and from mankind they are driving even you away, and with the beasts of the field your dwelling will be. Vegetation they will give even to you to eat just like bulls, and seven times themselves will pass over you, until you know that the Most High is Ruler in the kingdom of mankind, and that to the one whom he wants to he gives it.’”​—Daniel 4:29-32.

8. Who was the one that smote the boastful king, and who healed him?

⁸ What followed immediately? It is understandable why what now happened was not preserved for us in the Babylonian historical records, or why any record thereof by a Babylonian chronicler was removed or destroyed. But the honest, true-to-fact prophet Daniel, who was personally implicated in the matter, was inspired to make a record of it, for our consultation more than two and a half millenniums later. The proud King Nebuchadnezzar was instantly smitten with madness​—and it was not his most revered god, Marduk (or, Merodach), who smote him. It was the Almighty God who foretold this madness that smote the boastful king, the king who had destroyed the sacred temple at Jerusalem in 607 B.C.E. And, just as predicted and ordained, “seven times” literally did pass over King Nebuchadnezzar while he was insanely chewing at grass like a bull out there in a nearby field. The mad king did not commit suicide, as Adolf Hitler did in 1945 just as his capital city Berlin was falling into the hands of the Red Communist armies of Russia. At the end of Nebuchadnezzar’s seven years of madness, the Divine Smiter of him healed him and restored his sanity.

Little did he know that that period of “seven times” in which he proved his unfitness to rule were prophetic of a greater period of “seven times” of larger duration, “the times of the Gentiles.” Little did he know that during those larger “seven times” five world powers would dominate the earth​—the Babylonian, the Medo-Persian, the Grecian, the Roman and the modern-time British-American. Little did Nebuchadnezzar know that those “seven times,” comprising all together 2,520 years, began in the year of his desolating of Jerusalem and its temple and would end in the year that would see the world of mankind embroiled in the first world war​—1914 C.E. (Luke 21:24, AV; Daniel 4:16, 23, 25, 32) Yes, little did Nebuchadnezzar know that at the end of those “seven times” of Gentile domination in 1914 the “King of the heavens” would give the “kingdom of mankind” to the one whom he wanted to​—His Messiah!​—Daniel 9:25.