Nebuchadnezzar II

Nebuchadnezzar II was king of Babylon from 605 to 562 BC and the eldest son of Nabopolassar. Through Jeremiah the LORD called him "My servant Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon," whom He would bring against the land of Judah and all the surrounding nations (Jeremiah 25:1, 9). He took King Jehoiachin captive in 597 BC, and in 586 BC his army burned the temple and the great houses of Jerusalem (2 Kings 24:12; Jeremiah 52:12-13).

---

Name and family

His name also appears as Nebuchadrezzar, and he shared it with an earlier king, Nebuchadnezzar I (1125-1104 BC). The Babylonian chronicle of his early years calls him Nabopolassar's "eldest son, the crown-prince."

---

Carchemish and the throne

In the fall of Nineveh in 612 BC, Babylonians joined Medes and Elamites in burning and plundering the city. At the Battle of Carchemish, fought at Carchemish on the Euphrates in the fourth year of Jehoiakim king of Judah, Nebuchadnezzar defeated the army of Pharaoh Neco of Egypt (Jeremiah 46:2). Egypt's king never again marched out of his own land, since the king of Babylon now held everything from the Brook of Egypt to the Euphrates (2 Kings 24:7). Nabopolassar, king of Babylon from 626 to 605 BC, had reigned twenty-one years, and in 605 BC Nebuchadnezzar "sat on the royal throne in Babylon."

---

Daniel and the first captives

By Daniel's account, Nebuchadnezzar besieged Jerusalem in the third year of Jehoiakim (609-598 BC), though Jeremiah dates Carchemish to that king's fourth year (Daniel 1:1; Jeremiah 46:2). The Lord delivered Jehoiakim into his hand with some of the articles from the house of God, which Nebuchadnezzar put in the treasury of his god in the land of Shinar (Daniel 1:2; 2 Chronicles 36:7). He had young Israelites of the royal family and the nobility trained for three years in "the language and literature of the Chaldeans" for his service, among them Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael and Azariah, renamed Belteshazzar, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego (Daniel 1:3-7).

---

Jehoiakim's revolt

Jehoiakim served Nebuchadnezzar as a vassal for three years and then rebelled, and the LORD sent Chaldean, Aramean, Moabite and Ammonite raiders against Judah (2 Kings 24:1-2). Chronicles says Nebuchadnezzar bound Jehoiakim with bronze shackles to take him to Babylon (2 Chronicles 36:6); 2 Kings says that Jehoiakim rested with his fathers and his son Jehoiachin reigned in his place (2 Kings 24:6).

---

The capture of Jerusalem in 597 BC

In the reign of Jehoiachin (598-597 BC) Nebuchadnezzar's servants besieged Jerusalem and the king himself came to the city; Jehoiachin surrendered with his mother, servants, commanders and officials, and in the eighth year of his reign the king of Babylon took him captive (2 Kings 24:10-12). As the LORD had declared, Nebuchadnezzar carried off the treasures of the temple and the palace and cut into pieces the gold articles Solomon had made for the temple (2 Kings 24:13). He carried Jehoiachin, the royal household and the leading men of the land into the Babylonian exile, ten thousand captives in all (2 Kings 24:14-15). He made Jehoiachin's uncle Mattaniah king, renamed him Zedekiah (597-586 BC) and made him swear by God (2 Kings 24:17; 2 Chronicles 36:13).

---

Zedekiah's revolt and the fall of Jerusalem

Zedekiah rebelled, and in his ninth year Nebuchadnezzar marched against Jerusalem with his entire army and built a siege wall around it, beginning the siege of Jerusalem (2 Chronicles 36:13; Jeremiah 52:4). In Zedekiah's eleventh year, with the city starving, the wall was breached (Jeremiah 52:5-7).

