In the course of writing my thesis I came across Nimrod, grandson of Ham, great grandson of Noah (Gen 10, 1-12). Now Nimrod is not only »a mighty hunter before the Lord: wherefore it is said, Even as Nimrod the mighty hunter before the Lord.« (Gen 10, 9), according to Wikipedia, he – under the name of Namrūd ibn Kan’ān – also tried to build a tower so he could reach Allāh and dispossess him. Allāh did not at all approve of this plan, so he came up with a rather creative punishment:
Allāh ließ eine Mücke durch die Nase in sein Hirn fliegen. So wurde Namrūd 400 Jahre gequält, bis er starb.
(Allāh had a midge fly through his nose and into his brain. This tortured Namrūd for 400 years until he died.)
Update
In the meantime I found a source for the bug-in-brain thing in Johann Heinrich Zedlers Grosses vollständiges Universal Lexicon aller Wissenschafften und Künste. However, in this version it is not a midge but a worm that crawls into Nimrod’s head. The worm causes that much pain that Nimrod has other people beating him over the head with a stick from time to time in order to get some relaxation.
I also enjoyed the opening paragraph of the article.
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