love and longing.
‘A bundle of myrrh is my wellbeloved unto me,’ says the woman (Song of Songs 1, 13): ‘He shall lie all night betwixt my breasts.’ ‘By night on my bed I sought him whom my soul loveth: I sought him, but I found him not’ (3, 1). ‘O daughters of Jerusalem, if ye find my beloved, that ye tell him, that I am sick of love’ (5, 8).
Her man is every bit as lovestruck (4, 11):
Thy lips, O my spouse, drop as the honeycomb; honey and milk are under thy tongue; and the smell of thy garments is like the smell of Lebanon. A garden inclosed is my sister, my spouse; a spring shut up, a fountain sealed.
He comes to see her at her home and a veritable flurry of innuendo ensues (5, 4):
My beloved put in his hand by the hole of the door, and my bowels were moved for him. I rose up to open to my beloved; and by hands dropped with myrrh, and my fingers with sweet smelling myrrh … I opened to my beloved.
Ultimately, the darkest thing about the Song of Songs is its appreciation of the sheer (and potentially destructive) power of desire – a power that is not readily to be held in check (8, 6):
Love is as strong as death; jealousy is as cruel as the grave: the coals thereof are coals of fire … Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it.
The decision fell on Esther, an orphaned Jewish girl being brought up by her cousin Mordecai, in Susa, Persia’s capital. Ahasuerus, unaware that Esther was Jewish, loved her ‘above all the women, and she obtained grace and favour in his sight more than all the virgins; so that he set the royal crown upon her head, and made her queen instead of Vashti’ (2, 17).
While rivalling her in looks, Esther could hardly have been more different from her predecessor: she was meek and compliant, utterly self-effacing. When news reached her of a plot to massacre the empire’s Jews so that their property could be taken, her cousin called upon her to help, but she was afraid even to approach her husband without his prior summons – an offence in principle punishable by death. In the end, though, she summoned up the courage: going to Ahasuerus she revealed what was afoot – and also her personal stake in what was happening. ‘If I have found favour in thy sight,’ she said (7, 3):
let my life be given me at my petition, and my people at my request. For we are sold, I and my people, to be destroyed, to be slain, and to perish.
Her husband had the ringleader of the pogrom plot hanged immediately.
A little surprisingly, perhaps, it seems to have been with Ahasuerus’ blessing that Esther’s people now carried out their own attacks on their Persian persecutors: they ‘slew of their foes seventy and five thousand’ across the empire (9, 16). He also authorized Esther’s decree, as Queen of Persia, that the Jews from that time forth should celebrate their escape from slaughter with annual ‘days of feasting and joy, and of sending portions one to another, and gifts to the poor’ (9, 22). The festival of Purim has been honoured ever since.
Jonah makes an unconventional landing, coughed up by the whale on the coast of the Aegean to complete his prophetic mission to the people of Nineveh. This scene comes from a fresco at the Greek Orthodox Monastery of Saint Nicholas Anapausas, Meteora, Thessaly.
Nineveh on Notice
As we’ve seen, the biblical narrative overlapped intriguingly with that of ancient history, but spiritual truth trumped chronological exactitude every time. So it is that we find, in the final books of the Old Testament, accounts of the fall of Nineveh, when the Assyrian collapse had long been – in historical terms – old news.
So it is that the Book of Jonah begins with the prophet receiving his summons from the Lord (1, 2):
Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry against it; for their wickedness is come up before me.
Jonah, the story goes, attempted to flee his responsibilities and took a sea passage to Tarshish (possibly Sardinia), only to be thwarted by a tempest sent by God. Thrown overboard by his ship’s terrified crew, he was famously swallowed by a whale and finally disgorged on dry land, where God gave him a second chance to do his duty.
This time he ‘went unto Nineveh, according to the word of the Lord’ (3, 3), ‘and he cried, and said, Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown.’ The people heard him, repented their sins, ‘proclaimed a fast, and put on sackcloth’ (3, 5). God had mercy on the city – this time at least.