The Chaldeans overtook Zedekiah in the plains of Jericho and brought him to Nebuchadnezzar at Riblah in the land of Hamath, where the king slaughtered his sons before his eyes and killed all the officials of Judah, then put out Zedekiah's eyes and took him to Babylon in bronze shackles (Jeremiah 52:8-11). In Nebuchadnezzar's nineteenth year his captain of the guard, Nebuzaradan, burned the house of the LORD, the palace and every significant building in Jerusalem and broke down its walls: the fall of Jerusalem in 586 BC, though some date it to 587 BC (Jeremiah 52:12-14). Nebuchadnezzar had ordered that Jeremiah be looked after and kept from harm, and the prophet was handed over to Gedaliah son of Ahikam, whom the king appointed over the people left in Judah (Jeremiah 39:11-14; 2 Kings 25:22).

---

Tyre and Egypt

Ezekiel foretold that the Lord GOD would bring "Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon, king of kings" against Tyre (Ezekiel 26:7). In another oracle Ezekiel said that Nebuchadnezzar's army had labored strenuously against Tyre and received no wages from it, so the LORD would give him the land of Egypt as its wages (Ezekiel 29:18-20). Josephus, in Against Apion and his Antiquities of the Jews, reports that Nebuchadnezzar besieged Tyre for thirteen years under its king Ithobal, or Ethbaal. Through Jeremiah the LORD declared that He would send for "My servant Nebuchadnezzar" and set his throne over stones He had embedded (Jeremiah 43:10). A fragmentary cuneiform text, BM 33041, dates an invasion of Egypt by Nebuchadnezzar to his thirty-seventh year.

---

Nebuchadnezzar in the book of Daniel

In the second year of his reign Nebuchadnezzar had troubling dreams, and when his astrologers, answering in Aramaic, asked him to tell them the dream, he ordered all the wise men of Babylon destroyed, Daniel and his friends among them (Daniel 2:1, 4, 12-13). Daniel recounted the dream: a great statue with a head of gold, chest and arms of silver, belly and thighs of bronze, legs of iron and feet of iron and clay, shattered by a stone cut out without human hands that became a mountain filling the whole earth (Daniel 2:31-35). He told the king, "You are that head of gold," and that three more kingdoms would follow, the fourth as strong as iron, in whose days the God of heaven would set up a kingdom "that will never be destroyed" (Daniel 2:37-44). Nebuchadnezzar fell on his face, confessed Daniel's God as "the God of gods and Lord of kings," and made Daniel ruler over the province of Babylon (Daniel 2:46-48).

He set up a golden statue sixty cubits high on the plain of Dura (Daniel 3:1). When Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego would worship no god but their own, he had them thrown into a furnace heated seven times hotter than usual (Daniel 3:19-21, 28). Then he saw four men walking unbound in the fire, "and the fourth looks like a son of the gods" (Daniel 3:24-25). He called them out, blessed their God for sending His angel to deliver them, and decreed that no one should speak against Him, "For there is no other god who can deliver in this way" (Daniel 3:26-29).

Daniel 4 is written as Nebuchadnezzar's own proclamation to "the people of every nation and language" (Daniel 4:1). He dreamed of a great tree cut down at a holy watcher's command, its stump left in the ground with a band of iron and bronze around it (Daniel 4:10-15). Daniel, also called Belteshazzar, told him, "you, O king, are that tree," and urged him to break away from his sins by doing what is right and showing mercy to the oppressed (Daniel 4:19-27). Twelve months later, on the roof of his palace, the king exclaimed, "Is this not Babylon the Great, which I myself have built as a royal residence by the might of my power and for the glory of my majesty?" (Daniel 4:29-30). A voice from heaven declared that the kingdom had departed from him and that seven times would pass him by until he acknowledged that "the Most High rules over the kingdom of mankind and gives it to whom He wishes"; he was driven from mankind and ate grass like an ox (Daniel 4:31-33). When his sanity was restored, he praised the King of heaven, who "is able to humble those who walk in pride" (Daniel 4:34-37).

