ABSTRACT
Another fable:
The king was upset at the news from back home. A courier, dusty and tired, had just slid in from the north, and he smelled like the camel he had come on. He was ushered in to see the king immediately; he fell at his feet, kissed the hem of his robe, and blurted out, “The Persians are coming!”
“What do you mean by that?” the king asked. “The Persians helped us rid the world of the wretched Assyrians, and we have been allies since.”
“No, lord,” the messenger said, still with his face near the floor, “the Persians have assembled an army in their hills and are marching down into the plain with the intention of overthrowing your august leadership. They have broken all their promises.”
The king looked out over his newly built city in the center of Arabia, hundreds of miles from the Mesopotamian plain. His idea had been to create a new place where his religious innovations could take root. But had they? He had had to drive the Arabs who had lived there from their homes because they had refused to accept him or to realize that his devotion to the moon god was as important to him as it was to them. But they had not even wanted to hear what he had to say. Perhaps the translator had botched things. He did not know. That had been ten years ago.
He had left his son back in Babylon, a fine young man who could become a great king, but now he faced a greater challenge than mere administration. Belshazzar said in the message, which had been memorized by the messenger, “There is unrest in the streets of Babylon. Even the priests are in rebellion.”
“So there are people opposing us even in Babylon?” asked the king.
“Yes, lord. There were crowds in the street when I left,” the messenger said.
The king thanked the messenger and sent him away with silver; his slaves were instructed to make sure he was well fed and housed for the night. But the king himself wandered the palace, unsure if he should immediately decamp. He had advisors around, of course, but he did not want to be troubled by their opinions this night. He merely wanted to understand what had gone wrong.
He had been so sure that his course had been correct. His mother, then alive, had encouraged him to follow his heart and do what the gods told him was the right thing to do. And she had spent her entire life in selfless devotion to the god of the moon. Where was the god tonight?
The king scanned the skies, but there was as yet no moonrise, and this disturbed him. He would have liked a nice smiling moon to look down and bless his thoughts tonight. But it was not there, at least not yet.
The people of Babylon simply did not understand what he was trying to do, to rethink the whole of Babylonian religion and acknowledge the primacy of the moon, not a new god by any means, but one that looked over humankind benignly, marking months and years, adjusting for us the seasons, giving us peaceful nights. His gifts were manifest to everyone, and yet the Babylonians did not care to understand the moon's importance.
Of course, there would always be those who worshipped the all-seeing sun, or the powers of the female, and the king would be the last person in the world to deny the importance of those elements. But still the moon ruled the night, and the night was really the decisive element with which humans had to contend. Why could the Babylonians not see that? And the grace and beauty of the moon, fully given to anyone who would look up. Perhaps that was it; the Babylonians never took the trouble to look up.
And now they were welcoming in a foreigner, a barbarian, whose religion was what? Did anybody really know? He seemed to worship some of the old gods, but really no one could tell. And they preferred that Persian to him, the native son of the river valley?
But enough of that sort of thought. Nabonidus bustled toward the office of the supervisor of his household to command him to prepare to move everyone back to Babylon, to dispute this Persian's faithless attack, to fight if need be till the end to defend his rule.