The Book of Nahum, however, finds God once more ‘furious’ (1, 1), despite being ‘slow to anger’ (1, 3). The people of Nineveh had not done their duty to their Lord. A punisher had come who would dash the people to pieces (2, 1) and an avenging army would descend on the city. The shield of his mighty men is made red, wrote the prophet (2, 3):
the valiant men are in scarlet: the chariots shall be with flaming torches in the day of his preparation, and the fir trees shall be terribly shaken. The chariots shall rage in the streets, they shall justle one against another in the broad ways: they shall seem like torches, they shall run like the lightnings.
‘The chariots shall rage in the streets, they shall justle one another in the broad ways’.
NAHUM 2, 4
Unfazed by the monuments to Assyrian might all about him in Nineveh, Jonah attacks the faithlessness and immorality he sees about him in the city. Surprisingly, perhaps, he seems to have been given a sympathetic hearing.
‘Woe the bloody city!’ exclaimed Nahum (3, 1): ‘It is all full of lies and robbery.’ Accordingly, it could not be allowed to continue in existence. ‘O king of Assyria,’ he concluded (3, 18):
Thy nobles shall dwell in the dust: thy people is scattered upon the mountains, and no man gathereth them. There is no healing of thy bruise; thy wound is grievous.
Nor could the Assyrians expect sympathy from others:
All that hear the bruit of thee shall clap the hands over thee: for upon whom hath not thy wickedness passed continually?
The Book of Zephaniah agreed (2, 13):
And he will stretch out his hand against the north, and destroy Assyria; and will make Nineveh a desolation, and dry like a wilderness. And flocks shall lie down in the midst of her, all the beasts of the nations.
ISRAEL AFFLICTED
ALL THE PROPHETS might in their different ways be said to articulate the tribulations of an Israel feeling abandoned and empty in its alienation from its God, yet oppressed by a succession of much stronger earthly enemies. The Book of Joel is particularly powerful in the mood of devastation it evokes:
That which the palmerworm hath left hath the locust eaten; and that which the locust hath left hath the cankerworm eaten; and that which the cankerworm hath left hath the caterpiller eaten (1, 4).
Is it animal pests or human attackers who have laid this country to waste (1, 6)?
For a nation is come up upon my land, strong, and without number, whose teeth are the teeth of a lion … He hath laid my vine waste, and barked my fig tree; he hath made it clean bare, and cast it away; the branches thereof are made white.
Either way, the land is devastated. In Chapter 2, a locust swarm descends, darkening the sky and galloping across the plains:
A fire devoureth before them; and behind them a flame burneth: the land is as the garden of Eden before them, and behind them a desolate wilderness; yea, and nothing shall escape them. The appearance of them is as the appearance of horses; and as horsemen, so shall they run. Like the noise of chariots on the tops of mountains shall they leap, like the noise of a flame of fire that devoureth the stubble, as a strong people set in battle array … They shall run like mighty men; they shall climb the wall like men of war; and they shall march eve
ry one on his ways, and they shall not break their ranks.
The great metropolis would become an unpopulated swamp (2, 14):
both the cormorant and the bittern shall lodge in the upper lintels of it; their voice shall sing in the windows; desolation shall be in the thresholds.
‘This’, said Zephaniah (2, 15), ‘is the rejoicing city that dwelt carelessly, that said in her heart, I am, and there is none beside me’. Assyria’s capital had become an emblem of human heedlessness and self-involvement.
‘A Prophet is not without honour, save in his own country,’ Christ was to say (Mark 6, 4). Jonah found a ready ear in Nineveh. The people there repented of their misdeeds, and God spared their city – for the time being.
Born of the Virgin Mary (above) Christ was to redeem the sins of humankind – but only through his crucifixion and death. Giotto’s fresco (opposite) shows him being betrayed, by the kiss of his supposed supporter Judas.
VII
THE BIBLE
‘NOT PEACE, BUT A SWORD’
‘Love thy neighbour…’, ‘Turn the other cheek …’, ‘Blessed are the peacemakers…’ Even in Christ’s own Gospels, these values sometimes struggle to prevail.
——♦——
‘What manner of child shall this be.’ LUKE 1, 66.
The Prophet Jeremiah had given notice that the relationship between the Lord and his Chosen People was eventually destined to change (Jeremiah 31, 31):
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