Footnote
c With historical facts behind him the noted German scholar Ernst Wm. Hengstenberg (1802-1869) proves Dr. Henry Dodwell’s date of 445 B.C.E. to be wrong. In his work entitled “Christology of the Old Testament,” in volume 2 thereof, on page 394 (¶2), Hengstenberg says: “The difference [of opinion] concerns only the year of the commencement of the reign of Artaxerxes. Our problem is completely solved, when we have shown that this year falls in the year 474 before Christ. For then the twentieth year of Artaxerxes is the year 455 before Christ, according to the usual reckoning, . . . ”
When proving that Artaxerxes’ reign began in 474 B.C.E., Hengstenberg says, on page 395: “Krueger . . . places the death of Xerxes in the year 474 or 473, and the flight of Themistocles a year later.” On page 399 Hengstenberg speaks of “a fifty-one years’ reign of Artaxerxes,” whereas the Greek historian Ctesias, of the fifth century B.C.E., calculates that Artaxerxes reigned only 42 years.—See the English translation from the German by Reuel Keith, first edition, New York (1836-1839), in three volumes.
Hengstenberg gives as a possible reason for the evident mistake in Ptolemy’s Canon when assigning to Xerxes a reign of 21 years, that, when Ptolemy compiled his list of kings from the record of ancient chronologers he mistook the Greek ia for ka, which for the Greeks stand for the numerals 11 and 21 respectively.
Archbishop James Ussher, of Ireland, (1581-1656) as a chronologist, held (on page 131 of Annales Veteris et Novi Testamentorum, under “The Persian Empire,” as published in 1650,) that Artaxerxes Longimanus ascended the Persian throne in 474 B.C.E., but his date for this was not put in reference Bibles. The celebrated writers Vitringa (1659-1722) and Krueger (1838) agreed with Ussher in dating the accession of Artaxerxes to the Persian throne in 474 B.C.E.