Community Magazine March 2014

24 COMMUNITY MAGAZINE YEHUDA LANDY S eemingly, this should be an easy task, for we know that Ahashverosh ruled during the years 3393-3407, according to our form of counting from the year of creation. If we find the corresponding years in the Gregorian calendar, shouldn’t we be able to identify him as the Persian king from those years? In reality, though, this is not so simple, due to the complicated nature of the chronology of this period. According to Hazal , the second Bet Hamikdash stood for 420 years. The Gemara ( Avodah Zarah 9a) states that during the first 34 years the Jews were under the Persian Empire; the next 180 years mark the Hellenistic period; during the next 103 years the Jews enjoyed sovereignty, under the rule of the Maccabees; and the final 103 years were spent under the rule of the Roman Herodian dynasty. If we add the 18 years from the beginning of the Persian Empire until the rebuilding of the Bet Hamikdash to the 34 years of Persian rule after that, we arrive at a total of 52 years. The Gemara lists just four kings who ruled the Persian Empire during those years: Daryavesh (Darius the Mede), Koresh (Cyrus), Ahashverosh, and Daryavesh (who is also called Artachshaste and Koresh). Cambyses (according to Rashi in Daniel, based on Josephus) and Darius the Great (according to several Midrashim) may be added to this list, bringing us to a total of six. According to conventional history, however, the Persian Empire lasted for an additional 155 years, totaling 207 years. This is based on the Greek historians’ reference to 11 Persian kings. Even with regard to those kings whose existence is agreed upon, the two sides differ regarding the length of their rule. These differences make it impossible to try matching the dates of our chronology with those of the conventional chronology as a means of associatingAhashverosh with a known king of the Persian Empire. Jewish scholars faced major difficulties when trying to compare historical records with Hazal ’s chronology. As mentioned earlier, Rashi (Daniel 11:2) pointed out that Josephus refers to an additional king by the name of Bambisha (i.e. Cambyses) who ruled before Ahashverosh and is not mentioned in the Gemara. Radak (ibid.) also struggled to sort out the chronology of this time period. Thishistoricalissuehasoccupiedrabbisandhistoriansforhundreds of years. Some accepted what is known today as the “Rabbinical chronology” and ignored any other evidence. Rabbi Shimon Schwab (1908-1995), on the other hand, one of the great Torah figures of 20th-century America, was willing to accept the conventional chronology. There are yet others who tried to explain that the two chronologies do not necessarily contradict each other, and they proposed interesting theories to reconcile the different sources. It is beyond the scope of this article to deal with this issue in depth, but we will mention a few possible ways that we, who accept Hazal ’s chronology, can explain the extra names of kings that appear in history. One suggestion, which is based on the Gemara (Rosh Hashanah 3b), is that Persian kings had several different names. They each had a common name shared by all Persian kings, similar to “Pharaoh” in Egypt, as well as another name, which changed from king to king. When the Greek historians, upon whom the conventional chronology is based, tallied the years of the Persian Empire, they considered each name individually, thus adding many extra kings and their years in to the calculation. Another suggestion is that some of the people labeled as kings were actually assistant kings with a title similar to that of a king. They were mistakenly counted as kings, and their years were tallied when counting the years of the Persian Empire. The question, though, remains, which one of the 11 Persian kings in conventional sources was the King Ahashverosh who is known to us from the Megillah? As we would expect, there is no unanimous answer to this riddle, and it seems that even Hazal had no undisputed answer. Nonetheless, the majority of scholars, including the noted Jewish historian, Rabbi Yitzchak Eizik Halevi Rabinowitz (1847-1914), identify the king commonly known as Xerxes as the King Ahashverosh of the Megillah. What is this conclusion based upon?