Nebuchadnezzar

by  Nathaniel Bates

Nebuchadnezzar turned and faced the window that overlooked a sprawling kingdom.  His was a kingdom of rich and poor, but also a land of a middle class that could be quarrelsome.  Freedom for the people was an idea he encouraged, if only to restrain tyrannical nobles.  But alas, that great city Babylon!  The multitude of her counselors!  She had enough self-government to challenge any king which was why being a “god” was necessary.  No mortal would bow to a mere man.  They might bow to a god.  It was an act of sorts, but one made necessary by politics.

The king had to deal with enough politics.  “May you live forever!”  Indeed, many said that with their lips but few with their hearts.  Already his counselors were jealous of a successful Jewish advisor Daniel and his Hebrew kinsmen.  There was an earnest quality to Daniel, a keen intellect that grasped political science and economics.  The old guard establishment was envious. Yet how many of Daniel’s opponents bothered to serve the people, as opposed to service to their old filial ties, was a question that bothered the king who was otherwise partial to his own fellow Babylonians.  Daniel was a New Man emerging from conquered people and not the old aristocracy. He represented the rising Babylon that was to come.  In this way he earned the king’s respect.

Nebuchadnezzar reflected on matters of state as he remembered the old story of Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh of old had built the great city Uruk by his own hands.  His friend and brother, Enkidu, was Nature herself regenerated into manhood.  Enkidu was a Wild Man, like the hunters and gatherers of the outer world beyond the kingdom.  They knew nothing of gods or kings.  The death of Enkidu was also the death of their world in the rise of the city-state.  The death of Enkidu, sad though it was, also meant the death of wildness in Gilgamesh himself that allowed him to dwell in his great city unencumbered.  Finally Gilgamesh could count, take stock and rule.  Unencumbered by dreams and longings of wildness, Gilgamesh must have realized, he could now rule firmly.  A man remembers his past with the wolves and wind.  All men do. Memory of the sunset and ravines distracts him from civilized purpose.

Sad was the death of Enkidu.  Sadness was Gilgamesh’s greatest mistake in his search for immortality that caused the search to fail.  Enkidu was a good man, but his death was inevitable.  The death was the death of the animal in man, the primal urge.  Gilgamesh was too close to Enkidu, too mournful of Enkidu’s passing, to succeed in his quest to live forever.  But Gilgamesh must on some level have come to grips with the fact that to be a king a man must cut himself off from that longing for brotherhood, for kinship with man and wolf.  He finally did cut himself off after his quest for immortality ended but it was too late. Nebuchadnezzar would not make the same mistake.  Nebuchadnezzar would live as a separate self, with his eyes on distant horizons.  He would live forever that way at least.

Behold, Nebuchadnezzar said, the city I built with my own hand!  Behold, he exclaimed, with his servants in earshot, the city I built with my reason, my planning, my own hand!  Just then a scent came into the nose of the king, a scent of meat far off.  He sensed it as a pungent smell of air.  The king suddenly ran to the source of the meat and howled.  The servants of the palace ran after him, astonished and filled with woe.  The king’s senses were heightened and he began to crawl on all fours.  His Majesty, son of the gods, had become an animal before the eyes of all of his courtiers.  He ran to a window and began the slow howl of a wolf, a haunting sound.

The king’s doctors and advisors all gathered for a discussion on man and beast, how a man might turn to a beast or how a beast might speak.  Daniel was seated among them and in a moment of awkward silence, when eyes were fixed on him to contribute something, he spoke of the tradition of his people that a donkey once spoke for the Lord.  It was also true, he said, that a snake had spoken and tempted the parents of humanity.  Other advisors from different cultures told of legends of the hunters who did not grow food agriculturally.  They related that these people believed that that Animal People Guardians and Plant Elders told of where to hunt.  It was an ironic turn of the conversation because these bands of hunters were outside of civilization while the king was the center of it.  The doctors pointed out that his last words were a praise to himself that he had built the city with both hands.  The thought of a psychological malady manifesting as a regression to childhood formulated in their minds, but could not form the right words to say just that.  It would perhaps be left to a future time to formulate just those words.

Outside of the Palace, social disintegration began to show itself in the form of strikes and work stoppages.  The greatness of Babylon existed side by side with a firm independence of the people.  So many had been foreigners and remembered the traditions of their own peoples.  Domestication was hard for them and the madness of their king reminded them that madness was sometimes a thing of liberation. Madness could reset sanity if done right.  One way for them to do insanity right was to reset the social order.  The king was decent as far as they went, as “THEY” went, but most of his advisors were corrupt.  The constant throwing of dissidents into fires was not going over very well with many of the rising middle class and even less well with workers.

Daniel was popular enough with the Hebrews and even some of the other exile peoples that they sent him out to calm the crowds.  Some reforms were passed; and the king’s other advisors were nervous about Daniel’s ease of popularity and about the reforms.  The possibility of a coup by Daniel or by another leader who rose from Exile was ever present on their minds.  Captive peoples had a history of becoming dominant in the very Empires that conquered them.  Daniel was a highly intelligent leader and could be king in his own right.  The Hebrews never bowed to the king as a god.  While supposedly this was his religious dedication to one deity only, to the suspicious minds of rival advisors this was possibly a hidden signal to other captive peoples for a revolution.

