Nebuchadnezzar's Wife

DESCRIPTION: "Nebuchadnezzar/Holy Moses/Thomas a Didymus/Pontius Pilate, the King of the Jews Sold his wife for a pair of shoes. When the shoes began to wear, Nebuchadnezzar began to swear... good lack, Nebuchadnezzar wanted her back."
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1972 (Sutton-Smith-NZ-GamesOfNewZealandChilden/FolkgamesOfChildren)
KEYWORDS: royalty wife clothes humorous playparty commerce Jew
FOUND IN: Britain(England) New Zealand Ireland
REFERENCES (5 citations):
Abrahams-JumpRopeRhymes, #389, "Nebuchadnezzar, King of the Jews" (1 text)
Sutton-Smith-NZ-GamesOfNewZealandChilden/FolkgamesOfChildren, p. 128, "(Iky Moses, king of the Jews)" (1 text)
Peirce-KeepTheKettleBoiling, p. 27, "(Ala Bala Busha, the King of the Jewws)" (1 text)
ADDITIONAL: Peter and Iona Opie, _I Saw Esau: Traditional Rhymes of Youth_, #98, "(Nebuchadnezzar the King of the Jews)" (1 text); cf. #10, "(Thomas a Didymus, Hard of Belief)" (1 text)
Roy Palmer, _The Folklore of Warwickshire_, Rowman and Littlefield, 1976, p. 97, (no title) (1 single-verse fragment)
Roud #19250
CROSS-REFERENCES:
cf. "Sale of a Wife" (theme) and references there
cf. "Johnston Mooney and O'Brien" (form)
NOTES [875 words]: For some reason, the number of people who want to tell me about this song is unusually high. Robert Salles sends me this report:
"When I was a little boy, in the 1950 ies, my mother told me the following:
Nebuchadnezzar, the King of the Jews
Sold his wife for a pair of shoes.
When the shoes began to wear,
Nebuchadnezzar began to swear.
She knew it from her childhood, she was born in 1904."
Beth Edwards sent me a much longer version, which obviously could contain many more couplets:
Nebuchadnezzar, king of the jersey (sic)
Sold his wife for a pair of shoes.
When the shoes began to wear,
Nebuchadnezzar began to swear.
When the swear began to stop,
Nebuchanezzar bought a shop.
When the shop began to sell,
Nebuchanezzar bought a bell.
When the bell began to ring,
Nebuchanezzar began to sing.
At the end, "When Nebuchadnezzar finished his song," he got his wife back.
For the idea of selling a wife, see the notes to "Sale of a Wife."
Not every version refers to Nebuchadnezzar, although he is the most common pseudo-hero. The other names are harder to explain. Moses was never King of the Jews, but of course he did lead them, so I suppose he was in the place of a king. Thomas Didymus, however, was a follower of Jesus (at least in the Gospel of John; no other gospel calls him "Didymus"); he certainly never reigned over the Jews.
The reference to Nebuchadnezzar is interesting. He is sort of the Standard Heathen King of the Old Testament, mentioned about 85 times, with the largest number of mentions being in the books of Jeremiah (whose prophesies cover much of Nebuchadnezzar's long reign) and Daniel (although the events in Daniel, insofar as they are non-fictional and not related to the Maccabean period, seem to be based on the historical Nabonidas, who was perhaps Nebuchadnezzar's son-in-law, rather than Nebuchadnezzar himself). He is also mentioned in Tobit 14:14, where he is credited, falsely, with conquering Ninevah, and in Judith 1:1 and following we find him falsely being called the Assyrian Emperor.
Nebuchadnezzar (or, as Jeremiah more correctly calls him, Nebuchadrezzar) is the Hebrew name for the Chaldean Emperor Nabo-kudurri-usur II. He couldn't really be called the King of the Jews -- he overthrew the Davidic dynasty and deported the people (these events are described in the last two chapters of 2 Kings), but the land was left desolate; there was no King of Judah. Indeed, several records in Babylon still call the deposed King Jehoiachin "King of Ya-u-du" (i.e. Judah; Noth, p. 282). But Nebuchadnezzar did rule almost all the Jews of the Dispersion -- the only ones not within his borders were the handful who had fled into Egypt.
And he was easy to remember, because he reigned for a very long time -- 43 years, according to the Uruk King List (PritchardII, p. 119). He assumed the throne of Babylon in 605, following the death of his father Nabopolassar (If you're wondering about all these names starting with "Nabo" or "Nebo," Nebo was a Chaldean god). This took place just after Nebuchadnezzar had won the great battle of Charchemish and destroyed the last remnant of the Assyrian empire and smashed a great Egyptian army (Bright, p. 326; compare Jeremiah 46:2-4). Had it not been for the death of his father, it is quite possible that Nebuchadnezzar would have gone on to destroy Egypt. As it was, Judah became a Babylonian vassal, but rebelled and was conquered in 598/597. The rebellious King Jehoiakim conveniently died (Bright, p. 327, speculates that he was assassinated), and Nebuchadnezzar did not entirely destroy Judah, although he did exile many of the best people and the new King Jehoiachin (2 Kings 24). A decade later, Jehoiachin's uncle Zedekiah rebelled, and Judah was conquered again in 587 (2 Kings 25). Judah was destroyed and its people exiled.
Many Jews probably expected divine revenge on Nebuchadnezzar. It didn't come. He remained King for another quarter century, and embarked in an ambitious rebuilding of Babylon, with much building of temples and monuments to his gods (Leick, p. 119). He finally died in 562.-- opening the door for chaos in Babylon. (And these dates are pretty firm -- according to Dougherty, p. 10, his date list for the Chaldean kings, which agrees with PritchardII, is said to be based on "more than two thousand dated cuneiform documents.") Three kings reigned before Nabonidas took the throne in 556 (Bright, pp. 352-353), and then Babylon fell to the Persians in 539.
Actual records of Nebuchadnezzar's private life are of course few; PritchardI, p. 203, records his brief account of his first capture of Jerusalem in 598 B.C.E., while p. 205 lists some of his household accounts. Goodspeed, p. 349, notes the "instability" of his dynasty -- but there is no mention of his wife, just of the weakness of his son and the brutality of his son-in-law. Still, based on all the sources I checked (not all of which are cited here, since they duplicated the material in the sources I have cited), there seem to have been no succession quarrels in the period before his death, nor is there any mention of a son other than Amel-Marduk (the Bible's Evil-Merodach), implying that there weren't a bunch of wives trying to advance the interests of their sons. - RBW
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