After defeating the combined armies of Egypt and Assyria at Carchemish in 605 BCE, Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon conquered Jerusalem. Babylon carted way the city’s holy temple treasures and took captive, along with many others, the prophet Daniel and his three friends Mishael, Hananiah and Azariah (better known soon afterward for dancing in a fiery furnace after being renamed Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego). Following his facilitation of the first deportation at Jerusalem, then General Nebuchadnezzar succeeded his father, Nabopollassar, as king. The rest, of course, is history, but little of what has been written is kind to the Neo-Babylonian Empire’s most notorious commander-in-chief. There are, of course, reasons for that.

Read the Book of Daniel and you too will likely consider Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon to have been a savage, narcissist and boor. Of course you would be right, but no one is perfect. In the course of researching my book about the Prophet Daniel’s life in Babylon, For the Sake of His Name, I discovered, along with several factors which help to explain Nebuchadnezzar’s serial brutality toward Jerusalem, ample testimony of his exceptional talents as a statesman, engineer and visionary as well as gifted general and king.

In this, Part One of a two-part study, Defending Nebuchadnezzar, we’ll examine the great king’s singular list of accomplishments. In Part Two, we’ll examine the geopolitical havoc that drove him to madness, obsessing over Egypt and his most impactful  move, historically, his decision to put a savage end to the sovereignty of ancient Israel.

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Elijah, Hosea and Daniel & the restoration of Israel.

Even as the world has handed Iran carte blanche to build nuclear weapons and export terror throughout the world, we are witnessing the miraculous restoration of Israel. Hebrew prophets spoke of what we now recognize as current events—the return of a Jewish remnant to the promised land—even before Joshua and his people crossed the Jordan into Canaan some 3,500 years ago.*

…when all these things are come upon you, the blessing and the curse which I have set before you, and you shall call them to mind among all the nations where the LORD your God has driven you…the Lord your God will turn your captivity and have compassion upon you and will return and gather you from all the nations where the Lord your God has scattered you. If any of yours are driven out unto the outermost parts of heaven, from there will the Lord your God gather you and from there will he fetch you. And the Lord your God will bring you into the land that your fathers possessed and you will possess it; and he will do you good and multiply you above your fathers. (Deu 30:1-5)(*Those who do not believe that the words above were spoken by Moses but originated later, in the time of Judah’s King Josiah who died in 609 BCE, may weigh their prophetic accuracy against the 2,557-year gap between Josiah’s death and the reappearance of sovereign Israel in 1948.)

By my count, nineteen other prophets were active in Israel and Judah during the 337-year time span encompassed by the novels in this series. These included Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Zechariah, each of whom had much more to say, specifically, about the future restoration of Israel than Elijah, Hosea or Daniel. But Daniel and Elijah confronted great kings. Hosea married Gomer, ancient Israel herself.
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Why did Belshazzar offer the prophet, Daniel, the third, not the second highest position of authority in Babylon for reading the handwriting on the wall?
About eleven years ago, my wife, Marcia, challenged me to write a novel based on the Book of Daniel. I have since forgiven her. My mistake, back then, had been to quickly agree to do it. Like everyone else, I had heard the popular stories about Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego thrown into a fiery furnace, accounts of Daniel and the lions’ den and the startling account of the handwriting on the Babylonian palace wall, warning King Belshazzar of the end of his kingdom. But I knew nothing about the Book of Daniel. I had not read it. While the fire, the lions and  disembodied hand all sounded like appealing “myths” to dramatize, after I actually read the Book of Daniel I realized I had no clue how to go about writing a novel based upon it.
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