2 Kings 24:8-17
The first deportation
He takes the treasures, the craftsmen and the smiths, ten thousand captives, and leaves none except the poorest sort of the people of the land. Ezekiel and the young men of Daniel 1 go in these years.
People of the Bible
Nebuchadnezzar
Burned the temple, built the greatest city in the world, and ended up eating grass.
Nebuchadnezzar is the most powerful man in the world for forty years and the instrument that ends the kingdom of Judah. He takes Jerusalem in three stages, deports the skilled and the young, burns the house and breaks the walls. In Babylon he is a man who cannot be argued with: he demands a dream be told before it is interpreted, he builds an image of gold and a furnace to enforce it, and he asks who is that God that shall deliver you out of my hands. The book answers the question four times.
Scroll down to the storyThe movements, in the order the text gives them.
The story of Nebuchadnezzar
- 01
- 02
Daniel 2:1-13
Tell me the dream and its meaning
He will not say what he saw, and the wise men point out that no king has ever asked such a thing. He decrees the death of all of them, which is how Daniel hears about it.
- 03
Daniel 3:13-25
Who is that God
Given a refusal he cannot buy off, he heats the furnace seven times more. Then he counts four figures walking in the fire and calls the three out by name and by title, servants of the most high God.
- 04
Daniel 4:28-33
Is not this great Babylon
Walking on the roof of his palace twelve months after the warning, he says it out loud. The sentence falls while the word is still in his mouth.
- 05
Daniel 4:34-37
I lifted up my eyes
At the end of the days he looks up and his understanding returns, and the chapter that began as a royal proclamation ends with him praising the King of heaven, whose ways are judgment.
Why it matters
Daniel keeps him as a person rather than a symbol, which is rare for an enemy king. He rages and he also falls on his face; he threatens execution and then promotes the men who defied him; he publishes a decree of his own humiliation in the first person. The lesson he is given is repeated so often it becomes a refrain: that the Most High rules in the kingdom of men and gives it to whomsoever he will, and sets over it the basest of men.
12 songs
The music
Every song in the catalogue whose passage falls inside these chapters.
