ARTAXERXES, ARTACHSHAST (\floonpriN as it is most frequently written) is the title under which more than one Persian king is mentioned in the Old Testament. The Hebrew form is a slight corruption of which letters De Sacy has deciphered in the inscriptions of Nakshi Rustam, and which he vocalizes Artahshetr(Antiq. a'. 1. Perse, p. too). Gesenius pronounces them Artachshatr; and, by assuming the easy change of r into s, and the transposition of the s, makes Artachshast very closely represent its prototype. The word is a compound, the first element of which, arta—found in several Persian names—is generally admitted to mean great; the latter part De Sacy conceived to be the Zend lashethro, King, to which Gesenius and Pott assent. Thus the sense of great warrior, which Herodotus (vi. 98) assigned to the Greek form Artaxerxes, accords with that which etymology discovers in the original Persian title (particularly when we consider that, as the king could only be chosen from the soldier caste—from the Xshatriyas—warrior and king are so far cognate terms) ; although Pott, according to his etymology of Xerxes, takes Artaxerxes to be more than equivalent to Artachshatr—to be mag nus regum rex' (EOrtet. Forsch. i. p. lxvii.) The first ARTACHSHAST (NMrjenllll- , and once pointed Artachshashta ; Sept. is men tioned in Ezra iv. 7-24 as the Persian king who, at the instigation of the adversaries of the Jews, obstructed the rebuilding of the Temple, from his time to that of Darius, king of Persia. According to the arguments adduced in the art. AHASUERUS, this king is the immediate predecessor of Darius Hystaspis, and can be no other than the Magian impostor, Smcrdis, who seized on the throne B. c. 521, and was murdered after a usurpation of less than eight months (Herod. iii. 61.78). Profane historians, indeed, have not mentioned him under the title of Artaxerxes ; but neither do Herodotus and Justin (the latter of whom calls him Oropasta, i. 9) agree in his name; so that this fact is not, of itself, enough to invalidate any deductions which are in other respects sound.
As to the second ARTACHSHAST (str1Dt..,31v1st ; Sept. ' ApOaoao-Oct), in the seventh year of whose reign Ezra led a second colony of the Jewish exiles back to Jerusalem (Ezra vii. 1, sq.), the opinions are divided between Xerxes and his son Artaxerxes Longimanus. The arguments brought forward by the advocates for Xerxes, among whom are J. D. Michaelis, Jahn, and De Wette, are briefly as follows : That, as the preceding portion of the book of Ezra relates to Darius Hystaspis, it is most natural to expect that the next following section should refer to his successor, Xerxes ; that, on the supposition that Artaxerxes is here meant, we not only have to explain how the reign of Xerxes, who had been so favourable to the Jews, is entirely omitted here, but also how the narrative can make such a tremendous leap as from the sixth year of Darius to the seventh of Artaxerxes, a period of fifty-eight years ; that, on that suppo sition, the interval between the seventh year of his reign, when Ezra set out, allows too short a space for the affairs of the colony to have reached that state of disorder in which Nehemiah found them on his arrival at Jerusalem, in the twentieth year of his reign; and, lastly, that Josephus calls the king in question Xerxes (Joseph. Antiq. xi. 5.
supporters of the other alternative—that the king nere meant is Artaxerxes Longimanus—among whom are J. H. Michaelis, Eichhom, and Bertholdt, rest on the following reasons, as stated chiefly by Bertholdt : That the coherence between the several portions of the book of Ezra is by no means so strict as to make the first argument conclusive; as, even assuming that Xerxes is the person referred to, there is still a gap of thirty-six years between the end of ch. vi. and the beginning of ch. vii. ; that
the objection, that the interval between the arrivals of Ezra and Nehemiah in Jerusalem is too short (on the supposition that the former left Babylon in the reign of Artaxerxes) to account for the confusion in which the latter found the colony, loses its force, if we consider that the progress of the infant state was necessarily slow in its difficult position, and if we also conceive Ezra's efforts to have been more directed to reform the religious than the civil state of the Jews ; that the appeal to Josephus is of no avail, as he calls the king in whose reign Nehemiah returned Xerxes also, which is decidedly incorrect, since Nehemiah went back to Persia in the thirty second year of the king 6), and Xerxes only reigned twenty-one years ; that the Apocryphal Esdras, in its version of this history, calls the king Artaxerxes; that, in taking our Artachshast to be Artaxerxes Longimanus, we have the support of a considerable resemblance in the two names; and lastly, that (if Xerxes is the Achashverosh of the books of Esther and Ezra) we not only avoid the evil attending the other alternative—the evil of being obliged to recognise him under two widely different names in almost contemporaneous books —but also find Artaxerxes under one and the same name in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah. This last argument proceeds on the assumption that the Artachshast of whom Ezra and Nehemiah speak is the same person; and, as Ezra and Nehemiah were decidedly contemporaries (Neh. viii. 9), the reasons here adduced may derive some additional force from the arguments brought forward below.
The third ARTACHSHAST (the forms in the He brew and Sept. are the same as in the last case) is the Persian king who, in the twentieth year of his reign, considerately allowed Nehemiah to go to Jerusalem for the furtherance of purely national objects, invested him with the government of his own people, and allowed him to remain there for twelve years (Neh. ii. 1, sq.; v. 14). It is almost unanimously agreed that the king here intended is Artaxerxes Longimanus, who reigned from the year 464 to 425 B.C. The date of Nehetniah's departure is, therefore, the year 444 B.C. Some few have indeed maintained (and it seems prin cipally for the purpose of reconciling Neh. xiii. 28, with Joseph. Antiq. xi. 8. 3, 4) that the king here referred to is Artaxerxes Mnemon, who reigned from the year B.C. 404 to 359; and J. D. Michaelis (Anmerk. f. Ungel.) admits that he should not know how to refute any one who advocated that opinion. Bertholdt, however (Xinleit. iii. 1014), endeavours to find a conclusive argument in the fact that Eliashib, who was the high-priest when Nehemiah arrived at Jerusalem (iii. I), was the grandson of the high-priest Jeshua, who accom panied the first colony under Zerubbabel (xii. r, to). He argues, namely, that the three generations which elapsed between the accession of Cyrus and the arrival of Nehemiah, and which in the ordinary computation amount to ninety-nine years, tally so exactly with the ninety-two years which intervene between the first year of Cyrus and the twentieth year of Artaxerxes Longimanus, as to render it far more probable that the latter is the Artachshast of the book of Nehemiah ; where as, on the supposition that Artaxerxes Mneinon is the person meant, Eliashib and his father and grandfather must have enjoyed the high-priesthood between them for the incredible period of 154 years. — J. N.