---

Death and successors

Nebuchadnezzar died in 562 BC, and his designated heir, Amēl-Marduk, took the throne; he is the Bible's Evil-merodach, king of Babylon from 562 to 560 BC. In the year Evil-merodach became king he released Jehoiachin from prison and gave him a place at the king's table for the rest of his life (2 Kings 25:27-30). Chronicles says that those Nebuchadnezzar carried into exile served him and his sons until the kingdom of Persia came to power (2 Chronicles 36:20).

---

How later Scripture speaks of him

Through Jeremiah the LORD said that all nations would serve Nebuchadnezzar, his son and his grandson until the time of his own land came, and that He would punish any nation that refused his yoke (Jeremiah 27:6-8). The nations would serve the king of Babylon seventy years, after which the LORD would punish him (Jeremiah 25:11-12). Ezekiel's parable of the eagle tells of the king of Babylon taking Jerusalem's king to Babylon and making a covenant under oath with a member of the royal family, who broke it by turning to Egypt (Ezekiel 17:12-16). Jeremiah's oracles against Babylon name him: "the last to crush his bones was Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon," and "Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon has devoured me" (Jeremiah 50:17; 51:34). At the feast of Belshazzar the vessels Nebuchadnezzar had taken from the temple were brought in to drink from, and Daniel reminded Belshazzar how God had humbled Nebuchadnezzar when his heart grew arrogant (Daniel 5:2, 18-21). In Ezra the returned elders call him "the Chaldean who destroyed this temple," and Ezra records that King Cyrus brought out the temple articles Nebuchadnezzar had carried away (Ezra 5:12; 1:7). The book of Esther recalls those "taken captive with Jeconiah king of Judah" by Nebuchadnezzar (Esther 2:6).

---

His records and the excavation of Babylon

One of the Babylonian Chronicles, the chronicle of his early years, records that in his first year he captured Ashkelon and "turned the city into a mound and heaps of ruins." For his seventh year it records that he "besieged the city of Judah," took it on the second of Addaru, captured its king and "appointed there a king of his own choice," a date that falls in February or March 597 BC. 2 Kings counts the same capture in Nebuchadnezzar's eighth year (2 Kings 24:12); Rodger C. Young, in a 2004 article in the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, explains that 2 Kings 24 and 25 "use Nisan years and non-accession reckoning." Young also notes that the Babylonian records of the destruction of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar's army have not been found.

The Jehoiachin ration tablets, found in an underground storeroom of his Babylon palace, record oil issued to prisoners at his court, among them the king of Judah and his retinue. Olof Pedersén, in his 2025 edition of the palace archives, identifies the king from Judah named in them as Jehoiachin, "the biblically attested king," and notes that the largest ration, about 1.6 gallons (6 liters), was his. One of the tablets was drafted in Nebuchadnezzar's thirteenth year, 591 BC. Another Babylonian cuneiform tablet names a chief eunuch of his, Nabu-sharrussu-ukin. A 2007 article in Bible and Spade identifies him with Nebo-sarsekim the Rabsaris, one of the officials of the king of Babylon who sat in the Middle Gate (Jeremiah 39:3).

He had the Ishtar Gate built on the north side of Babylon, its facade of blue glazed brick bearing wild bulls and dragons. The excavator Robert Koldewey began his excavations at Babylon in 1899, and the gate's excavated reliefs were used to reconstruct it and the Processional Way in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin. Nebuchadnezzar also worked on Esagila, the temple of Marduk, the god of Babylon, whom his inscriptions call Bel (compare Jeremiah 50:2).

A later report preserved by Josephus credits him with "the so-called Hanging Garden," made because his wife, raised in Media, longed for mountain scenery. The 2024 edition of his royal inscriptions notes that no garden is mentioned in any surviving text of his. The British Assyriologist Stephanie Dalley has proposed that the gardens were in fact at Nineveh.