Nebuchadnezzar Dragged From His Grave to Grovel for the World

For eighteen years the voice came every morning, before the king had risen, before the wine had been poured. It rolled through the corridors of Babylon like a stone down a stairwell. Nebuchadnezzar lay in his bed and listened to it name him a slave. "O wicked slave, go and destroy the house of your Lord, for His children no longer heed Him." Eighteen years. A man can grow old waiting on a sentence like that.

He did not want to go. He remembered Sennacherib, who had marched on Jerusalem and come home a corpse short an army, struck down in a single night. The king of Babylon was proud, but he was not stupid, and the two things sat in him uneasily, side by side.

The Omens That Pointed Only One Way

So he hedged. He took up arrows for divination, the old belomancy, and shook them in his fist and asked the bundle a question. Rome. Nothing stirred. Alexandria. Nothing. Jerusalem. One arrow leapt out of his hand as if a wind had taken it.

He did not trust the arrows. He went to the seeds, planting them and reading the sprouts the way other men read stars. He sowed for Rome and the ground stayed bare. He sowed for Alexandria and the ground stayed bare. He sowed for Jerusalem and green came up overnight, thick and insolent.

He lit lamps and candles against the dark. Rome stayed black. Alexandria stayed black. The flames he lit for Jerusalem burned bright enough to throw his shadow on the wall. He set little vessels floating on the Euphrates and watched the river. The boats for Rome and Alexandria sat dead in the water. The boats for Jerusalem slid downstream as though something below the surface were pulling them home. Every test he ran, the world answered with the same name. He could not get a single sign to refuse him. So at last he went.

The Cup Carved From a Dead Man

He came back a conqueror, and conquerors keep trophies. His was a drinking cup, and it was made from the bones of a slain Jew. He liked to lift it at his feasts. There is no quieter way to tell a roomful of men that you have won than to drink your wine from the body of the people you broke.

One night he raised it to his mouth, and the bone moved in his hand. Life flickered back into the dead thing. It stirred, it jerked, and it struck him across the face hard enough to rock his head. A voice came with the blow. "A friend of this man is reviving the dead at this very hour." The cup had just told the king of Babylon that the God of the Jews was, in that same moment, raising other Jews from their graves.

Nebuchadnezzar was shaken to the bone of his own skull. He set down the cup and began, of all things, to praise. He opened his mouth and a hymn came out, and it kept coming, climbing, swelling, gathering force, and it was becoming something so great that it threatened to rise above the Psalms of David himself.

An angel would not allow it. A Babylonian king, drunk on a Jewish corpse, was not going to outsing the sweet singer of Israel. The angel struck him across the mouth and the praise died in his throat. The king who had drunk from a dead man's bones was silenced by a hand he never saw.

Cast Down to Graze Among the Beasts

Pride that reaches for heaven does not get to keep its feet on the earth. Heaven drove him out from among men. He went down on all fours into the field and ate grass like an ox, his hair growing into feathers, his nails into claws, his speech into the lowing of cattle. The king who had a man's bones for a cup now had a beast's mouth for a face.

And the throne did not stay empty. His son Evil-merodach sat in it and ruled in his place, and learned the taste of a crown for all those years the great king grazed in the wet grass and forgot his own name.

The Heir Who Would Not Be Tricked Twice

But the beast came back. Nebuchadnezzar's reason returned, and his shape, and he climbed up out of the field and onto his own throne again, and the first thing he did was look for his son. He found him and threw him into the prison house. And the men Nebuchadnezzar locked away never came out, not one, not ever, until the day the old king finally died.

When death took him, the court came to Evil-merodach to crown him. He would not move. He had learned this lesson once already, in irons. "The first time I listened to you, I went to prison for it," he told them. "Why would I listen now? Perhaps my father is not truly dead. Perhaps he rises, and finds me on his seat, and kills me."

There was only one way to satisfy a man who had been buried alive in his own father's jail. They went to the grave. They dug down to the great king of Babylon and they hauled the body up into the light and dragged it through the streets, and they let the new king see with his own eyes that the thing was a corpse and would stay a corpse. Only then would Evil-merodach take the crown.

So the king who had refused to rest in his bed for eighteen years, hounded out of sleep by a voice from heaven, did not get to rest in his grave either. He had reached for the heavens, and he ended as a body flung out of the earth, dragged behind his own heir like a loathsome branch no one would let lie still.