The Babylonian Chronicle ABC 7, also known as the Nabonidus Chronicle, has not only the actions of King Nabonidus and Belshazzar the Crown Prince, but in Nabonidus' sixth year (550 BCE), there is a seemingly unrelated entry about...
moreThe Babylonian Chronicle ABC 7, also known as the Nabonidus Chronicle, has not only the actions of King Nabonidus and Belshazzar the Crown Prince, but in Nabonidus' sixth year (550 BCE), there is a seemingly unrelated entry about Cyrus, king of Ansan, defeating Astyages, the last king of the Medes1. This is not the only account of Cyrus in the ABC 7, for we see another entry about Cyrus in Nabonidus' ninth year, when he (Cyrus) defeats a king of another country,2 and another possible mention of him in Nabonidus' sixteenth year. These entries are up to eleven years before Cyrus took over Babylon in Nabonidus' seventeenth year. A possible reason the Babylonians started monitoring the actions of the Medes and Persians can be shown from Daniel 8:20, in which Daniel was told by an angel that his vision of the ram and the goat meant the Medes and Persians would be a world power that would fight with and be defeated by the Greeks. In Daniel 8:27, Daniel says he went back to work doing the king's business, and talked with people about the dream, but no one understood it. Daniel 8:1 records Daniel's vision of the ram and goat happened in the third year of Belshazzar's reign.
By close examination of the Nabonidus Chronicle, the Nabonidus Cylinder from Sippar, and the Verse Account of Nabonidus, we can show that the third year of Belshazzar was the fifth year of Nabonidus3. Since the monitoring of the Medes and Persians on the Babylonian Chronicle started in the sixth year of Nabonidus, which is the year after Daniel had the dream of the ram and the he goat, we can provide a reason why the Babylonians would start recording on their chronicle what the Medes and Persians were doing: Daniel had identified a threat to their status of world power, and they started monitoring the actions of this new coalition that was forming. It would be another eleven years before the Medes and Persians took over Babylon, in fulfillment of Daniel's vision.