Cyrus was not "the king of
Babylon" Cyrus was "the king of the Persians and the Medes."
Daniel 1:1 In the third year of the reign of Jehoiakim king of Judah came Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon unto Jerusalem, and besieged it.
The book opens by claiming that Nebuchadnezzar besieged Jerusalem in the third year of Jehoiakim, and carried the king into Babylon along with some of the temple treasures. In fact, the chronology of the Exile in II Kings 24 places the first siege in the first year of the reign of Jehoiachin, Jehoiakim's son, some eight years later than Daniel's chronology.
II Kings 24:8-13 Jehoiachin was eighteen years old when he began to reign, and he reigned in Jerusalem three months...At that time the servants of Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon came up against Jerusalem, and the city was besieged...And Jehoiachin the king of Judah went out to the king of Babylon, he, and his mother, and his servants, and his princes, and his officers: and the king of Babylon took him in the eighth year of his reign...And he carried out thence all the treasures of the house of the Lord...
The book of Jeremiah agrees with this date, but fails to mention any earlier siege during the reign of Jehoiakim.
Jeremiah 29:1-2 Now these are the words of the letter that Jeremiah the prophet sent from Jerusalem unto the residue of the elders which were carried away captives, and to the priests, and to the prophets, and to all the people whom Nebuchadnezzar had carried away captive from Jerusalem to Babylon; (After that Jeconiah [Jehoiachin] the king, and the queen, and the eunuchs, the princes of Judah and Jerusalem, and the carpenters, and the smiths, were departed from Jerusalem...)
In fact, in Jeremiah 36:9, we find Jehoiakim in Jerusalem in his fifth year, two years after the time that Daniel claims he was carried away to Babylon. The Babylonian records indicate that Nebuchadnezzar made Judah a vassal state in about 603 BCE, when Jehioakim was still king, but do not record a capture of Jerusalem at that time. At the time that Daniel claimed that Nebuchadnezzar was engaged in a siege against Jerusalem, the Babylonian records indicate that he was occupied with a war against Necho, king of Egypt (Jeremiah 46:2), and then returned home to Babylon to succeed his father as king.
How did Daniel arrive at the conclusion that the siege took place in the third year of Jehoiakim? One possibility is that he had before him two incompatible accounts of the Exile - II Kings 24 and II Chronicles 36. The latter passage claims that Jehoiakim was indeed carried away to Babylon, although this fact is not mentioned in any other Biblical account (in fact, it seems to contradict Jeremiah), nor does it square with the Babylonian account of the wars of Nebuchadnezzar. Being a true Bible believer, Daniel obviously decided that both accounts must be true, and combined them to create a third account, one which is incompatible with both Kings and Chronicles. Another possibility is that Daniel misread II Kings 24:1, and assumed that the three years of vassalage referred to the third year of Jehoiakim.
The word Chaldeans originally referred to a Babylonian tribe that overthrew the Assyrians in the seventh century BCE, and established the neo-Babylonian empire. At the time of the Exile and later, the word was synonymous with the Babylonians (5:30, 9:1). In time, however, the word Chaldeans also came to refer to the educated, priestly class in the Babylonian society, and it is this later usage that Daniel employs (see 2:2, 3:8, 4:7, 5:7).
Daniel records that the Babylonian Empire fell to a certain king by the name of Darius, a Mede. (5:31, 9:1). Neither the Babylonian nor the Persian histories record such a person. Herodotus, who wrote his history about 440 BCE, records that Babylon fell to the Persian army, under the control of King Cyrus. Darius the Mede is never mentioned. In fact, the Median kingdom was conquered and assimilated by Cyrus as early as 550 BCE, when he defeated Astyages, king of Media.
There is good evidence that the person that Daniel imagined to be Darius the Mede was in fact Darius I Hystaspes, the king of Persia from 521 to 485 BCE. The author of Daniel, writing in the second century BCE, confused this king with his own creation, Darius the Mede.
In Daniel 9:1, Darius is said to be the son of Ahasuerus, commonly acknowledged to be a variant spelling of Artaxerxes (Esther 1:1). The problem, of course, is that Artaxerxes was a persian. Artaxerxes was the father of a Persian king named Darius, but this was Darius II, who reigned from 425 to 405 BCE. Had Daniel been alive in the first year of this Darius, he would have been at least 160 years old, assuming that he was an infant when he was carried to Babylon.
http://www.2think.org/hundredsheep/bible/comment/d...
