Jack the Bodiless

Irrelevant. Neither Isaiah nor Jeremiah wrote 2 Chronicles.
Nope.

There was no "Darius the Mede", and Babylon was not destroyed (by either the Medes OR the Persians). A perfectly clear-cut prophecy failure.

spin

The next stage is what I did. After pointing out to him that there were Babylonian commercial texts that showed that Darius I ruled for at least 35 years, the lad, who had insisted that Darius I ruled only six years instead of 36, decided it must have been Darius II who only ruled about 20 years, so he's decided he had to add 15 years onto Darius II after chopping 30 off Darius I. Pure insanity. It's about that time that he went on my ignore list.

(But you'll still waste a bit more time on him, as you did with the post you made directly after this I'm responding to.)


spin

Larsguy47

Hi Julian. Since we're getting into the details a bit here, it helps to know the specific revisions. The most pertinent is the expansion of the reign of Artaxerxes II from a mere 17 years to 47 years, the standard 30-year expansion. Remember that Darius I was expanded the same 30 years, making his rule of 6 years expanded to 36 years. You can see the practicality of 30 years since it was the maximal number of years that was still within a generation and it likely make correction of the numbers easier in most cases. 30 years was also added between the Peloponnesian and Persian Wars, originally 20 became 50. What is interesting here is that the revisions were to protect the identity of Xerxes as Artaxerxes, thus that many years did not have to be added to make this correction. But, of course, we find the expansion of the reign of Artaxerxes II, the ruling monarch during the time of Xenophon. What it looks like, is while Xenophon was at it adjusting Greek history, he seems to have offered the king a greater posterity by expanding his rule by 30 years as well. Why not?

So in the accusation that the Persians, namely Artaxerxes II was paying for these revisions, we find he took advantage of the situation and had some extra years added to his own reign as part of the package.

Of course there is not much documentation regarding that long reign but Ktesias, a physician, served this king during his reign.

Here's a general exerpt of historical problems with Ktesias during the reign of Artaxerxes II:

As I noted, in order to reduce the Persian Period of 82 extra years by the time of Cyrus, we reduce the rule of Darius I by 30 years, combine the 21-year rule of Xerxes with Artaxerxes since they were the same king, leaving us 31 years to account for. 30 years are removed from the 47-year of Artaxerxes II, reducing his rule to just 17 years, which is the number of years Ctesias claims he was the physician to Artaxerxes II. The final 1-year adjustment is reducing one of the 8 years of rule of Cambyses to a 1-year co-ruler with his father Cyrus, thus reducing his rule to just 7 actual historical years of sole rulership.

In the meantime, the only history we really have about these latter kings, particularly Artaxerxes II and Artaxerxes III comes entirely from Greek sources, the weakest link in the entire chronology timeline, but these Greek revisions affect and distort the timeline all the way back to the time of the Exodus.

LG47

Larsguy47

That's what you say, based on your experience. But in my defense, again, I noted that there had already been an issue with some co-rulership years for Darius II since the famous "Babylonian Chronicle" itself lists that it was copied in year 22 of Darius. Darius, historically was known to have died the same year the Peloponnesian War ends with his father dying in the 9th year of the war. Per current history the war ends in 404 BCE, giving Darius II a 19-20 year rule after his father's death. So where did the "year 22" come from? I presumed, therefore a co-rulership.


But when I saw the references of business documents for year 35, et al for the rule of Darius, I noticed they were Babylonian texts and were calling Darius the "King of Babylon." That is the title of the co-ruler of the empire. That was the title of Xerxes before he became "King of king, King of Lands." The Persian empire was huge and the empire was managed from Babylon. When Cambyses first began to reign in the 8th year of his father Cyrus, he ruled from Babylon.

So one scenario explaining why you have business tablets from Babylon dated to as high as year 35 of Darius, King of Babylon is that this was his seat of rule for perhaps the first 17 years of his rule and thus even though he became king over all of Persia, some business texts would continue his rulership years from when he first became king over Babylon. So there is nothing wrong with this text. That is, it works for my chronology perfectly as well.

Xerxes/Artaxerxes began to rule when he 18 as co-ruler to Darius I, so likewise this could have customarily been old enough for Darius II to begin ruling at Babylon once he was 18-22 years of age. If you back up from when Darius died in the last year of the PPW, say presuming he ruled a total of 37 years 18 of those years as co-ruler, he would have begun ruling about the 25th year of Xerxes/Artaxerxes, which if you include a 4-year co-rulership between Darius and Xerxes (which we must based upon the bas-reliefs at Persepolis showing them as co-rulers) then he becomes king at Babylon right when Xerxes claimed he was dead and became Artaxerxes. So there's more than just "lunacy" and desperation involved here.

So it turns out those texts help improve when the revisions in the Babylonian Chronicle were made. One important aspect would have been this done after the death of Artaxerxes since instead of just claiming half his reign of 20 years and letting the other half of 21 years to assigned to Xerxes, he claimed his full 41-year rule. That's why more adjustments had to be made and these records were being officially corrected in year 22 of Darius II. This works out to be about 4-5 years after the death of Artaxerxes I, which makes sense.

At any rate, because of the above, the business tablets cannot be used to directly contradict a 6-year rule for Darius I in this case, or at least I would need to claim this was a forged business document, which there were, of course, but not in this case.

LG47

3DJay

So, you accept Newton as a reliable source?


Peace