Then they said, “Come! Let’s build ourselves a city, with a tower whose top reaches into heaven. So let’s make a name for ourselves, or else we will be scattered over the face of the whole land.”
(Now Absalom, in his lifetime, had taken and set up for himself a pillar, which is in the King’s Valley, for he said, “I have no son to preserve the memory of my name.” So he called the pillar by his name and it has been called Absalom’s Monument to this day.)
“Let there be a treaty between me and you, as it was between my father and your father. I have just sent you a present of silver and gold; go, break your treaty with King Baasa of Israel, so that he may withdraw from me.”
He also built towers in the wilderness and dug out many cisterns because he had much livestock, and he had farmers in the foothills and in the plain and vinedressers in the mountains and in the fertile fields—for he loved the soil.
Solomon brought Pharaoh’s daughter up from the city of David to the house that he had built for her, for he said, “My wife shall not dwell in the palace of King David of Israel, because the places where the Ark of Adonai has entered are holy.”
Immediately the word about Nebuchadnezzar was fulfilled. He was driven away from men, ate grass like an ox, and his body was drenched with the dew of heaven, until his hair had grown like eagles’ feathers and his nails like birds’ claws.