DARIUS də rī’ əs. In addition to Darius the Mede (q.v.), it is the name of two Pers. kings mentioned in Haggai, Zechariah, Ezra, and Nehemiah.

1. Darius I Hystaspes (521-486 b.c.), fourth ruler of the Pers. empire (after Cyrus, Cambyses, and Gaumata; cf. Dan 11:2, which lists three kings after Cyrus and before the “richer” king, who is obviously Xerxes). He often is referred to as “Darius the Great” because of his brilliant achievements as restorer of the empire after Gaumata, the Pseudo-Smerdis, usurped the throne from Cambyses (q.v.). The Achaemenid dynasty would prob. have ended with Cambyses had not Darius, one of his officers, son of Hystaspes (a satrap) and great-grandson of Ariyaramnes (brother of Cyrus I), retained the loyalty of the Pers. army. Within two months he had killed Gaumata (522 b.c.) and during the next two years defeated nine kings in nineteen battles to secure his throne. His own account of these victories is recorded in a large trilingual (Old Persian, Akkadian, and Elamite) cuneiform inscr. on the face of the Behistun Rock.

In one of these campaigns a Babylonian usurper claiming the title Nebuchadnezzar IV was trapped with his followers within Babylon. After a long siege the city was taken and three thousand of its leading citizens were crucified as a warning to other potential rebels (Herodotus, III, 159). This helps to explain the amazing zeal of Tattenai to obey a decree of Darius I about a year later to which the following warning was appended “whosoever shall alter this word, let timber be pulled down from his house, and being set up, let him be hanged thereon; and let his house be made a dunghill for this” (Ezra 6:11-13 KJV).

The remaining years of his reign were devoted to the reorganization of the empire into twenty satrapies and many provinces; the establishment of a highly efficient postal system similar to the 19th cent. American pony express (Herodotus VIII, 98; cf. Esth 8:10); the building of a fabulous new capital at Persepolis; the conquest of NW India (c. 514 b.c.); the redigging of an ancient canal from the Nile to the Red Sea (c. 513 b.c.); the conquest of Libya, Thrace, and Macedonia (c. 512 b.c.); the crushing of revolts among Ionian Greeks (500-493 b.c.); and the ill-fated expeditions against Greece (493 and 490 b.c.). Returning to Persia in defeat he died in 486 b.c. while preparing for yet another attack upon Greece.

Darius was buried in a rock-hewn tomb at Naqsh-i-Rustam, a few m. NE of Persepolis. The trilingual inscr. includes these words: “Says Darius the king: By the favor of Ahuramazda I am of such a sort that I am a friend to right, I am not a friend to wrong; it is not my desire that the weak man should have wrong done to him by the mighty; nor is that my desire, that the mighty man should have wrong done to him by the weak.”

Early in his reign, just after securing his throne, Darius I became God’s instrument for encouraging the Jews to complete their second Temple. In 520 b.c., Tattenai, the recently-appointed Pers. governor of W Euphrates provinces (formerly included in the realm of Darius the Mede), challenged the Jews who had started to build their Temple through the encouragement of Haggai and Zechariah (Ezra 5:1-3). Their explanation that Cyrus had given Sheshbazzar (Zerubbabel) official permission to build the Temple was forwarded to Darius I with a request to investigate. Providentially the work was not halted during the long process of searching for Cyrus’ decree (Ezra 5:5).

The transition of royal power from Cambyses to Darius I was so traumatic that it is a testimony to Pers. efficiency that the document was ever discovered. An expanded form of the decree of Cyrus on a parchment scroll had been filed away in a branch library in the distant city of Ecbatana (Ezra 6:2). Darius I then proceeded to issue his own decree, commanding Tattenai to assist the Jews in their work on the Temple and to provide expenses from the tribute that came from the western provinces (Ezra 6:6-12). Doubtless, the king was sufficiently polytheistic (in spite of his devotion to Zoroastrianism) to suspect that Jehovah could either help or injure his dynasty (6:10).

With this substantial material assistance (and with additional words from the Lord during Darius’ fourth year [518 b.c., cf. Zech 7:1-8:23]), the Jews completed the Temple in his sixth year (Feb/March, 516 b.c.). Nothing further is known of the experiences of the Jews during the subsequent thirty years of the reign of Darius I.

2. Darius II Ochus (423-404 b.c.), seventh ruler of the Pers. empire, and son of Artaxerxes I by a Babylonian concubine. His cruel and scheming queen, Parysatis, was frequently the real ruler. The empire disintegrated at an accelerated pace under his administration, with revolts in Sardis, Media, Cyprus, Cadusia and Egypt. In the latter case, the Jewish colony at Elephantine lost their temple (on an island in the Nile of Upper Egypt) and wrote desperate letters to Jerusalem and Samaria for help, all in vain.

It was prob. during the reign of Darius II that Nehemiah went to Jerusalem the second time and found that many abuses had arisen (Neh 13:6ff.). Also, it was during his reign that the names of some Jewish priests were recorded (Neh 12:22). Some have insisted that this must have been Darius III Codomannus (335-331 b.c.), because the same v. mentions a high priest Jaddua, and Josephus states that Jaddua was high priest in 332 b.c. (Antiq. XI. viii. 4). If we assume that Josephus was historically accurate at this point (and this assumption carries with it very embarrassing implications for destructive critics, since Josephus states in the following paragraph that this Jaddua presented a copy of the Book of Dan to Alexander the Great!), he could have been referring to another high priest of the same name or to the same Jaddua at a very advanced age. The Elephantine papyri mention Jaddua’s father Johanan, as being high priest in 408 b.c. (cf. ANET, p. 492). Therefore, Jaddua could easily have been high priest in 404, esp. since he was only five generations removed from Joshua (Neh 12:10, 11), who was high priest until at least 519 (Zech 1:7; 6:11). Consequently, there is no valid reason for denying that this king was Darius II and that Nehemiah could have written this v. as well as all the other vv. of his book.

Bibliography A. T. Olmstead, History of the Persian Empire (1948); J. B. Pritchard (ed.), Ancient Near Eastern Texts (1950); G. C. Cameron, “Darius Carved History on Ageless Rock” National Geographic Magazine (Dec., 1950); R. Ghirshman, Iran (1954); J. Finegan, Light From the Ancient Past (1959); Pfeiffer and Vos, The Wycliffe Historical Geography of Bible Lands (1967).