Who was Cyrus the Great in the Bible?

The king who opened Babylon

Cyrus II, later called the Great, ruled from about 559 to 530 BC. He started as king of Anshan, a small Persian kingdom in what is now southwest Iran. Within twenty years he had swallowed the Medes, the rich kingdom of Lydia in today’s Turkey, and finally Babylon. In October 539 BC his army beat the Babylonians at Opis, on the Tigris, and a Babylonian chronicle says his troops then entered Babylon without a battle. The empire that had burned Jerusalem fell without a siege.

The Bible never calls him “the Great.” He is “Cyrus king of Persia,” and he appears in four books: Isaiah, Ezra, 2 Chronicles and Daniel, where Daniel serves at court “even to the first year of King Cyrus” (Daniel 1:21).

“My shepherd,” “his anointed”

The most startling words about him are in Isaiah. Jerusalem lies in ruins, and a voice tells the exiles that a foreign king will rebuild it.

who says of Cyrus, ‘He is my shepherd, and shall perform all my pleasure,’ even saying of Jerusalem, ‘She will be built;’ and of the temple, ‘Your foundation will be laid.’

One verse later comes the title: “Yahweh says to his anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I have held” (Isaiah 45:1). The Hebrew word is mashiach, messiah, the word for Israel’s anointed kings and priests. No other foreigner in the Hebrew Bible receives it. God adds, twice, “though you have not known me” (Isaiah 45:4–5), and promises that Cyrus will “let my exiles go free, not for price nor reward” (Isaiah 45:13). He serves a plan he never chose.

When were these lines written? Most scholars assign Isaiah 40–55 to a prophet of the exile, writing around 540 BC while Cyrus was on the march. Traditional readers hold that Isaiah of Jerusalem named Cyrus some 150 years ahead. Josephus, in the first century AD, even claims that Cyrus read the prophecy about himself and set out to fulfill it.

The decree of his first year

The book of Ezra opens with the order that ended the exile.

Cyrus king of Persia says, ‘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.

The same proclamation closes 2 Chronicles, the last book of the Hebrew Bible in Jewish order, so the Jewish Bible ends with a Persian king’s words: “let him go up” (2 Chronicles 36:23). Cyrus also hands back 5,400 gold and silver vessels that Nebuchadnezzar had carried off from the Temple (Ezra 1:7–11). Ezra 6 quotes an Aramaic record of the decree, found in the palace at Ecbatana in Media, with the Temple’s measurements and its costs charged to the royal treasury. The first returnees numbered 42,360 (Ezra 2:64). Many families stayed in Babylon. The new Temple was finished in 515 BC, under Darius.

The Cyrus Cylinder

In 1879 the archaeologist Hormuzd Rassam dug up a barrel-shaped clay cylinder at Babylon, written in Babylonian cuneiform. It is now in the British Museum. On it Cyrus says that Marduk, Babylon’s god, chose him; that he entered the city in peace; and that he returned the gods of many towns to their shrines, gathered their peoples and sent them home. It never mentions Judah or Jerusalem. But it describes the same policy Ezra records: the deported go home and rebuild their temples.

It has been called the first charter of human rights. Most historians read it as royal propaganda in an old Mesopotamian style. A replica stands at the United Nations in New York. Cyrus himself died in 530 BC, in battle east of the Caspian Sea, Herodotus says, and his tomb still stands at Pasargadae, in Iran.