Darius the Mede by Hunter Irvine
“That very night, Belshazzar, king of the Babylonians, was slain, and Darius the Mede took over the kingdom, at the age of sixty-two (Daniel 5:31-32 NIV).
There is a big dispute as to the identity of “Darius the Mede,” since he is not found by name in other historical sources. Incredible as this may sound, I have learned this all boils down to a name issue. But I start by acknowledging that many people think Darius the Mede was a ruler put in place by King Cyrus immediately after he conquered Babylon. The evidence against this theory:
First: Though the Persians and Medes were allies, I doubt King Cyrus would have appointed a Mede be a king with the power to appoint 120 satraps to rule throughout the kingdom, as is shown in Daniel 6:1! I support this by noting what Herodotus said: “It will be seen that the governorship (or satrapy, as the Persians call it) of Assyria is by far the most coveted of all their provincial posts…” (Book One; 192)(1).
Second: If Darius the Mede was simply put a ruling position in Babylon by King Cyrus around 536 B.C. (or some scholars say 539 B.C. while other scholars say 538 B.C.), then that means the incident of Darius putting Daniel in the den on lions would have taken place when Daniel was at least 85 years old, because Daniel was taken to Babylon around 605 B.C.
So who is Darius the Mede? The only reason I was able to detect his identity is because there was a period in the spring of 2008 when I would come home after a big day of work and read sections of The Histories by Herodotus, though I skipped over a number of sections and the end chapters since there is so much violence. In carefully reading certain sections of that ancient history which has been studied for centuries, I was able to discern Darius the Mede was King Astyages; he fits the description.
First, in Daniel 5:31 we learn Darius the Mede was age 62 when he took over. And Herodotus tells us Astyages had reigned for 35 years before he was defeated by King Cyrus. That would mean that his reign ended between 561 B.C. and 550 B.C., thus he would be older during that time period.
Second, Astyages was portrayed by Herodotus as violent, the type of person who would throw a nice guy in a lion’s den.
This is not my new theory or a recent theory. I have seen one scholar propose Astyages as Darius the Mede. That scholar was the author of a book from around the mid-1900's which I read a part of standing in a used Christian bookstore around ten years ago, the reason I got to pondering the subject myself.
But then why do so many people dispute this? If Asytages was Darius the Mede, and he took over Babylon in the 550's B.C., they conclude there would be no grounds for King Cyrus conquering it in 536 B.C. Makes sense. Yet I figured out the golden point! King Astyages, a Mede, gained control over the resistant Babylon after “Belshazzar” was slain. But then it would have only been a few years later, with this all happening between 561 B.C. and 550 B.C., that King Cyrus the Persian defeated King Astyages. The golden point is that just because King Cyrus defeated King Astyages, does not mean that Cyrus immediately inherited what had been the entire Median Empire. Many provinces, including Babylon, which was never fond of foreign rule, went back to self-rule I propose, based on information Herodotus gives. King Cyrus had to recapture certain lost territory!
Support of this is the fact Babylon even had a revolt later under Persian rule, and gained self rule for a short period of time! This happened under the reign of King Darius the third Persian ruler, not the Mede. “The revolt had been long and carefully planned; indeed, preparations for withstanding a siege had been going quietly on all through the reign of Magus and the disturbances which followed the rising of the seven against him, and somehow or other the secret never leaked out” (Book Three; 150) (2).
Herodotus goes on tell about how King Darius (not Darius the Mede) worked to get Babylon back. "[Babylon] could not be taken, not even when Darius, after all else failed, attempted to repeat the method which Cyrus had previously used with success. The Babylonians were always on the watch with extraordinary vigilance, and gave the enemy no chance" (Book Three; 152) (3).
You can read about how the Persians regained Babylon from there in a story which shows how the Persians even resorted to deranged measures in their effort to regain rule over Babylon. So what Herodotus calls the second capture, I would agree was a second for Persia, yet previously, the Medes had captured Babylon sometime near the end of the reign of King Astyages, probably only a short time before Babylon went back to self rule after Astyages, Darius the Mede, was defeated by King Cyrus the Persian.
Thus King Astyages, as called by Herodotus, was called by the Hebrew author of the book of Daniel "Darius the Mede." And the Median rule of Babylon by him and the rule by King Cyrus, had a period of Babylonian self rule in between! Wow.
Hunter Irvine
(1) Herodotus, The Histories, trans. Aubrey De Selincourt (New York: Penguin Books, 1954), 84.
(2) Herodotus, The Histories, trans. Aubrey De Selincourt (New York: Penguin Books, 1954), 235.
(3) Herodotus, The Histories, trans. Aubrey De Selincourt (New York: Penguin Books, 1954), 236.
