by
Damien F. Mackey
So far we have
concluded, following Jewish legend, that the conspiratorial Haman of the Book
of Esther was himself a Jew, and that he was the captive king, Jehoiachin
(Coniah).
Jehoiachin’s late
exaltation by King Evil-Merodach, son-successor of Nebuchednezzar II, was only
the prelude to his attaining the very high status that was afforded him, as
Haman, by “King Ahasuerus” of Esther, who must therefore have closely followed
Evil-Merodach.
Who Was “King Ahasuerus”?
At the commencement of my:
Is the Book of Esther a Real
History? Part Two
I
summed up as follows my reconstruction to that point:
So
far I have concluded, based on some compelling Jewish legends, that Haman of
the Book of Esther was actually a Jew, not an Amalekite (etc.), and that he was
in fact King Jehoiachin. And that the opinion that he was an Agagite, or an
Amalekite (Greek: Amali̱kíti̱s)
may have arisen from Jehoiachin’s chief epithet, “Captive” (Greek:
aichmálo̱tos), of similar phonetics.
With the evil king Jehoiachin as the wicked Haman,
then the next logical step - as it had previously seemed to me - was that the
exaltation of Jehoiachin by king Evil-Merodach (usually considered to have been
the Chaldean son and successor of Nebuchednezzar II), as related in 2 Kings 25:27-28, must resonate with the exaltation of
Haman by king “Ahasuerus” (Esther 3:1). And so I had concluded that Evil-Merodach
was the long sought for king “Ahasuerus”. Hardly a
good fit.
Better to conclude that, whereas Evil-Merodach
had exalted Jehoiachin “in the year that he began to reign”,
“Ahasuerus” appears to have raised up Haman some time after his wedding, in his
7th year (cf. Esther 2:16 and 3:1).
These are two separate incidents.
Clearly, now, “Ahasuerus” was a successor of
Evil-Merodach’s.
[End of quote]
That
“Ahauserus” (var. “Artaxerxes”) must have, in my context, followed very soon
after the death of Evil-Merodach would be a matter of biological necessity,
for, as I had gone on to note: “The
age of Haman now needs to be taken into consideration. Already about 55, as we
calculated, in the 1st year of Evil-Merodach, he was probably close
to 70 in the 12th year of Ahasuerus (the Esther drama focusses on
this king’s 12th year)”.
That Haman was not a young man is apparent
from the words of one of the Great King’s edicts (Esther 16:1), telling that
Haman “was called our father”.
According
to my radical truncating of the number of Chaldean kings of this era,
Nebuchednezzar II’s son, Evil-Merodach (or Awel-Marduk), was the last of the
rulers of this dynasty - and he was the same person as Belshazzar:
Hence
it is likely that the Medo-Persian king who succeeded Belshazzar, “Darius the
Mede” – who I believe to have been Cyrus himself (see e.g.):
Darius the Mede "Received the
Kingdom"
was
the Great King “Ahasuerus” (“Artaxerxes”), whose wife Queen Esther was.
Conclusion: “King Ahasuerus” was Darius the Mede/Cyrus.
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