Daniel Studies

Plain of Dura event    Daniel 3 and Innovative worship styles of Nebuchadnezzar

koot van wyk (DLitt et Phil; ThD)

Visiting Professor

Kyungpook National University

Sangju Campus

South Korea

Conjoint lecturer of Avondale College

Australia

5 December  2011

           Daniel wrote Daniel 3 telling the history of what happened to his three friends in the plain of Dura. Nebuchadnezzar got the idea to make an image of himself, very large and out of gold and to place it in the plain of Dura, which is in the province of Babylon. We assume that the plain of Dura was not in Babylon and that explains why Daniel was not with his friends when this event happened. It is tempting to suggest that the plain of Dura was at Ur. Most Assyriologists and scholars who have looked at the excavation reports of Ur, has made the point that for them the Daniel 3 event was a legend but there is a ring of truth to it when they have looked at the architectural design of the temple at Ur.

           In the report of the excavations dating to the time of Nebuchadnezzar, Nabonidus and Cyrus’ renovations at the temple, by L. Woolley, M. Mallowan, Ur Excavations Vol. IX The Neo-Babylonian and Persian Periods (London: The Trustees of the Two Museums, 1962) is very helpful to give us the detail of the architectural innovations of Nebuchadnezzar’s worship style.

A number of aspects stand out at Ur excavations at the temple there:

1.    Nebuchadnezzar came to the renovation program because the temple was very neglected.

2.    His idea was to raise the elevation of the Shrine, the holy and the outer court by several meters. The whole structure was sloping down to the space in the large outer court where he wanted the audience to stand and watch proceedings.

3.    Whereas the past worship activities were behind closed doors and secret, Nebuchadnezzar wanted them to be open and visible to the curious audience standing or walking past.

4.    Archaeologists have found the outer court paved for that purpose with tiles.

5.    Nebuchadnezzar invented the “open worship style” and the architecture had to participate in this concept. One scholar commented:

"The new building therefore had a large court, fifteen metres across and more than twenty metres from north-west to south-east, with chambers on either side, and raised above it, at the north-west end, a smaller court in the centre of which was the table of offerings on which the priest would set the gifts of the pious worshippers; beyond this was the sanctuary, and through its open door those in the lower court would see, above the head of the ministrant priest, the great statue of the god to whom the offerings were made. Nothing could be more unlike the conditions of the old temple than this spacious building in which there was room for a multitude of people and everything was so arranged as to focus attention on the rites in progress: the change in the temple plan must correspond to a change in religious practice. . . . .

           Other statues had been dedicated in many temples and the worship paid to them had not affected the Jews, for the simple reason that the ritual was the concern primarily of the priests and such participation in it as was allowed to laymen was but optional; what was novel here was not the setting up of the image but the order that all were to share in the adoration of it.

           Nebuchadnezzar was substituting a form of congregational worship for the mysteries of an esoteric priesthood. This, interpreted into brick and mortar, is precisely what we find him doing in E-nun-mah; 'the whole city might now stand and see performed before its eyes ceremonies which had once been jealously hidden amid a maze of dark passages'[citing C. J. Gadd, History and Monuments of Ur, page 231]" (Mallowan 1962: 23-24).

6.    The function of raising the sanctuary is for people in a distance to see clearly what is happening in the sanctuary and what the priesthood was doing during their performances.

7.    Where exactly the plain of Dura was, is not sure. The Sumerian word for god was dingir. This sign was placed in front of persons (king Shulgi of Ur in the Ur III period), cities at times and gods always. If one places this sign in front of the sign for the city of Ur it would read dingir Uru, the god of Ur. That god was the moon-god Nannaru. Dingir Uru would or could be abbreviated in Semitic as duru > dura? Is that why it is called the plain of Dura, the plain of the god of the city of Ur? The word duru in akkadian also means wall so that bit durani means fortress. One would expect that if such an expensive golden image was placed in public that security and guarding of the image was very important.

8.    The archaeology of Ur in the Neo-Babylonian period or levels, do give us insights into the innovative worship styles of Nebuchadnezzar at that time. We say innovative, since Nabonidus, his son, came later and tried to change what his father had build here in Ur. He himself had a conversion to the Moon god religion of Haran. He tried to place everything back into secrecy again as it was before Nebuchadnezzar.

9.    The Babylonians were familiar with the history of Gudea who placed statues of himself everywhere to display his piousness. He lived in the time of the birth of Abraham’s son Ismael in 2143 BCE. The other example is in the Ur III period when Shulgi [2095-2047 BCE] deified himself and expected that people worship him. Many hymns to the god Shulgi were written during that time. About Shulgi, Jacob Klein said “Šulgi was the first king of the Ur III dynasty, who toward the middle of his reign, assumed the proposed as well as the apposed divinity titles, probably imitation of Naram-suen of Akkad. Subsequently, his successors bore the divinity titles from the beginning of their reigns” (Jacob Klein, Three Šulgi Hymns [Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan University, 1990], 35). Klein says that the earliest evidence for the deification of Shulgi was in his 40^th year [in 2055 BCE] (Klein 1990: 31 footnote 43). So when Nebuchadnezzar placed an image of himself in the plain of Dura, he had a pretext in history which would have cautioned the objections of the public.

Nebuchadnezzar, typical of dictators, developed a megalomania about himself, and designed an icon cult of himself and opened up temples for public viewing in congressional style and when the music plays they had to kneel in front of his image