finitum non capax infiniti

Every Monday there will be a midrashic fable posted from Louis Ginzberg’s classic collection Legends of the Jews. This week the midrash concerns the punishment of Nebuchadnezzar.

This midrash is interesting because of its irony: Nebuchadnezzar was so arrogant that he thought himself to be a god and, as a result, God causes him to act like an animal. In other parts of the midrash, this almost seems to connect to the story of Adam and Eve: they ate the fruit in order to “be like God” and then they are clothed in animal skins. In a way, and read in light of some of the Psalms, this represents both their fall from glory and their identification with the animals. Whereas once they were sinless and truly human, now they are tainted by sin and less-than-human, less than what they were created to be.

Nebuchadnezzar, the ruler of the whole world, to whom even the wild animals paid obedience,—his pet was a lion with a snake coiled about its neck—did not escape punishment for his sins. He was chastised as none before him. He whom fear of God had at first held back from a war against Jerusalem, and who had to be dragged forcibly, as he sat on his horse, to the Holy of Holies by the archangel Michael, he later became so arrogant that he thought himself a god, and cherished the plan of enveloping himself in a cloud, so that he might live apart from men.

A heavenly voice resounded: “O thou wicked man, son of a wicked man, and descendant of Nimrod the wicked, who incited the world to rebel against God! Behold, the days of the years of a man are threescore years and ten, or perhaps by reason of strength fourscore years. It takes five hundred years to traverse the distance of the earth from the first heaven, and as long a time to penetrate from the bottom to the top of the first heaven, and not less are the distances from one of the seven heavens to the next. How, then, canst thou speak of ascending like unto the Most High above the heights of the clouds’?”

For this transgression of deeming himself more than a man, he was punished by being made to live for some time as a beast among beasts, treated by them as though he were one of them. For forty days he led this life. As far down as his navel he had the appearance of an ox, and the lower part of his body resembled that of a lion. Like an ox he ate grass, and like a lion he attacked and killed many wicked men. The wonder attracted a curious crowd, but Daniel spent his time in prayer, entreating that the seven years of this brutish life allotted to Nebuchadnezzar might be reduced to seven months. His prayer was granted. At the end of forty days he passed in weeping bitterly over his sins, and in the interval that remained to complete the seven months he again lived the life of a beast.