Deeper Reflection
The Bible is the Word of God given in the words of men in history.”³⁶ Note “in history”. There are stories in the Bible that sound like the stuff of fairy tales, that may cause one to wonder about their historicity. The historicity of Bible stories can stand on their own without necessarily being verified by extra-biblical evidence.One such story is Nebuchadnezzar being “driven away from mankind… be given grass to eat like cattle” for “seven periods of time” (v.25). Nebuchadnezzar suffered from a mental illness, and “history is by no means silent” about it.³⁷ Some three centuries after Nebuchadnezzar’s death, a Babylonian priest, Berossus, “preserved a tradition stating that Nebuchadnezzar was taken ill suddenly towards the end of his reign”³⁸. This does correspond to verse 25a.According to Old Testament scholar R. K. Harrison, Nebuchadnezzar suffered from a rare form of deviant behaviour known as “boanthropy”, where he “imagined himself to be a cow or bull, and acted accordingly”³⁹. While “a great many doctors spend an entire, busy professional career without once encountering an instance” of boanthropy, Harrison “actually observed a clinical case of boanthropy in a British mental institution in 1946”⁴⁰ . A man “in his early twenties, in fine bodily health but decidedly anti-social, spent whole days from dusk to dawn outdoors on institutional grounds. He was limited in his ability to care for himself… They gave him water from a clean container so he wouldn’t drink from mud puddles. But as he wandered over the grounds, he would pluck up chunks of grass to eat; he never ate institutional cuisine with other inmates” ⁴¹ .

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³⁶ George Eldon Ladd, The New Testament and Criticism (Eerdmans, 1967), 12 ³⁷ R. K. Harrison, Introduction to the Old Testament (Eerdmans, 1969), 1114 ³⁸ R. K. Harrison, 1114 – citing Josephus, Against Apion, I, 20 ³⁹ R. K. Harrison, 1115 ⁴⁰ R. K. Harrison, 1116 ⁴¹ Dale Ralph Davis, The Message of Daniel, The Bible Speaks Today (IVP, 2013), 59 – citing R. K. Harrison, 1115-1117