September 18, 2011 – Ezra 5:8 - 6:22

a beam is to be taken from his house, and he is to be lifted up and impaled on it. Is this a description of the first crucifixion. If it isn’t, it is a ancestor of it. We see that Darius allows the Temple to be rebuilt because he finds the Memo for Cyrus. But what happened to the note that stopped the building in between. Maybe that had not been a written memo and something Oral, so it did not hold as much weight. We do see that it takes a long time to build. The 1^st year of Cyrus, continuing through the 6^th year a Darius. Cyrus reigned 559 BC – 530 BC (30 years), followed by Cambyses 530 BC – 523 BC (7 years), and then Darius.

Things I looked at seem to say that this is not the same Darius from Daniel and that Daniel’s writer might have used the name here because Darius was well known in Jewish History because of the Temple being built during his reign.