Darius the Mede

Darius the Mede is the ruler who "received the kingdom" on the night Belshazzar was killed and Babylon passed to the Medes and Persians in 539 BC (Daniel 5:28-31). The text gives his age as about sixty-two, calls him "the son of Ahasuerus, by descent a Mede," and says he "was made king over the realm of the Chaldeans" (Daniel 9:1). He is a different man from the three Achaemenid kings named Darius who have their own entries: Darius I (the Great), Darius II and Darius III, who reigned between 522 and 330 BC.

Biblical Account

At the Fall of Babylon Darius succeeds Belshazzar (Daniel 5:31). He sets 120 satraps over the kingdom, answerable to three high officials of whom Daniel is one (Daniel 6:1-2). The other officials persuade him to sign an injunction that for thirty days no one may petition any god or man except the king (Daniel 6:6-9). When Daniel is accused, Darius labours to save him, is told that "a law of the Medes and Persians" cannot be changed, and passes the night fasting (Daniel 6:14-18). Finding Daniel alive at dawn, he throws the accusers to the lions and writes to all peoples that Daniel's God is "the living God, enduring forever" (Daniel 6:19-27); see Daniel in the Lions' Den. The chapter closes: "So this Daniel prospered during the reign of Darius and the reign of Cyrus the Persian" (Daniel 6:28). Daniel's prayer over the seventy years foretold to Jeremiah is dated to the first year of Darius (Daniel 9:1-2), as is the angel's word, "in the first year of Darius the Mede, I stood up to confirm and strengthen him" (Daniel 11:1). Isaiah and Jeremiah had both named the Medes as the power that would bring Babylon down (Isaiah 13:17; Jeremiah 51:11).

Historical Context

The Nabonidus Chronicle records the events without any Darius. On 16 Tashritu (12 October 539 BC) Ugbaru, governor of Gutium, and the army of Cyrus entered Babylon without a battle, and Nabonidus, who had left the city the day before, was captured when he returned; on 3 Arahsamnu (29 October) Cyrus the Great entered Babylon; Gubaru, his governor, appointed sub-governors in Babylon; and on the night of 11 Arahsamnu Ugbaru died. Contract tablets are dated from the accession year of Cyrus onward, and texts from 535 to 524 BC name Gubaru as governor of Babylon and the district beyond the Euphrates. Cyrus had absorbed Media by 550 BC, so "the Medes and Persians" of Daniel 6 was a single realm.

Identification

Several identifications have been proposed by scholars who hold Daniel to be a reliable record. The first, argued by R. D. Wilson and revived in detail by J. C. Whitcomb (1959), identifies Darius with Gubaru, Cyrus's governor of Babylon, whom Whitcomb distinguishes from the short-lived general Ugbaru: Gubaru ruled with sub-governors under him, as Daniel 6:1 describes, and "received the kingdom" would mean he held it under Cyrus. Its weakness is that no tablet calls Gubaru king, a Mede, or son of Ahasuerus, and none gives his age. The second, proposed by D. J. Wiseman in 1957, reads Daniel 6:28 with an explicative "and": "the reign of Darius, even the reign of Cyrus the Persian," a construction found in 1 Chronicles 5:26, where Pul and Tiglath-pileser are one king. On this view Darius is a second name of Cyrus, who according to Herodotus was grandson of the Median king Astyages through his mother Mandane, who appointed governors, and who by the reckoning of Bengel and Sidney Smith was about sixty-two in 539 BC. Its weakness is that Cyrus is nowhere else called Darius or son of Ahasuerus. A third view, held by Jerome, follows Xenophon's Cyaxares, son of Astyages, a king unknown to Herodotus. Ugbaru has also been proposed, though the chronicle records his death within a month of the conquest, an interval most regard as too short for the thirty-day decree and the "first year" of Daniel 6 and 9. The critical position, set out by H. H. Rowley in 1935, treats Darius the Mede as a literary figure built from the prophecies about the Medes and from Darius I.

Theological Significance

Darius stands in Daniel as a foreign king who learns the limit of his own law: his decree cannot save Daniel, but Daniel's God can (Daniel 6:20-22), and his letter confesses that the kingdom of Daniel's God "shall never be destroyed" (Daniel 6:26).