Sympathy for a gentile king: Nebuchadnezzar, exile, and mortality in the Book of Daniel

Nebuchadnezzar II sacked Jerusalem and destroyed its temple. Yet he emerges in Daniel 1-4 as a compelling and sometimes sympathetic hero-villain. Drawing upon the concept of the story-collection, this article considers the implications of this genre for character formation, examines the further thematic means by which Nebuchadnezzar’s sympathetic characterization is generated in the book of Daniel, and explains his character in terms that make his often contradictory nature understandable across the text of the book. This article argues that Nebuchadnezzar’s dreams reflect deep-seated anxieties about his own mortality and relates these anxieties about death and time to Daniel’s broader themes of time, mortality, and exile. It suggests an analogy between the death of the self and the death of one’s state, and suggests that Nebuchadnezzar’s portrayal in Daniel has a role to play in our understanding of Daniel as a reflection upon life in exile.