Nabu

Nabu is the Mesopotamian god of writing, wisdom and the scribal arts, keeper of the Tablet of Destinies on which the fates are inscribed, and patron of the scribes whose literacy ran the temple and the state. Son of Marduk, the king of the Babylonian gods, he rose in importance as Babylon rose, and by the first millennium BCE he was one of the greatest gods of the empire; his cult centre was Borsippa, near Babylon, where his temple Ezida stood.

At the Babylonian New Year festival (the akitu) the statue of Nabu was carried in procession from Borsippa to visit his father Marduk in Babylon, a ritual journey that dramatized the ordering of destinies for the coming year. His emblem is the stylus on the clay tablet, and his name survives in personal names across the ancient Near East, including the biblical Nebuchadnezzar. Nabu's temple Ezida at Borsippa has been excavated repeatedly since the mid nineteenth century: Henry Rawlinson uncovered foundation deposits there in 1854, Hormuzd Rassam dug at the site for the British Museum in 1879 to 1881, Robert Koldewey worked there in 1902 alongside his main excavation at Babylon, and an Austrian team from Innsbruck, led by Helga Piesl-Trenkwalder and Wilfried Allinger-Csollich, conducted sixteen further seasons there from 1980, concentrating on both the great ziggurat and the Nabu temple itself. The god's name is folded into a run of Neo-Babylonian royal names built on the pattern Nabu, protect or exalt, followed by king or throne, most famously Nabu-kudurri-usur, Nebuchadnezzar, whose biblical form preserves the god's name intact across two languages and two and a half millennia.

Nabu's fame in the ancient world was great enough that he appears, alongside his father Marduk, in a hostile mention within the Hebrew Bible. The book of Isaiah, in a passage widely read as directed against the gods of Babylon during the period of Judah's exile there, declares that Bel, a title of Marduk, bows down and Nebo, that is, Nabu, stoops, their images loaded onto beasts of burden and carried off as useless cargo unable to save themselves, let alone their worshippers, a deliberate mockery of two of the greatest gods of the empire that had conquered Jerusalem. That such a taunt made sense to its audience is itself a measure of how prominent Nabu had become by the sixth century BCE: by the Neo-Babylonian period he ranked second in the pantheon only to his father, and Nebuchadnezzar II, the king who destroyed Jerusalem's temple and whose own name honors Nabu directly, was among his most devoted royal patrons, funding lavish rebuilding at Borsippa's Ezida.

The biblical polemic, then, is not aimed at an obscure deity but at one of the two most powerful gods of the empire that had just conquered Judah, and its argument, that these gods are mere carved objects requiring transport rather than living powers, is a piece of genuine interreligious argument preserved from the ancient world, one side of a theological confrontation whose other side is recoverable only through the archaeology and inscriptions of Nabu's own cult.