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How Rabbi Abbahu Counted Every Year of Nebuchadnezzar's Reign

After Babylon burned the Temple, the rabbis refused to let the destroyer's years blur. Rabbi Abbahu counted them to forty-five and proved it twice.

Curated by Arthur · Told by Maggid ·
Table of Contents
  1. The Man Who Destroyed the House
  2. The First Count
  3. The Second Proof
  4. The Number That Bounded Babylon

The Man Who Destroyed the House

Nebuchadnezzar arrived at Jerusalem in the third year of Jehoiakim's reign. That is the moment Rabbi Abbahu chooses as his starting line. Not the siege. Not the burning. The arrival, the year Daniel 1:1 places on the record. Everything that followed Babylon's first appearance at Jerusalem's gates would be measured from that year, counted forward with the precision a destroyed people owe to the instrument of their destruction.

The Temple was gone. The exile was real. The city had been emptied of its priests and its vessels and its kings. But knowing Nebuchadnezzar's exact length of reign was its own kind of refusal, a way of saying that the chaos had edges, that the catastrophe occupied a countable number of years before God moved again. Forty-five years. Rabbi Abbahu was not guessing. He had arguments, and he brought two of them.

The First Count

The arithmetic begins with the opening of the Book of Daniel. Nebuchadnezzar came to Jerusalem in the third year of Jehoiakim. That marks the start of his rule over the land of Judah. From that first arrival, he ruled over Jehoiakim for eight years. Then came Zedekiah, the last king of Judah before the final destruction, and Nebuchadnezzar ruled over him for eleven years. Eleven plus eight is nineteen years before the Temple fell.

After the destruction, Babylon's grip did not loosen immediately. Nebuchadnezzar reigned for another twenty-six years. Nineteen and twenty-six make forty-five. The arithmetic is exact, and its exactness is the point. The rabbis were not satisfied with approximations when calculating the reign of the man who burned God's house. They wanted precision the way a plaintiff wants precision: not to honor Nebuchadnezzar but to contain him inside a number that could be set against the frame of all history.

The Second Proof

A single calculation might be a coincidence. Rabbi Abbahu brings a second line of evidence, because when the stakes are the length of Babylon's dominion over Israel, one proof is insufficient. The second argument comes from the exile of Jehoiachin, the young king who surrendered Jerusalem before the final destruction and was taken to Babylon in chains.

Jehoiachin's exile is dated. The book of Kings records the year. And the tradition could follow Jehoiachin's presence in Babylon through the royal records, tracking the point at which Evil-merodach, Nebuchadnezzar's successor, released the exiled king from prison and gave him a seat at the royal table. That release falls in the thirty-seventh year of Jehoiachin's exile, which Rabbi Abbahu connects back to the original count, arriving again at the same total. Two paths through the evidence, one destination: forty-five years.

The Number That Bounded Babylon

Counting Nebuchadnezzar's years is not nostalgia. It is the rabbinic habit of placing every act of history inside the same continuous timeline that runs from creation through the patriarchs through the judges and kings and now through the exile. If Nebuchadnezzar belongs to history, then his power was finite. If his years can be counted, then the exile he caused was bounded. If the exile was bounded, then the suffering it contained was not the final word.

Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer, the work that preserves this calculation, was compiled in Palestine in the eighth or ninth century, after a second destruction had compounded the first. The rabbis working in that tradition had reason to count carefully. They were not merely recording history. They were building a case that even the worst catastrophe has a number, and that numbers eventually end.

NebuchadnezzarDanielTempleExileBabylonMidrash AggadahPirkei Derabi Eliezer
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Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer 49:7Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer

Rabbi Abbahu, a sage from the Talmudic period, tackles this very question in Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer, a fascinating text filled with stories and interpretations that illuminate biblical narratives. He states quite definitively that Nebuchadnezzar reigned for forty-five years. But how do we arrive at that number? According to Rabbi Abbahu, in the very year Nebuchadnezzar began his reign, he marched on Jerusalem and conquered Jehoiakim, the king of Judah. We see this referenced in the Book of Daniel (1:1): "In the third year of the reign of Jehoiakim, king of Judah, came Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, unto Jerusalem, and besieged it."

Nebuchadnezzar ruled over the kingdom of Jehoiakim for eight years, followed by eleven years under Zedekiah. That’s a total of nineteen years before the destruction of the Temple. Then, Rabbi Abbahu says, Nebuchadnezzar continued to rule for another twenty-six years after the destruction. Add nineteen and twenty-six, and you get… forty-five!

