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The Gods of the Bible
Every named divine being in Scripture, what the text calls it, and what the ancient world thought it was.
Nebo
The Babylonian god of scribes, shown being hauled out of town on pack animals in Isaiah's parody.
Isaiah 46:1, in every translation this tool compares.
The Babylonian god of scribes, appearing exactly once. Isaiah shows him loaded onto pack animals and hauled out of town. The joke works because Babylon really did parade his image through the streets at New Year, and Isaiah turns the parade into a retreat.
Nabu, the Babylonian god of scribes and son of Marduk, who appears as a deity exactly once, carted off on pack animals with Bel in Isaiah's parody of a divine procession. The images of Bel and Nebo were paraded through Babylon at the New Year festival, and Isaiah turns the spectacle over: the gods bow and stoop, too heavy for worn-out animals that stagger into captivity. Hauling a defeated nation's gods out of its city was a stock Mesopotamian way of mocking that nation's helplessness, and Isaiah uses it against Babylon, since a god that has to be carried can't carry anyone.
H5015, 13 occ, mostly the mountain and the town
As scribe of the gods, Nabu wrote the tablet of destinies that recorded the fate of every person, which DDD compares to the divine record books of Exodus 32:32-33 and Psalm 69:28 and later to the book of life in Revelation 3:5 and 20:12,15. The god who kept the record of who lives and who dies goes out of the city as cargo.
- Isaiah 46:1
- NIV Bible Speaks Today: Notes, 968
- ESV Study Bible, 1325
- DDD s.v. "Nabû," 607-609
