And, to be sure, the idea of the rise of a pagan monarch in the First Testament paralleling the rise of a democratically elected president may seem surprising. 315).Īt first glance, these sentences seem to conjure an image quite foreign to our 21st-century political scene. Cogan, in The Context of Scripture 2: Monumental Inscriptions, p. Ruler by whose aid the dead were revived and who had all been redeemed from hardship and difficulty, they greeted him with gladness and praised his name (translation by M. They rejoiced at his kingship and their faces shone. All the people of Babylon, all the land of Sumer and Akkad, princes and governors, bowed to him and kissed his feet. He delivered Nabonidus, the king who did not revere him, into his hands.
He made him enter his city Babylon without fighting or battle he saved Babylon from hardship. He set him on the road to Babylon and like a companion and a friend, he went at his side. He (Marduk, the chief Babylonian god) ordered him to march to his city Babylon. The following excerpt describes the Babylonians’ reaction to Cyrus when he arrived in their city:
Written as government propaganda, the text lauds King Cyrus for his achievements, including his policy of permitting people whom his predecessors had brought to Babylon as captives to return to their homes to rebuild the temples for their respective gods. The Cyrus Cylinder Inscription was produced after the Persian conquest of the city in 539 B.C. 29:1–14), shortly after Cyrus assumed the rule of Babylon, the Persian king issued a decree authorizing the Judean exiles to return home and to rebuild the Temple of YHWH-with the aid of resources he provided.Ī vital extra-biblical source of our knowledge of Cyrus, especially for the perspective it provides for Cyrus’s decree in Ezra 1, is a clay cylinder the size of a large wine bottle discovered in the ruins of ancient Babylon. According to Ezra 1:1–4, in fulfillment of Jeremiah’s prophecy (Jer. All of YHWH’s covenant promises seem to have been dashed in 586 B.C., when Nebuchadnezzar and his Babylonian armies conquered Jerusalem, burned the temple of YHWH to the ground, and decimated what had remained of the Judean population after the deportation of the upper crust to Babylon in 598 B.C. Cyrus plays a critical role in the Bible’s story of YHWH’s relationship with his people Israel.
emperor who made Persia great-indeed the greatest empire in history to that point-by taking over and expanding the empire of the Babylonians. Who was Cyrus?Ĭyrus the Great was the sixth-century B.C. (This claim even made an appearance in the recently released film, The Trump Prophecy.) They argue that just as Cyrus, scarcely a devotee of YHWH the God of Israel, served as God’s agent by authorizing Jewish exiles in Babylon to return to the Promised Land and to rebuild the temple to YHWH, so the narcissistic and morally flawed Trump can advance the causes of the evangelical community-and by extension, the country. But American evangelicals have compared Trump to the Persian ruler since the Republican primaries. Netanyahu’s suggestion that Trump may be compared to Cyrus because of his specific policies affecting the Jewish community gives his analogy a unique twist. He proclaimed that the Jewish exiles in Babylon could come back and rebuild our Temple in Jerusalem.”
Following the 45th president’s announcement earlier this year that the US embassy in Israel would move from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, the Israeli Prime Minister remarked, “I want to tell you that the Jewish people have a long memory, so we remember the proclamation of the great king, Cyrus the Great, Persian king 2,500 years ago. But he’s probably been the most prominent. Benjamin Netanyahu wasn’t the first to compare Donald Trump to the ancient Persian leader, Cyrus.