Cyrus

Cyrus is the Persian king (Cyrus II, commonly called Cyrus the Great, reigned c. 559–530 BCE) whom the Bible names as the ruler who conquered Babylon and authorized the exiled Judeans to return to Jerusalem and rebuild their temple. He is the only non-Israelite ruler in Scripture explicitly called God's "anointed."

The text says that Yahweh "stirred up the spirit of Cyrus king of Persia" so that he issued a proclamation throughout his kingdom, declaring that "Yahweh, the God of heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth; and he has commanded me to build him a house in Jerusalem, which is in Judah" (Ezra 1:1–2). Through the prophet, God calls him "my shepherd, and shall perform all my pleasure," the one who will say of Jerusalem, "She will be built," and of the temple, "Your foundation will be laid" (Isaiah 44:28). The same oracle addresses him as Yahweh's "anointed," whose right hand God has held "to subdue nations before him" and to open doors and gates (Isaiah 45:1), promising him treasures and hidden riches "that you may know that it is I, Yahweh, who calls you by your name" (Isaiah 45:3). God says he raised him up "in righteousness" so that "he shall build my city, and he shall let my exiles go free, not for price nor reward" (Isaiah 45:13), and calls him "the man of my counsel from a far country" (Isaiah 46:11). Daniel dates a vision to "the third year of Cyrus king of Persia" (Daniel 10:1). The oracles that announce Babylon's downfall, that "glory of kingdoms" which will become "like when God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah" (Isaiah 13:19), belong to the same horizon of judgment and release.

Established history corroborates the outline: Cyrus's forces took Babylon in 539 BCE, and Persian policy allowed deported peoples to restore their cults, as the Cyrus Cylinder and other records attest; the Hebrew text's picture of a decree permitting return and rebuilding fits that setting. Linguistically, the title "anointed" (Hebrew mashiach) is applied here to a foreign ruler commissioned for a specific task, not to an Israelite king or to the promised deliverer of later expectation.

How traditions read Cyrus differently. Jewish interpretation has generally seen him as an instrument of providence, a "messiah" in the limited sense of an appointed agent, and has debated how much of Isaiah's oracles are predictive and how much retrospective. Christian readers have often treated him as a type or foreshadowing of Christ — a deliverer who frees captives without payment (Isaiah 45:13) — while disagreeing over the prophecy's mechanics: some hold that Isaiah named Cyrus centuries in advance, while most historical-critical scholarship places Isaiah 40–55 in the exilic or early Persian period, so the naming is a word spoken shortly before or around the events it describes. Daniel 10:1 is read by traditionalists as evidence of Daniel's own sixth-century setting and by critical scholars as a later composition using Cyrus as a chronological anchor.

AI-generated reference entry, grounded in the passages where this term appears — history and Scripture stated as such, interpretation labeled as interpretation. Not a substitute for the text itself.