Darius the Mede

Darius the Mede in the Book of Daniel

Darius the Mede is first mentioned in the story of Belshazzar's feast (Daniel 5). Belshazzar, king of Babylon, holds a great feast for his lords, but in the midst of the revelries a hand appears and writes on the wall: MENE, MENE, TEKEL, PARSIN. Daniel interprets the mysterious words: Belshazzar has been weighed and found wanting, and his kingdom is to be divided between the Medes and Persians. The story concludes: "That very night Belshazzar the Chaldean (Babylonian) king was killed, and Darius the Mede received the kingdom." The second half of former sentence may also be read as the first of chapter 6.

In the story of Daniel in the lions' den (Daniel 6), we learn that Daniel has continued to serve at the royal court under Darius, and has been raised to high office. His jealous rivals plot his downfall, tricking Darius into issuing a decree that no prayers should be addressed to any god or man but to Darius himself, on pain of death. But Daniel continues to pray to the God of Israel, and Darius, although deeply distressed, must condemn him to be thrown into the lions' den, for the edicts of the Medes and Persians cannot be altered. At daybreak the king hurries to the place and cries out asking if God had saved his friend, and Daniel replies that his God had sent an angel to close the jaws of the lions "because I was found blameless before him." Darius commands that those who had conspired against him should be thrown to the beasts in his place, along with their wives and children.

The final appearance of Darius is in Daniel 9. This chapter records a vision of Daniel relating to the end-time travails and triumph of the Israelites over their enemies, and the mention of Darius is simply a chronological marker: the vision, the reader is told, was sent to Daniel in "the first year of Darius son of Ahasuerus" (the Hebrew form of Xerxes).

The Medes and the fall of Babylon

The Medes came to prominence in 612 BCE when they joined with the Babylonians in overthrowing Assyria. Little is known about them, but they were possibly a significant power in the Middle East for several decades thereafter. The fall of their empire is recorded in a Babylonian inscription from around 553 BCE (a second report puts the event in 550 BCE) reporting that the Median king has been conquered by "Cyrus, king of Anshan," in south-western Iran: this is the first appearance of Cyrus in the historical record, and the beginning of the rapid rise of the Persians.

After extending his empire from the Mediterranean to Central Asia, Cyrus turned his attention to Babylonia. The most important ancient sources for his conquest of Babylon are the Nabonidus Chronicle (Nabonidus was the last Babylonian king, and Belshazzar, who is described as king of Babylon in the Book of Daniel, was his son and crown prince), the Cyrus Cylinder, and the Verse Account of Nabonidus - which, despite its name, was commissioned by Cyrus.

Cyrus' Babylonian campaign began in 539 BCE, although there were presumably previous tensions. On 10 October Cyrus won a battle at Opis, opening the road to Babylon, and on 12 October "Ugbaru, governor of the district of Gutium, and the army of Cyrus entered Babylon without a battle" (Babylonian Chronicle). Ugbaru is presumably the same person as the Gorbyras mentioned by the Greek historian Xenophon, a Babylonian provincial governor who switched to the Persian side. Cyrus made his entrance into the city a few days later; Nabonidus was captured and his life spared, and nothing is known of the fate of Belshazzar.

The Book of Daniel

The Book of Daniel is not regarded by scholars as a reliable guide to history. The broad consensus is that Daniel never existed, and that the author appears to have taken the name from a legendary hero of the distant past mentioned in the Book of Ezekiel. Daniel is an apocalypse, not a book of prophecy, and its contents form a cryptic allusion to the Syrian Greek king Antiochus IV Epiphanes (reigned 175–164 BCE) and his savage persecution of the Jews. There is broad agreement that the stories making up chapters 1-6 are legendary in character, and that the visions of chapters 7-12 were added during the persecution of Antiochus, the book itself being completed soon after 164 BCE.

Daniel 5 and Daniel 6 belong to the folktales making up the first half of the book. The language of Daniel 5 ("Belshazzar's Feast"), for example, follows ancient Near eastern conventions which are in some cases precisely those used in Daniel. Daniel 6 ("Daniel in the Lions' Den") is based on a classic Babylonian folk-tale called "Ludlul-bel-nemeqi", telling of a courtier who suffers disgrace at the hands of evil enemies but is eventually restored due to the intervention of a kindly god (in the story in Daniel, this is the God of Israel): in the Babylonian original the "pit of lions" is a metaphor for human adversaries at court, but the biblical tale has turned the metaphorical lions into real animals.

In Daniel 9 Daniel, pondering the meaning of Jeremiah's prediction that Jerusalem would remain desolate for seventy years, is told by the angel Gabriel that the 70 years should be taken to mean seventy weeks (literally "sevens") of years. Verse 1 sets the time of Daniel's vision as the "first year of Darius son of Ahasuerus, by birth a Mede", but no Darius is known to history, nor can he be fitted between the genuine historical figures of Belshazzar and Cyrus.

Identity of Darius the Mede

Many attempts have been made to connect Darius the Mede to known figures, but H.H. Rowley's 1935 study of the question (Darius the Mede and the Four World Empires of Darius the Mede, 1935) demonstrated that each was a false identification.

A few arguments opposing this conclusion: Darius I started his reign about 62 years after the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple (Daniel 5:31, the 62 years). In the book of Daniel the king's name changes from 'king of the Chaldeans = Babylonians' to 'king of the Persians' which also occurred between the kingships of Darius I and Xerxes. The 120 satraps mentioned in Daniel 6:1 can as well be translated as 20 tribute owing satraps. Darius I didn't build in the old Persian capital Pasargadae or Babylon (the centers of power during the reign of Cyrus the Great), he did build however in the old Median capital Ecbatana.

He is generally seen as a literary fiction combining the historical Persian king Darius I and the words of Jeremiah 51:11 that God "stirred up" the Medes against Babylon, but many candidates have been proposed: