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NABONIDUS

(Akk. Nabû-naʾid)

The last king of Babylon (556-539 b.c.). The son of a priest of the moon-god Sîn from Harran in Upper Mesopotamia, he was apparently not from the royal line and thus usurped the throne. In a pseudo-autobiographical account of her life, his mother Adad-guppi (who lived for more than 100 years) claimed to have been instrumental in Nabonidus’ rise to power. He favored the Sîn cult over that of Marduk, the chief god of Babylon, and thus caused friction between himself and the religious establishment in Babylon.

For some unstated reason, Nabonidus left Babylon for the oasis of Tema in the Arabian desert and stayed there ca. 10 years (ca. 553-543). His son Belshazzar ruled Babylon in his place, taking care of administrative and military duties. Thus Nabonidus was not present to fulfill his role as king in the New Year festivals of Marduk, thereby incurring the wrath of the Marduk priests. Nabonidus had returned to Babylon for only a short time before his kingdom was attacked by Cyrus of Persia, who captured the city in 539. According to the Babylonian writer Berossus (ca. 250), Cyrus later made Nabonidus a governor in Carmania.

Nabonidus was considered an “evil king” by later historical traditions. The Verse Account of Nabû-naʾid was a propagandistic text composed by the Marduk priests to justify the takeover of Babylon by the Persians. Nabonidus’ crime was his ignoring of the Marduk cult. The priests even claim to have helped the Persian cause. The Persian Cyrus Cylinder extolled the greatness of Cyrus, while listing the sins of Nabonidus.

Although Nabonidus is not mentioned in the Bible, he is found in the folkloristic Prayer of Nabonidus, a 1st-century b.c. text written in Aramaic. The depiction of the Babylonian king is similar to that in the Verse Account. Furthermore, Nabonidus was said to have been afflicted with a bad inflammation which caused him to be “put away from men” for seven years, not unlike the description of Nebuchadnezzar II in the book of Daniel. The marked similarities between the two Babylonian kings in later traditions has been the subject of much scholarly discussion, but there has been no consensus to explain this.

Bibliography. C. J. Gadd, “The Harran Inscriptions of Nabonidus,” Anatolian Studies 8 (1958): 35-92; R. H. Sack, “Nebuchadnezzar and Nabonidus in Folklore and History,” Mesopotamia 17 (1982): 67-131; “Nabonidus of Babylon,” in Crossing Boundaries and Linking Horizons, ed. R. E. Averbeck, M. W. Chavalas, and G. D. Young (Bethesda, 1997), 455-73.

Mark W. Chavalas

Prayer Tents Bible References - Prayer Tents

NABONIDUS

Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible (2000)