The kingdom was calm with advisors running it; but the king was not calm.  He ran in the royal gardens on all fours. The only word that came out of his mouth that was intelligible was “Enkidu.”  Did it mean that the king thought he was Enkidu?  Some whose religions believed in reincarnation wondered if he was actually Enkidu.  But what was apparent is that the king’s senses had heightened.  He could predict storms.  He could chase the royal game in the gardens.  Captive gazelles played with him as though he were one of their own.  How astonishing that he could speak their language!  The king seemed to care about these creatures in a way no one had seen before.  The king had come to learn compassion, a feeling that few had seen in the brazen Nebuchadnezzar before.

The Court philosopher advisors assembled for counsel. They wondered if the reference to Enkidu was a reference to the animal in man, the untamed.  All of civilization was repression, or so later words would someday say.  Before agriculture, the philosophers suspected, no kings existed and that it was possible that humans lived in a kind of harmony with the Universe.  These people of old could read the wind much as Nebuchadnezzar could, the philosophers suspected.  Man was kin to the wolf, ancient brothers.  All cats were wild.  In the very distant past some said that ice covered much of the Earth.  Yet it was in Sumer, in Babylon, that the gods first taught men the arts of civilization.  From Sumer came the blessing, or so they thought.  But something was lost and the philosophers could feel it.

The devout, by contrast, believed that there were no humans before gods.  For them the gods had created the human race to labor, only to flood the Earth when they became jealous of them.  The Earth was filled with too much noise, the gods declared.  So they flooded it due to the arrogance of man. One man’s family was saved by a dissident god and the arts of civilization flourished all over again.  Such was the declaration of the devout and no philosopher dared to even write down his speculations to the contrary much less enrage the faithful and their Priests.  Even Daniel, distant though his people were from Babylonian society, agreed that too much speculation against tradition was blasphemy.  But a few doubters of the gods existed among the philosophers, even though they never wrote down their thoughts.  Some of them speculated that man came from the forest as other creatures did.  Some even wondered whether some process allowed the first people to arise from animals or from fish in the ocean.  Perhaps, just perhaps, the king was reverting back to the very direction that man had come.  They dared not raise their idea lest they be denounced for blasphemy, or lest the populace perhaps become afraid they might become gazelles or lions next.

Daniel never believed in any of the speculation about humans coming from forests.  But, unlike the conservative advisors who thought the notions of the philosophers were blasphemy, he had a nuanced view.  His people did indeed believe the first humans, Adam and Eve, came from a Garden and that innocence was lost.  In this respect, he could understand what the philosophers were saying.  But Daniel’s was a world of Law that came from Moses, the ancient teacher of his people.  The Law did not admit of philosophizing man back to the Garden.  The world of golden sunrises and nakedness in Eden was lost in a world in which humanity had to work hard, in which desires might never be fulfilled.  The king could run as an animal, but his world was the sword of a conqueror while Daniel’s was another world altogether.  Daniel’s was of the pen that could write of animals and gardens but never be calm in them.

The king spent seven years feeling the full force of the cycles of sun, moon, rain, wind and life.  It was a pleasant time.  “Enkidu, Enkidu” he repeated.  The philosophers wondered if this was his attempt at immortality.  In a lucid moment, the king wondered whether it was Enkidu who actually became immortal by never forgetting the forest while Gilgamesh rested in his solitary human ego, only to die.  After seven years of being emmeshed in the winds and occasional snows, the king emerged and awoke.

The king awoke and emerged to humanity again, a humanity fresh and new.  He no longer praised himself but knew his place in the world.  “Praise be to the ultimate God beyond all other gods!”  Daniel smiled and said nothing.  He did not know if the king was saying this for political reasons involving the fear of Hebrew revolt or if he was really now inclined to some aspects of the Hebrew religion.  Daniel suspected that the king might have been currying favor with the abstract ideas of the philosophers, some of whom were suspected of inclining to Greek styles of government or even to revolution.  He might have been nervously trying to win their favor.  Or, perhaps he was trying to calm Hebrew discontent.  But either way it seemed like progress from the impetuous style of the king he once knew.  Perhaps being turned into a human beast was a way for the king to be humbled.

Nebuchadnezzar put on his human clothes again.  Gradually civilization was restored in the kingdom.  Work stoppages and strikes were made to cease.  Some reforms were implemented but not enough for some, too many for others, and barely noticeable to many.  Most of the reforms benefitted merchants and nobles more than workers.  But they did cement imperial unity more than it had been unified before.

Beyond the boundary of the Empire remained the wild men, the descendants of Enkidu.  They were as yet un-tamed by civilization’s commerce, government and religion of any kind.  Some city dwellers dreamed of joining the wild men, re-dedicating themselves to the childhood of man once again.  The king had meanwhile forgotten the lessons he learned and returned to many of his old ways.  Comedians and storytellers spoke of human-animals to much laughter.  Some city dwellers even attempted to imitate the king and turn themselves into beasts, to no success and much laughter.

As city life moved in increasingly soulless directions, the philosophers watched all of this and asked themselves if humans would ever return to innocence again.