The biblical book of Daniel describes a Median king named Darius, who sat on the throne of the mighty Medo-Persian Empire at the time when Babylon fell to the armies of the Medes and the Persians (539 BC). Yet Darius the Mede is not a king whom you will read about in a modern history book, for mainstream scholarship affirms that there never was such a person as Darius the Mede. Evangelical Bible scholars have proposed various solutions to harmonize the book of Daniel with extrabiblical literature, but there remains a measure of dissatisfaction with these solutions. This book attempts to break the current scholarly impasse on the issue by arguing for the historicity of the Median king Cyaxares II, who is described at length by the Greek historian Xenophon, and who closely corresponds to Daniel's Darius the Mede. (A revision of the author's Ph.D. dissertation by the same title from Dallas Theological Seminary.)
The biblical book of Daniel describes a Median king named Darius, who sat on the throne of the mighty Medo-Persian Empire at the time when Babylon fell to the armies of the Medes and the Persians (539 BC). Yet Darius the Mede is not a king whom you will read about in a modern history book, for mainstream scholarship affirms that there never was such a person as Darius the Mede. Evangelical Bible scholars have proposed various solutions to harmonize the book of Daniel with extrabiblical literature, but there remains a measure of dissatisfaction with these solutions. This book attempts to break the current scholarly impasse on the issue by arguing for the historicity of the Median king Cyaxares II, who is described at length by the Greek historian Xenophon, and who closely corresponds to Daniel's Darius the Mede. (A revision of the author's Ph.D. dissertation by the same title from Dallas Theological Seminary.)
