Achaemenians

The Achaemenians (or Achaemenids) were the dynasty of Persian kings who ruled the Persian Empire from c. 550 BC to 330 BC — from Cyrus the Great's overthrow of the Medes until Alexander the Great's victory at Gaugamela. The dynasty takes its name from Achaemenes (Persian Hakhamanish), its eponymous ancestor several generations before Cyrus. During its two-century reign, the Achaemenid Empire was the largest the ancient world had yet seen — stretching from Anatolia and Egypt to the Indus Valley — and it is the political backdrop of every Old Testament book set after the Babylonian exile.

The biblical narrative engages four Achaemenid kings directly. Cyrus II (559–530 BC), the founder, conquered Babylon in 539 BC and issued the famous decree allowing the Jewish exiles to return to Judah and rebuild the temple (2 Chronicles 36:22-23; Ezra 1:1-4). Isaiah had named him by name nearly two centuries earlier as the LORD's anointed (Isaiah 44:28–45:1). **Darius I** (522–486 BC) issued the second decree confirming the temple rebuild, completed in 516 BC (Ezra 6). Xerxes I (486–465 BC) is the *Ahasuerus* of the book of Esther. **Artaxerxes I** (465–424 BC) authorized both Ezra's return (Ezra 7) and Nehemiah's mission to rebuild Jerusalem's walls (Nehemiah 2).

The Achaemenid policy of returning exiled peoples to their homelands and supporting their religious institutions — preserved on the Cyrus Cylinder, recovered from Babylon in 1879 — is the secular-historical confirmation of what scripture attributes to the LORD's direct prompting: *the LORD stirred up the spirit of Cyrus king of Persia.* The dynasty's fall to Alexander the Great in 330 BC ended this period and inaugurated the Hellenistic era under which the New Testament world would eventually take shape.