Nebuchadnezzar II

Nebuchadnezzar II (c. 634 BCE – c. 562 BCE) was king of Babylon from roughly 605 BCE to 562 BCE.

Biography

During his reign, according to the Book of Daniel, Nebuchadnezzar threw three Hebrew youths, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, into a flaming furnace for refusing to bow down to his image.^[1]

He was known for his wrath and used an axe to execute his enemies.^[2]

The story of The Prayer of Azariah and Song of the Three Holy Children was later immortalized in many works of art in the following centuries, one of which was Tre giovani ebrei condotti alla fornace by Italian artist Matteo Rosselli, painted between 1630 and 1640. This very painting was later included by the late Assassin Clay Kaczmarek in a set of puzzles he left in the Animus to his successor, Desmond Miles. The puzzle was solved by selecting five images of aristocrats not doing any sort of work; Nebuchadnezzar was included in this list.^[1]