Daniel 4:31-32

31, 32. See note Daniel 4:25. This description is intensely dramatic, and many things unmentioned here are brought vividly before the eyes of anyone acquainted with the life of a Babylonian palace. If this, indeed, represents an attack of insanity, how the physicians and “magicians” must have tried every art known to them to deliver this greatest king of earth from his illusions. There was no disease known to the ancients which was regarded as so mysterious and so directly the result of the touch of the divine hand as this. Many of the magical texts have specific reference to the warding off of demoniacal powers and to deliverance from the “sickness of the head.” As one text states, “The disease of the forehead proceeds from the infernal regions; it is come from the dwelling of the lord of the abyss.” Think of the exorcisms against demons such as the following, accompanied with strange ceremonies, which must have been chanted over this afflicted monarch:

They are 7! They are 7!

They are the agents of the vengeance of the gods,

Raising up difficulties, obtaining power by violence.

The enemies! The enemies!

They are 7! They are 7! They are twice 7!

Spirit of the heavens, may they be conjured!

Spirit of the earth, may they be conjured! Chaldean Magic.

Or this:

May the bad demons depart!

May they seize upon one another!

The propitious demon, the propitious giant,

May they penetrate into his body.

Professor Sayce ( Hibbert Lectures) gives a specific spell against madness, which was in the great classical work on medicine used by all the physicians in Nebuchadnezzar’s time, closing with the pathetic wail:

Let the madness of his head be removed,

May the malady of the head which has descended

like the rain of the night be driven away.

He also translates this oracle from Nebuchadnezzar’s favorite god, Marduk, to some one in sickness:

In the night he was in grief,

in the day he was troubled,

And in a dream he sent unto him a warning;

Revealing it in a vision, he did not direct him

* * * * * * * * * *

His sick neck was not quiet in the yoke.

The with pure means did not soothe him.

Like an ox in the was he.

Like a lamb among the bricks was he confounded,

and at the mouth of the camp was he laid.

King, in his Babylonian Magic (1896), gives many of the ceremonies connected with the driving away of these demons and the cries of those in bondage to them:

And again:

May the sickness of my body be torn away!

May the groaning of my flesh be consumed!

May the ban be torn away!

Because of the evil magic, the demon,

Free me from my bewitchment! Loosen my sin!