Three Persian kings are known by the name Darius; here we deal specifically with "Darius the Mede," who is mentioned only in the book of Daniel. There is no external historical record pertaining to a Persian king by such a name in the period suggest by Daniel. Biblical scholars of the critical sorts simply conclude from this that the book of Daniel is historically unreliable. Naturally, believing scholars debate the identity of "Darius the Mede." Historians, generally and understandably, have no interest in him.
"Darius the Mede" is mentioned in Daniel in the following passages:
"That very night Belshazzar, king of the Babylonians, was slain, and Darius the Mede took over the kingdom, at the age of sixty-two." (5:30-31)
"In the first year of Darius son of Xerxes (a Mede by descent), who was made ruler over the Babylonian kingdom . . ." (9:1)
". . . but first I will tell you what is written in the Book of Truth. (No one supports me against them except Michael, your prince. 1And in the first year of Darius the Mede, I took my stand to support and protect him.) 2'Now then, I tell you the truth: . . ." (10:21-11:2)
Here then is a digest of the main 'historical' facts Daniel tells us about Darius the Mede:
A. Darius the Mede succeeded to the throne upon the death of Belshazzar, the last Babylonian king, making him the first king of the Persian Empire, instead of Cyrus,
B. this happened when he was 62 years old,
C. his father was Xerxes ("Ahasuerus" in Hebrew),
Accordingly, Darius' reign was a time when Daniel enjoyed a distinguished place in the royal administration and sparked the jealousy that led to his (and his three companions') ordeal in the lion's den (Chap 6). It was also in his time that Daniel prayed his great prayer for Jerusalem during which he received a visit from the angel Gabriel (Dan 9).
As noted earlier, the identity of this king remains a matter of debate among biblical scholars, and no one proposal has received wide acceptance. The more important proposals include, very briefly:
1. 'Darius the Mede' was "another name given to the general who actually captured Babylon on behalf of Cyrus. He is referred to in cuneiform sources as Ugbaru or Gubaru and in classical writings as Gobryas"1 . However, there is no evidence that this Ugbaru, though made governor of 'Babylon and Beyond the River,' was never called 'king,' Additionally he died not long after his capture of Babylon and so was not likely to have provided the temporal space to play the role that 'Darius the Mede' was portrayed to do in the book of Daniel.
2. 'Darius the Mede' was Gubaru, but a different person by the same name. This proposal by J. C. Whitcomb argues that the Ugbaru and Gubaru of the cuneiform sources were two different persons. Ugbaru captured the city of Babylon, but it was Gubaru who was appointed governor of 'Babylon and Beyond the River.' The weakness of this proposal was the fact—of which Whitcomb was, apparently, unaware—that Gubaru did not take up office until the 4th year of Cyrus' reign.
3. 'Darius the Mede' was another name for Cyrus, the acknowledge first king of the Persian Empire. This proposal comes from the renown British archaeologist and biblical scholar, D. J. Wiseman. Wiseman bases his proposal on the text of Dan 6:28 ("So Daniel prospered during the reign of Darius and the reign of Cyrus the Persian").2 The conjunction 'and' is signified in the Hebrew text by what is called waw. Waw, however, is capable of a broad range of interpretation depending on things like what parts of speech precedes it. Wiseman argues that the waw that joins "the reign of Darius" and "the reign of Cyrus the Persian" should be understood as a waw explicativum, i.e., an 'explicative conjunction, that is, the latter phrase, "the reign of Cyrus the Persian" is added to clarify the previous one, "the reign of Darius." Translated into English, the verse would read something like this: "So Daniel prospered during the reign of Darius, even the reign of Cyrus the Persian" or "So Daniel prospered during the reign of Darius, i.e., the reign of Cyrus the Persian." This proposal is enticing because it makes semantic sense—the use of waw explicativum is well attested in the Hebrew—without having to resort to cross-identifying Darius with some other person. Additionally, Cyrus was about sixty-two at the time of his conquest of Babylon. The proposal, however, faces the snag in the fact that Cyrus's father's name was Cambyses and not Ahasuerus. Despite this difficulty, Wiseman's proposal is accepted by many evangelical scholars.
4. A more recent proposal that is gaining a great deal of interest is that Darius the Mede is to be identified with Cyaxares II. To appreciate the substance of this proposal (which is really a 'meatified' version of an old one) we need to understand something about the sources for the modern reconstruction of ancient Persian history. Until the advent of archaeological research in the late 19th Cent, almost everything we know about the ancient civilizations were recontructed from ancient literary sources; in the case of the Persian Empire, these had come mainly from Herodotus, and the younger Xenophon.3 Unfortunately for us, these two sources often contradict one another, especially in their appreciation of the relationship betweeen the Medes and the Persians in the early days of Cyrus and his establishment of the Persian Empire. While Herodotus makes no mention of Cyaxares II, Xenophon reports him as being one of the Median kings, who led the conquest of Babylon in the Median-Persian coalition that overthrew the Babylonian empire. Could he have been the man Daniel calls 'Darius the Mede'? It was a possibility that enjoyed wide support among early Christian and Jewish commentators, including Josephus and Jerome, and remained the standard interpretation all through the Reformation and into the 19th Cent. What changed was the discovery of Akkadian inscriptions about 1880 which favoured Herodotus's account instead of Xenophon's. A new lease of life, however, has been given to the identification of Darius the Mede with Cyaxares II in a doctoral dissertation submitted by Steven Anderson to the Dallas Theological Seminary in 2014. Anderson's reinstatement of Cyaxares II as Darius the Mede has attracted much attention among evangelical commentators.
There have, of course, been many other proposals. Click here for a 9-page summary and critique (Pdf) of almost all them by Steven Anderson.
In conclusion, we may reaffirm an observation from thee past history of biblical studies. The historical reliability of various parts of the Bible have been challenged before but it has always emerged from such challenges vindicated. We don't know everything there is to know about the past, and he is a foolish historian to think that any one conclusion is settled. It is the habit of archaeological research that new discoveries may yet be found to upset any such conclusion; that is the whole point of doing archaeology, is it not?
Notes:
1. Ernest Lucas, Daniel, (AOTC; Leicester: Inter-Varsity Press, 2002), 135.
2. Wiseman's proposal, revised in the light of criticism, can be found in Some Historical Problems in the Book of Daniel," Notes on Some Problem in the Book of Daniel, ed. by (London: Tyndale Press, 1965), 9-18.
3. For a very helpful summary of this, see Rodger C. Young, "Xenophon's Cyaxares: Uncle of Cyrus, Friend of Daniel," Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 64.2 (2021): 265-85.
Read the entry in:
Eaton's Illustrated Bible Dictionary
International Standard Bible Encyclopedia
Resources:
BibleGateway, Encyclopedia of the Bible ← Darius the Mede
Steven Anderson, "Darius the Mede: A solution to his identity," TruthOnlyBible.com. This work essentially summarizes Anderson's PhD dissertation submitted to the Dallas Theological Seminary (click here to download a Pdf copy of the dissertation).
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Steven D. Anderson and Rodger C. Young, "The Rememberace of Daniel's Darius the Mede in Berossus and Harpocration," Bibliotheca Sacra 173 (2016):315-23.
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