David Hulme- Men As Gods: Part 3

                                                                                         

Following Caligula's murder, Claudius became emperor, succeeded in turn by Nero. It is said that toward the end of his reign Nero set up a huge bronze statue of himself as the sun god. While this is a matter of scholarly debate, it does sound like the kind of public work that Nero would have undertaken (see "Nero's Colossus"). If he did commission such a statue, his actions were strikingly similar to those of another ruler in a different time and place.

The Bible records that about 650 years earlier Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, erected a 90-foot golden statue and required all of his subjects to worship the great image on pain of death (see Daniel 3).

Some Bible scholars believe that it was most likely an image of Nebuchadnezzar himself--a version of what the young Jewish prophet Daniel had revealed when he interpreted the king's dream about an unusual statue made of several elements (see Daniel 2).

Daniel had said that its head of gold represented Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonian kingdom he ruled. It is not too wild a speculation to suggest that the king's already enormous pride was bolstered by Daniel's interpretation, and now some form of deification became his passion; hence a golden statue of himself, which everyone had to worship.

The book of Daniel goes on to show that the king's pride led him to believe that he was responsible for his own success, that he was in some way God's equivalent, for which he suffered seven years of egomaniacal madness (see Daniel 4).

The Babylonian priesthood, which was actually composed of Chaldean magi, had devised a method by which it retained power over the king through religion. A ceremony at the king's investiture emphasized his relationship to the chief Babylonian god, Marduk. The god's image was housed in a temple atop the almost 300-foot-high ziggurat, or stepped tower, in Babylon. As with the earlier biblical Tower of Babel (Greek, Babylon)--see Genesis 11--its builders had the idea of challenging heaven itself by building upward.

Inside the temple, the king figuratively received his authority from Marduk by holding the hands of the image. He thus became a son of the god and was obliged to protect the priests. As a result, the Babylonian people had long regarded their king as divine. Evidence of the Babylonian view of the relationship between king and god was found at the excavation site of ancient Babylon in the form of a cuneiform document, which reads in part: "Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon, the pious prince appointed by the will of Marduk, the highest priestly prince."

About the author:
David Hulme holds a doctorate in International Relations from the University of Southern California with an emphasis on the Middle East. He's the author of "Identity, Ideology and the Jerusalem Question" and the blog, Causes of Conflict. He is president of Vision Media Productions and chairman of Vision.org Foundation. Please email at dhulme@vision.org.

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