Nebuchadnezzar

There is a passage in Scripture that describes a shell more exactly than any treatise does. It is not about demons, and not about the reverse of the Tree. It is a record of what happens to a man when the thing that made him a man goes out of him, and the body stays behind and keeps walking.

A note on the numbering and on one word. English Bibles count this chapter three verses ahead of the Aramaic and of the Russian: what stands here as 4:33 is 4:30 in the Masoretic text. As for the word, the Aramaic has כְּנִשְׁרִין, “like eagles”, and the King James follows it. The Russian Synodal translation reads “like a lion”, because in Daniel it follows the Greek of Theodotion, and that text has a lion here. We name the divergence rather than quietly pick the convenient side.

Why this is a description of a shell

Kabbalah defines a qlipha as a husk left without the thing it was meant to hold. The definition stays abstract right up until this chapter.

Look at what the text keeps listing. The king remains: the body is there, it eats, it is wet with dew, the hair and the nails go on growing, too much now, since there is no longer anyone to cut them. Only one thing is missing, and the book names it in a single word: מַנְדְּעִי, understanding. In the next verse it comes back, and that is the first thing recorded: “mine understanding returned unto me”. Before that there had been a husk, walking in a field.

Add to this who the man was. Not a hermit, and not mad from birth: this was the builder of Babylon, who a few verses earlier had said: “Is not this great Babylon, that I have built for the house of the kingdom by the might of my power, and for the honour of my majesty?” Here was the maximum of form, the maximum of achievement, and precisely at that summit the content departs, and the form is left standing there, chewing grass.

The Aramaic עִדָּן means “time”, “season”, with no length attached. The tradition reads these seven variously, as seven years, as seven seasons, as an indefinite full term, but the book does not specify, and neither do we on its behalf.

The image of four metals

A second image from the same book is the dream of a statue, which the king saw two chapters earlier. It is about something else, and about the same thing: a form that holds until it is touched.

The image does not come down by war or by siege. A stone is cut out of the mountain without hands, strikes the feet, the one place where iron is mixed with clay, and the whole of it goes to dust. “Then was the iron, the clay, the brass, the silver, and the gold, broken to pieces together, and became like the chaff of the summer threshingfloors; and the wind carried them away, that no place was found for them.”

This ruin follows the reverse order of the splendour. The gold is at the top, and the breaking happens at the bottom. The figure is held up not by what is above but by what is below, and it is below that it has a mixture which will not alloy.

What is known outside the Bible

Babylonian sources give no direct evidence of any illness or absence of Nebuchadnezzar II. He reigned from 605 to 562 BC, rebuilt Babylon, and it was under him that the First Temple was destroyed.

Among the Qumran scrolls, however, there is a text that scholars set beside the fourth chapter: the Prayer of Nabonidus. In it the king Nabonidus (the last ruler of Babylon, not Nebuchadnezzar) tells how he was struck with a grievous illness and spent seven years apart from men, until a Jewish diviner helped him. The resemblance is marked, and many read it as an earlier form of the story, one in which the king bore a different name.

This is a hypothesis, not an established fact: the motif, the span and the role of the Jewish interpreter all agree, but no direct link between the two texts has been demonstrated. We call it a hypothesis and leave it there.

Why the archive keeps this

Because we have ten pages describing the qliphoth, and every one of them is forced to explain in the abstract: a husk without content, a form that has lost what filled it. The words are correct and dead.

And then you read the fourth chapter and you see a man to whom it happened. He did not turn into a demon and he did not go to hell. He simply went on existing without the thing that made him himself, and from outside it looked like overgrown nails and grass in the mouth. No reverse of the Tree explains a qlipha the way these two verses explain it.

The second half of the story matters just as much. Then the understanding returns. The text describes no exorcism and no rite: it says the king lifted up his eyes unto heaven, and his understanding returned to him. A shell in Kabbalah is not destroyed either: what is freed from it is the thing that got caught inside.