AHASUERUS (Heb. akh-ash-vay-rosh'), or Achashverosh, is the name, or rather the title, of four Median and Persian monarchs mentioned in the Bible.
(1) Father of Darius. The first Ahasuerus is incidentally mentioned in Dan. ix :1, as the father of Darius the Mede. It is generally agreed that the person here referred to is the Astyages of profane history (see the article DAatus).
(2) Successor of Cyrus. The second Ahas uerus occurs in Ezra iv:6, where it is said that in the beginning of his reign the enemies of the Jews wrote an accusation against them, the re sult of which is not mentioned. The Persian king here meant seems to be the immediate succes sor of Cyrus, the frantic tyrant Cambyscs, who came to the throne B. C. 529, and died after a reign of seven years and five months.
(3) Ahasuerus of the Book of Esther. The third Ahasuerus is the Persian king of the book of Esther. The chief facts recorded of him there, and the dales of their occurrence, which are important in the subsequent inquiry, are these: In the third year of his reign he made a sumptuous banquet for all his nobility, and pro longed the feast for 18o days. Being on one occasion merry with wine, he ordered his queen Vashti to he brought out, to show the people her beauty. On her refusal to violate the decorum of her sex, he not only indignantly divorced her, but published an edict concerning her disobedience, in order to insure to every husband in his domin ions the rule in his own house.
In the seventh year of his reign he married Esther, a Jewess, who, however, concealed her parentage. In the twelfth year of his reign, his minister, Haman, who had received some slights from Mord'cai the Jew, offered him io,000 talents of silver for the privilege of ordering a massacre of the Jews in all parts of the empire on an ap pointed day. The king refused this immense sum,
but acceded to his request ; and couriers were dispatched to the most distant provinces to en join the execution of this decree. Before it was accomplished, however, Mordecai and Esther ob tained such an influence over him that he so far annulled his recent enactment as to dispatch other couriers to empower the Jews to defend them selves manfully against their enemies on that day; the result of which was that they slew Boo of his native subjects in Shushan, and 75,000 of them in the provinces.
(4) Late Research. Almost every Medo Persian king, from Cyaxarcs I. down to Artaxer xes Ili (Ochus), has in his turn found some champion to assert his title to be the Ahasuerus of Esther, but the question has at last been au thentically settled by the decipherment of the cuneiform inscriptions.
In a personal letter on this subject, Prof. A. H. Sayce says: "Ahasuerus and Xerxes are the same name. and there is only one Xerxes to whom the account in the book of Esther can refer. That is the famous Xerxes I. Thanks to the decipher ment of cuneiform inscriptions, we now know that the Persian kings did not have two names, so that the old attempt to identify Xerxes of Esther with Darius or Artaxerxes can never be renewed." J. A. Selbie, Hastings' Bib. Did., says the Ahas uerus of Dan. ix, the father of Darius the Mede, is a personage whose identity is as difficult to estab lish as the existence of 'Darius the Mede' is prob lematical.
(5) The Fourth Ahasuerus. Still another Ahasuerus is mentioned in Tobit. xiv:15 in con nection with the destruction of Nineveh. This in dicates that Cyaxares was the man to whom al lusion is made by Herodottis (Herod. t :to6).