AHASUERUS or ACHASHVEROSH, is the name, or rather the le, of four Median and Persian monarchs mentioned in the Bible. The earlier attempts of Simonis and others to derive this name from the Persian &hash are unworthy of notice. Hyde (De Relig. Vet. Pers. p. 43) more boldly proposed to disregard the Masoretic punctua tion, and to read the consonants, Acsuares, so as to correspond with a Persian royal title. Among those who assume the identity of the names Achashverosh and Xerxes, Grotefend believes he has discovered the true orthography of Xerxes in the arrowhead inscriptions of Persepolis. He has deciphered signs representative of the sounds khshhershf, and considers the first part of the word to be the Zend form of the later shah, king' (Heeren's i. 2, 350). Gesenius also (in his Thesaurus) assents to this, except that (as Reland had done before) he takes the first part of the word to be the original form of a lion, and the latter to be that of shah. The Hebrew Achash verosh might thus be a modification of khshhershe : the prosthetic aleph being prefixed (as even Scali ger suggested), and a new vowel being inserted be tween the first two sounds, merely to obviate the difficulty which, as is well known, all Syro-Arabians find inpronouncing two consonants before a vowel. One of the highest authorities in such questions, however, A. F. Pott (Etyma/. Forschungen, i. p. lxv.), considers Xerxes to be a compound of the Zend csathra, king (with loss of the i), and csahya, also meaning king-, the original form of shah ; and suggests that Achashverosh—its identity with Xerxes, as he thinks, not being established—may be the Pelvi huzvaresh, 'hero' (from hu, good, and zour, strength'), corresponding to dpOor, which Herodotus (vi. 98) says is the true sense of Xerxes. Jahn, indeed, first proposed the deriva tion from zvaresh (in his Archliol. IL 2, 244) ; but then he still thought that the first part of the name was dchash—a modern Persian word, which only seems to denote price, value. Lastly, it deserves notice that the kethib, in Esther x. 1, has eivriN, pointed Achaskresh; and that the Syriac version always (and sometimes the Arabic also, as in Dan. ix. i) writes the name Ackshiresh. Ilgen adopts the kethib as the authentic consonants of the name , but changes the vowels to Achshdresn, and modifies his etymology accordingly.
The first Ahasuerus (Sept. ' Acraminpor, Theodo tion, is incidentally mentioned, in Dan. ix.
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 DARIUS.
The second Ahasuerus (Sept. 'Acroot'mpos) occurs in Ezra iv. 6, where it is said that in the beginning of his reign the enemies of the Jews wrote an accusa tion against them, the result of which is not men tioned. The whole question, as to the Persian king here meant, depends on the light in which the passage of this chapter, from ver. 6 to 24, is regarded. The view which Mr. Howes seems to have first proposed, and which Dr. Hales adopted in his Analysis of Chronology, proceeds on the theory that the writer of this chapter, after men tioning the interruption to the building of the temple from the time of Cyrus down to that of Darius, king of Persia (ver. 1-5), is led, by the association of the subject, to enter into a detail of the hindrances thrown in the way of building and fortifying the city (after the temple had been com pleted), under the successors of Darius Hystaspis (ver. 6-23); and that, after this digressive anticipa tion of events posterior to the reign of Darius, he returns (in ver. 24) to the history of the building of the temple under that prince. This view necessarily makes the Achashverosh and Artachshashta of ver. 6 and 7 to be the successors of Darius Hystaspis, i. e., to be Xerxes and Artaxerxes Longimanus. The main argument on which this theory rests, seems to be the circumstance that, in the whole passage, there is no mention whatever of the temple; but, on the contrary, that the setting up the walls of the rebellious city forms the sole ground of complaint : so that the passage must re fer to what occurred after the temple was finished (see the extract from Howes in the Pictorial Bible, ad loc.) There are, however, some objections against the conclusiveness of this reasoning ; for, first, even assuming the object of the enemies of the Jews, in this accusation, to have been to hinder the build ing of the temple, it is yet easy to conceive how the omission of all mention of the temple might be com patible with their end, and dependent on the means they were obliged to employ. They could only obtain their object through the Persian king ; they therefore used arguments likely to weigh with him. They appealed to motives of state policy. Accord
