The same king wears an opposite face in the Bible. Judah rebelled twice against Babylonian vassalage, and Nebuchadnezzar answered as empires did: in 597 BCE he took Jerusalem and deported its king and elite, and in 587 or 586, after a second revolt, his army burned the city and Solomon's temple and carried a great part of the population to Babylonia. The deportations, remembered as the Babylonian Exile, remade Israelite religion; the exiles' longing, argument and editing of their traditions by the rivers of Babylon stand behind much of the Hebrew Bible as it exists, and the event is recorded in this atlas as a hinge of religious history.
Scripture repaid him with an afterlife stranger than any inscription. Jeremiah calls him the servant of the Lord, the rod of a judgment Judah earned; the Book of Daniel, written centuries later, makes him the archetype of imperial pride, the dreamer of the statue with feet of clay, the builder of the golden image, the king driven from among men to eat grass like an ox until he learned that Heaven rules. That last tale, unknown to Babylonian sources and possibly transferred from his successor Nabonidus, fixed the image of the mad king of Babylon in Jewish, Christian and Muslim imagination. Between the bricks and the book stand two Nebuchadnezzars, and the historical king, richly documented in his own voice, is fully visible behind both.