by
Damien F. Mackey
Larcher, to reconcile Scripture with Herodotus, adopts another hypothesis. Evil Merodach is Belshazzar; Neriglissar … his brother-in-law, who slew him, is Darius the Mede; not a Median king, but a Mede by birth.
Henry Fynes Clinton
One result of my attempts to bring the over-inflated Chaldean king lists into a proper conformity with the royal sequence as outlined in the Book of Daniel, for example:
Chaotic King Lists can conceal some sure historical sequences
(5) Chaotic King Lists can conceal some sure historical sequences | Damien Mackey - Academia.edu
were my conclusions that Evil Merodach was the biblical King Belshazzar (Daniel 5), and that King Neriglissar of Babylon must have been the same person as the biblical king Darius the Mede (e.g. Daniel 5:31 - 6).
There I wrote:
Just as the Book of Tobit, a man who served as a high official during the Neo-Assyrian era, enables for us to know the true sequence of three of the Assyrian kings, so, thankfully, does the Book of Daniel provide us with exact knowledge of a succession of three later kings, two being Chaldeans and one a Medo-Persian: viz., Nebuchednezzar; Belshazzar; Darius the Mede. I find these three kings listed twice - though both times in perfect succession - but hidden away in the haystack of the conventional Neo-Babylonian (or Chaldean) to Medo-Persian dynasty. {I have taken the liberty here of adding Belshazzar, the son of Nabonidus}
Van de Mieroop lists them as follows (pp. 292-293):
Nebuchadnezzar [II]
Evil-Merodach
Neriglissar
Labashi-Marduk
Nabonidus
[Belshazzar]
…
Cyrus
Here we get the Danielic sequence:
Nebuchadnezzar
Evil-Merodach = Belshazzar
Neriglissar = Darius the Mede
and, again:
Nabonidus = Nebuchadnezzar
Belshazzar
Cyrus = Darius the Mede
For more detail on all of this, see e.g. my article:
Why “Darius the Mede” is like a needle in a haystack
(2) (DOC) Why “Darius the Mede” is like a needle in a haystack | Damien Mackey - Academia.edu
Today (7th August, 2024) I have read for the first time that Pierre Henri Larcher, a French classical scholar and archaeologist (d. 1812), had long ago arrived at this very same conclusion.
I quote from Henry Fynes Clinton’s book, From the LVth to the CXXIVth Olympiad (1827, p. 371):
Larcher, to reconcile Scripture with Herodotus, adopts another hypothesis. Evil Merodach is Belshazzar; Neriglissar … his brother-in-law, who slew him, is Darius the Mede; not a Median king, but a Mede by birth.
Where I diverge from Pierre Henri Larcher is in my view that Nebuchednezzar/ Nabonidus was just the one same king - because the Frenchman apparently had Nebuchednezzar as an entity separate from Nabonidus (loc. cit.):
Nabonidus is not related to his predecessor … and yet is son of Nebuchadnezzar …. The daughter of Nebuchadnezzar marries a Mede (Darius the Mede, or Neriglissar) …
After so promising a start it all begins to go rather pear-shaped:
the younger son of Nebuchadnezzar (after the death of this stranger, Darius the Mede,) recovers the throne by destroying Laborosoarchod, son of the usurper, and reigns by the name of Nabonadius.
Such a revised shake-up of the sacrosanct king-lists, as envisioned some two centuries ago by the French scholar, Pierre Henri Larcher (and more recently by me), is never likely to go down well with conventionally educated historians.
And so we get brush-off remarks such as this one by McClintock and Strong Biblical Cyclopedia, article “Nergalsharezer”:
https://www.biblicalcyclopedia.com/N/nergalsharezer.html
“…. Some (as Larcher) have sought to identify him with Darius the Mede; but this view is quite untenable. …”.
I, for my part, would basically side on this with Pierre Henri Larcher.
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