C. K. v. Hofmann (die 70 Yahre, etc., p. 44, ff.) identifies 'Belshazzar with the boy .Labosordack. His father Neriglissar, who, according to Berosus had married a daughter of Nebuchadnezzar, occu pied the throne four years as viceroy and guardian of his son, whose years Daniel dates from the death of Evil-merodach (hence the third year,' Dan. viii. r). With Belshazzar the house of Nebuchadnezzar ceased to reign. Then Astyages regarded himself as heir, and Nabonned, elected by the slayers of Belshazzar, reigned as his vassal, but after a while sought to effect his independence by a league with Lydia. So began the war first with Crmsus, and, that finished, against Nabonned. When Cyrus had taken Babylon (B.c. 538), Astyages assigned it to his own younger brother, the Cyaxares II. of Xenophon = Darius. So, in Dan. v. 30, vi. we have an abbreviated account of what really took place. With Belshazzar, grandson of Nebu chadnezzar, that dynasty came to an end, as fore told, Jer. xxvii. 7 ; for Nabonned was only TLS rCe'v BapiAc7wor (Berosus). The Chaldean kingdom, it is true, still continued for a while, but only as a dependence of Media.
Here it is assumed that the announcement, v. 28, Thy kingdom is divided to the Medes and Per sians,' was fulfilled in the person of Astyages im mediately on the death of Belshazzar, but that the fulfilment is not noted. Yet surely it ought to have been ; and so it is, if the copula in vi. I looks back to that prediction. ' In that same night, Bel shazzar, the Chaldean king, was slain, and—as Daniel had interpreted the writing on the wall— Darius the Mede took the kingdom.' M. v. Niebuhr Gesch. Assnrs u. Babels, 91, ff., perceives this necessary connection, and determines that Belshazzar is Evil-merodach, son and successor of Nebuchadnezzar ; that, on his death (slain by Neriglissar, his sister's husband), Astyages, who is Daniel's Darius the Mede, reigned one year at Babylon, which year in the Canon is I Neriglissar ; in the following year he was conquered by Cyrus. After the fall of this Darius-Astyages, Babylon recovered its independence under Nabonned, to fall under the arms of Cyrus, B.C. 538. Daniel himself passed from the service of Darius to that of Cyrus, and did not again return to Babylon : so vi , 28 is explained. The mention, Dan. viii. i, of the third year of Belshazzar makes a difficulty—not as v. Niebuhr puts it, because Evil-merodach has but two years in the Canon, for the actual reign may very well have reached its third year, but from the mention of Susa as the scene of the vision ; for Susa being Median was not subject to any Chaldean king. The explanation gravely pro posed by v. Niebuhr is, that Daniel while at Susa in the service of Darius the Mede continued to date by years of Belshazzar's reign ; and this, though he is related to have been present in Babylon the night in which Belshazzar was slain. The diffi culty is not confined to M.v. Niebuhr's scheme : Belshazzar, whoever he was, was a Chaldean ; and the explanation may be, that the prophet is at Susa, not in bodily presence, but transported in spirit to the city which was to be the metropolis of the Persian monarchy, the fate of which, under the em blem of the ram, is portrayed in the ensuing vision.
2. Darius, king of Persia,' in whose second year the building of the Temple was resumed, and completed in his sixth (Ezra iv. 5, 24 ; vi. 15), un der the prophesying of Haggai and Zechariah, is understood by most writers, ancient and modern, to be Darius son of Hystaspes, whose reign in the Canon extends from 521 to 485 D.C. Scaliger, however, makes him Darius Nothus (424-405 B.C.), and this view has been recently advocated by the late Dr. Mill, The Evangelical Accounts of the Birth and Parentage of our Saviour, etc., 1842, p. 153-165, who refers for further arguments to Hot finger, Pentas Dissertationani, p. 107-114. Be fore we examine the grounds on which this conclu sion rests, it will be convenient to consider the difficulties with which it is attended.
Zerubbabel son of Shealtiel, as prince of the house of David, and Jeshua son of Jozadak, as high-priest, headed the first colony of exiles from Babylon in the first year of Cyrus (Ezra iii. 2), at which time neither can have been less than twenty years old. By these same two persons the work
of rebuilding the temple was resumed and com pleted after its suspension. Now from the first year of Cyrus, in the biblical reckoning (536 B.c.) to the second of Darius Nothus (423 B.c.) are 113 years : so that, if he be the Darius of this history, both Zerubbabel and Jeshua must then have reached the age of 130 years at least. This is incredi ble, if not in itself, certainly under the entire silence of the history and the contemporary pro phets as to a fact so extraordinary. Moreover, that the work of rebuilding the temple should have been abandoned for a century and more is scarcely conceivable. Its suspension dur ina fifteen or sixteen years is sufficiently ac counted for by the history and the representations of the prophets. The adversaries weakened the hands of the people of Judah, and troubled them in building, and hired counsellors against them to frustrate their purpose all the days of Cyrus, even until the reign of Darius' (Ezra iv. 4. 5). Besides molesting the builders in their work, they pre vailed by their machinations at the court of Cyrus, or of his viceroy, to bring it to a stand-still, by in terposing official obstacles, stopping the grants from the royal treasury (vi. 4), and the supply of materials from the forest and the quarry (iii. 7). So the people were discouraged : they said, The time is not come for the house of the Lord to he built,' and turned to the completion of their own houses and the tilling of their lands (Hagg. i. 3). This is intelligible on the supposition of an in terval of fifteen or sixteen years, during which, there having been no decree issued to stop it, the work was nominally in progress, only deferred, as the builders could allege at the time of its resump tion, Since that time (2d of Cyrus), even until now, bath it been in building, and yet it is not finished' (Ezra v. 16). But in no sense could the temple be said to have been in building' through the entire reigns of Cambyses, Darius, Xerxes, and Artaxerxes I.: there is no testimony to the fact, nor any means of accounting for it. Again, the persons addressed by Haggai are the residue of the people' who came from Babylon with Zerubbabcl and Jeshua, some of whom had seen the first house in its glory (ii. 2. 3), i.e., who might be some So years old on the usual view, but on the other must have been 170 at the least. The prophet further admonishes his countrymen that the blights, droughts, and mildews which year by year disappointed their labours in the fields were the chastisement of their want of faith in letting the House of God lie waste, while they dwelt in their ceiled houses' (s. 4-17) ; so long as they had been guilty of this neglect, so long had they been visited with this punishment. On the one supposition, this state of things had lasted from twelve to fifteen years at most ; on the other, we are required to imagine that the curse had been on the land for three successive generations, an entire century. Lastly, in the same second year of Darius, Zechariah distinctly intimates what length of time had elapsed from the destruction of the first temple—' threescore and ten years' (i. 12). So in vii. 5 mention is made of a period of 70 years, during which the people had fasted and mourned in the fifth and seventh month.' The events commemorated by those fasts were the de struction of the temple in the fifth, and the murder of Gedaliah in the seventh month of the same year. From that year to the 2d of Darius I. are almost, if not exactly, 70 years. To the corre sponding year of Darius II. the interval is more than 16o years, and the mention of those 70 years' is quite unintelligible, if that be the epoch of Zechariah's prophesying. Certainly, if the pro phecies of Haggai and Zechariah, and the first five chapters of Ezra, are worth anything as testi mony, the second year of Darius' must lie with in one generation from the decree of Cyrus, and not more than 70 years from the destruction of the first temple. The conclusion is inevitable, unless we are prepared to deny that the Koresh of Scrip ture is the Cyrus of the Greeks, and to affirm that Nebuchadnezzar was contemporary with Darius, son of Hystaspes.