A possible hint to Daryavesh's Judaism

I've been quite busy lately and still am. I've started a number of posts but haven't gotten around to finishing them. However, yesterday I realized something interesting while reading a book, and it's short, so I'm sharing it.

So Purim has come and gone...several months ago. But when you think about it, maybe Purim should be year-round because the whole build up to the grand finale of Esther was years in the making.

Anyway, Daryavesh, or Darius, the one under whom the Second Temple was completed, was, according to Jewish tradition, the son of Queen Esther and King Achashverosh (see for example Midrash Yalkut Shimoni on the Torah 536). However, this is never openly acknowledged in Tanach. There might be any number of reasons for this, including that we have misunderstood our sources and they are not referring to the same Daryavesh under whom the Temple was completed; that Daryavesh was so far gone from Judaism that there was no point; IT'S A THEOLOGICAL CONSPIRACY (see here to get what I'm talking about); and so forth.

However, there are some hints to his Judaic identity. One is his usage of the term "God of the Heavens" to refer to Hashem (Ezra 6:10) (used likewise by Koresh (Cyrus) (Ezra 1:2) and the Jews of Yehudah (Ezra 5:12)). And yesterday I read something that may be considered another hint.

First, Daryavesh, it should be said, is also identified in Jewish tradition with Artaxerxes, the king who appears from Ezra 7 to the end of Nechemiah.

And now to the main point: In Edwin Thiele's groundbreaking work The Mysterious Numbers of the Hebrew Kings, which is a book that attempts to deal with the many perceived discrepancies in the chronology of the kings of Yehudah and Yisrael, on pp. 28-30, he argues that at least since the time of King Shlomo, the kings of Yehudah counted their years as rulers from the month of Tishrei, while the kings of Yisrael, from the time of Yerov'am counted from the month of Nissan. Now, interestingly enough, though the Persians also counted from Nissan, according to Thiele, Nechemiah, who was a top-ranking Persian official (yes, even in Yehudah he was a governmental officer) counted Daryavesh's years from Tishrei!!! Much like one would expect from a Jewish king. He bases this on Nechemiah 1:1 and 2:1. In the first verse it's Kislev of the twentieth year, which is two months after Tishrei and three or four months (depending if it's a leap year or not) before Nissan. In the second verse, time has passed, and it's Nissan, but it's still the twentieth year!

Now, you might be wondering: Wouldn't the count have been just as legitimately Jewish if it started from Nissan, seeing as the Kingdom of Yisrael counted that way?

Yes, technically you are correct. But this ties into one of the larger themes of Ezra-Nechemiah and the Second Temple Era in general: The attempt to keep the Jewish people unified. No more two kingdoms, just the one people. As I mentioned in this post, Avraham Korman argued that when the Samaritans asked the Jews to build the Temple with them, they wanted to do it while remaining a separate nationality. That was something the Jews could not agree with because they were interested in keeping the Jews one nation. So we find that Nechemiah was singling out just one type of chronological count, and that happened to be the one used by the last king of a unified kingdom, Shlomo. In this sense, the Tishrei count was much more legitimately Jewish than the Nissan count.

Also, bear in mind that Esther was from the tribe of Binyamin. Though Daryavesh was technically tribeless because of his non-Jewish paternal lineage, he was most closely aligned to the tribe of Binyamin from his mother's side. And Binyamin stayed with Yehudah after the split. And, Esther was also a descendant of King Shaul (see sources listed in this post). While there's no evidence to this (to my knowledge), it is most likely that Shlomo was simply continuing on the tradition first set forth by King Shaul and continued by King David.* So using the Judaic count was a way to tie Daryavesh to his roots (whether the idea was to remind him of his roots or to remind the Jews of the roots of the Persian king is open for interpretation).** 

Of course, just like in the case that Daryavesh's possible Jewishness in general is never directly acknolwedged, it's also possible that there are any number of other reasons why Nechemiah would use the Tishrei count here, but it's still a cool idea in my opinion.

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* However, I can also imagine Shaul using Nissan counting and Yerov'am coming and saying: Hey, gang, we're going back to our roots and changing the count back to the way things used to be done around here. I won't get into it too much now, but there's a lot of evidence, both from Tanach and other Jewish sources that Yerov'am worked hard to widen the split between the two kingdoms.

** Which now made me realize that as Nechemiah is written as a kind of journal-semi-report, perhaps some version of it was supposed to make its way to Daryavesh (of course, there are some things that would probably need to have been censored).