Wait, there’s more. Rabbi Abbahu provides another line of reasoning to support this forty-five-year figure. He asks us to consider the exile of Jehoiachin, Jehoiakim's son, until the reign of Evil-Merodach (also known as Awil-Marduk), Nebuchadnezzar's son. Second Kings (25:27) tells us: "And it came to pass in the seven and thirtieth year of the captivity of Jehoiachin, king of Judah, in the twelfth month, on the seven and twentieth day of the month, that Evil-Merodach, king of Babylon, in the year that he began to reign, did lift up the head of Jehoiachin, king of Judah, out of prison.” Thirty-seven years had passed from Jehoiachin's exile to the start of Evil-Merodach's reign.

So, where does that fit in? Well, if we consider that Evil-Merodach came to power after Nebuchadnezzar's forty-five-year reign, the math seems to hold up. It's like Rabbi Abbahu is giving us multiple angles to confirm the length of Nebuchadnezzar's rule and its connection to key events in Jewish history.

What's fascinating here isn't just the historical calculation, but the way our sages sought to understand and connect the dots between different biblical accounts. They weren’t just interested in what happened, but when it happened, and how it all fit together in the grand scheme of Jewish history. It reminds us that even seemingly dry historical details can hold profound meaning when viewed through the lens of tradition and interpretation.

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Legends of the Jews 10:46Legends of the Jews

That was the reality for the Jews being marched into exile in Babylon.

Nebuchadnezzar, that infamous king, wasn’t taking any chances. He’d conquered Jerusalem, destroyed the Temple, and now he was dragging its people to Babylon. But he wasn't just worried about rebellion; he was afraid of something far more potent: prayer. Nebuchadnezzar figured if the Jews got a moment to catch their breath and pour out their hearts to God, He, being the compassionate being He is, might just intervene and undo everything. So, the march was relentless, brutal.

They weren’t allowed to stop, not even for a moment, until they reached the Euphrates River. Only then, within the borders of Nebuchadnezzar’s empire, did he feel he could relax a little. But even the water brought sorrow. Accustomed to the fresh springs and wells of their homeland, many Jews fell ill and died as soon as they drank from the river. Imagine the despair, the utter desolation.

If that wasn’t enough, the indignities continued. As the Jews mourned their dead on the riverbanks, Nebuchadnezzar and his cronies celebrated their victory with a boisterous party on their vessels. The king noticed something: the princes of Judah, even in chains, weren’t carrying any burdens. “Have you no load for these?” he demanded.

What followed was an act of calculated cruelty. Nebuchadnezzar’s servants seized the Sefer Torah, the sacred parchment scrolls of the Law. They tore them to shreds, fashioned them into sacks, filled them with sand, and forced the Jewish princes to carry these desecrated burdens on their backs.

Can you even begin to fathom the horror? The very symbols of their faith, the heart of their covenant with God, turned into instruments of humiliation.

The sight of this was too much. The entire Israelite nation erupted in weeping. The sound, the kries, the wailing, was so profound, so filled with anguish, that it pierced the heavens.

And here’s where the story takes a truly dramatic turn. According to the Midrash (rabbinic interpretive commentary), God heard their cries and was so moved, so affected by their suffering, that He considered undoing creation itself! As we find in Midrash Rabbah, God thought to Himself that the world was created for the sake of Israel. What was the point if they were suffering like this?

It's a powerful statement about the importance of Israel and the special relationship between God and His people.

But the angels, ever the advocates, intervened. “O Lord of the world,” they pleaded, “the universe is Thine! Is it not enough that Thou hast dismembered Thy earthly house, the Temple? Wilt Thou destroy Thy heavenly house, too?”

God, in His infinite wisdom, restrained Himself. “Do ye think I am a creature of flesh and blood, and stand in need of consolation?” He responded. “Do I not know beginning and end of all things? Go rather and remove their burdens from the princes of Judah.”

And so, aided by God, the angels descended. Invisible, yet undeniably present, they took the heavy, desecrated loads from the backs of the Jewish princes and carried them all the way to Babylon. A silent act of divine intervention, a evidence of God's unwavering love and protection, even in the darkest of times.

It’s a reminder that even when we feel most abandoned, when our burdens seem unbearable, there's a force working, unseen, to ease our load. A force that hears our cries, and even if it doesn't undo our suffering entirely, walks alongside us, carrying us through.

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