“He ate grass like an ox”
He was driven away from mankind. He ate grass like an ox, and his body was drenched with the dew of heaven, until his hair grew like the feathers of an eagle and his nails like the claws of a bird. (Daniel 4:33 BSB)
What it sounds like today
A bizarre fairy-tale curse or pure legend.
The cultural key
This can read like a fairy-tale transformation, but it describes a recognizable descent into madness. Nebuchadnezzar's affliction, living outdoors, eating grass, drenched with dew, hair and nails growing wild, matches what has since been called boanthropy, a rare form of derangement in which a person believes himself to be an ox or beast and lives accordingly. The narrative's interest, though, is moral, not merely clinical. It is a precise, poetic-justice reversal: the king had just boasted, 'Is this not Babylon the Great, which I myself have built by the might of my power?' (4:30), exalting himself above God, and so the most powerful man on earth is brought down to the level of the cattle he ruled, stripped of the reason that distinguishes humans, 'until you acknowledge that the Most High rules over the kingdom of mankind.' When he finally lifts his eyes to heaven, his sanity and throne return. The grass-eating is not idle marvel but a fitting humbling of human pride.
Recovered meaning
Nebuchadnezzar 'eating grass like an ox' depicts a beast-like madness (boanthropy), a pointed humbling of the king who boasted he built Babylon by his own might. Reduced below the animals until he acknowledges God's rule, he is then restored.