Artaxerxes
King of Persia · 465–425 BC
The Years
- Began 465 BC
- Daniel’s seventy weeks, counted from Nehemiah 2:1. Ussher: 473 BC
- “slew Xerxes as he lay in his bed”
- Ended 425 BC
- “hearing there, that Artaxerxes was lately dead”
Artaxerxes Longimanus, king of Persia, who sent Ezra and Nehemiah. His reign is counted from the year his father Xerxes was slain, 465 BC, so that the month Nisan of his twentieth year (Nehemiah 2:1) is 446 BC. Daniel’s sixty and nine weeks, “from the going forth of the commandment to restore and to build Jerusalem unto the Messiah the Prince” (Daniel 9:25), are 483 years of 360 days (a month of thirty days: the hundred and fifty days of the flood are five months, Genesis 7:11, 24; 8:3-4), 173,880 days, from that month to the Lord’s coming into Jerusalem as King, Sunday the eleventh of the first month, AD 31 (Zechariah 9:9; Luke 19:37-42). Ussher counts his reign from 473 BC, so his twentieth year falls in 454 BC.
Where the year isn’t Ussher’s, the text sets it, and the note says how. Ussher’s years and sentences are from his Annals of the World (1658), quoted as printed.