ingly, they sought to alarm his jealousy lest the rebellious city should become strong enough to resist tribute, and refuse to allow the transit of his armies ; they drew attention to the rebuilding of the defences, as the main point of the argument; and said nothing about the temple, because that would be a matter of secondary importance in the only point of view in which the subject would ap pear to the Persian king. But, secondly, it has been shewn by a minute inquiry by Trendelenburg (in Eichhorn's Einleit. in die Apocryph. Schrift. p. 351), that the first hook of the apocryphal Esdras is principally a free, but in parts continuous, transla tion of the canonical Ezra. It is, therefore, remark able that the author of Esdras, who has taken this very account of the accusation from Ezra, was so far from discerning the omission of the temple, and the conclusion that Mr. Howes has drawn from it, that his letter (ii. 16-30) states, that ' The Jews, being come into Jerusalem, that rebellious city, do build the market-place, and repair the walls of it, and do lay the foundation of the temple . . . And forasmuch as the things pertaining to the temple are now in hand, we think it meet not to neglect such a matter.' Josephus also (Antiq. xi. 2, 1), con. formably to his general adherence, in this part, to the.apocryphal Esdras, both uses, in his letter, the same terms about the reconstruction of the temple being then commenced, and even tells the whole story as referring to Cambyses, which makes it clear that he understood the passage of the imme diate successor of Cyrus. Thirdly, it is even pro bable, a priori, that the rebuilding of the temple and of the city itself would, to a certain extent, necessarily go on together. The Jews must have had sufficient time and need, in the fifteen years between the accession of Cyrus and that of Darius Hystaspis, to erect some buildings for the suste nance and defence of the colony, as well as for carrying on the structure of the temple itself. As we read of `celled houses' in Haggai i. 4, they may have built defences sufficient to give a colour to the statements of the letter ; and enough to free a critic from the necessity of transferring the pas sage in Ezra to the time of Artaxerxes Longimanus, solely because it speaks of the erection of the walls. Moreover, as Ezra (ix. 9) speaks of God having enabled the Jews to repair the temple, and of his having `given them a wall in Jerusalem,' we find that, when the temple was finished (and no evidence shews how long before that), they actually had built a wall. Josephus also (Antiq. xi. 4, 4) men tions even `strong walls with which they had sur rounded the city' before the temple was completed. (U is worth while to remark that Dr. Hales, speak. ing of this wall of )~.'zra, endeavours, consistently with his theory, to make it 'most probably mean the fence of a shepherd's fold, here figuratively taken for their establishment in their own land.' But any lexicon will' shew that -11u means a fence, a wall, generally ; and that it is only limited by the context to mean the wall of a garden, the fence of a fold). Again, it is assumed that Nehemiah shews that the walls of the city were not built until his time. Not such, nor the same, as he erected, granted. But—to borrow a remark of J. D. Michaelis—when we read in Neh. i. 3, of the Jews who returned to Persia, and who answered Nehemiah's inquiry after the fate of the colony, by informing him that `the wall of Jerusalem is broken down and the gates thereof burned with fire,' is it possible that they can refer to the de struction of the walls by Nebuchadnezzar, 144 years before? Was such news so long in reaching Nehemiah ? Is it not much easier to believe that the Jews, soon after their return, erected some defences against the hostile and predatory clans around them ; and that, in the many years which intervene between the books of Nehemiah and Ezra (of which we have no record), there was time enough for those tribes to have burnt the gates and thrown down the walls of their imperfect forti fications? Lastly, the view of Mr. Howes seems to require peculiar philological arguments, to re concile the construction of the digression with the ordinary style of Hebrew narrative, and to point out the particles, or other signs disjunctive, by which we may know that ver. 24 is to be severed from the preceding. Nor is it altogether a trivial objection to his theory, that no scholar appears to have entertained it before himself. The nearest approach to it has been made by Vitringa, who, in his Ifypoiyposi Temporum (cited in Michaelis's Adnott. Uberior.), suggests, indeed, that ver. 6 refers to Xerxes, but explains all the rest of the passage as applying to Cambyses.