“In the first year
Of Darius,
Son of Ahasuerus,
By birth
A Mede.
He became king
Over the realm
Of the Chaldeans.”
Here is the problem with Darius the Mede, the son of Ahasuerus. As far as we can tell, there was no such person. Somehow, he comes between the Babylonian King Belshazzar and the Persian Cyrus the Great. Perhaps, he was the first Persian general who entered Babylon after its fall in 539 BCE, but there are no indications of that. He appears to be a literary fiction, perhaps based on the later King Darius I, the 3rd ruler after Cyrus, from 522-486 BCE, who acted very favorably towards the returning Jews to Jerusalem.
