Week 17 Isaiah
Today a man named Cyrus showed up for the first time in my reading this year.
Isaiah said: he (Cyrus) will command that Jerusalem be rebuilt and that the Temple be restored.
Isaiah’s audience would have been wondering a) who Cyrus was and b) why he would want to rebuild structurally intact buildings.
I checked a word book. Cyrus’ name appears in the bible for the first time in the last paragraph of 2 Chronicles (when I turned the page I saw that Ezra mentions Cyrus too).
I think back…
Near the end of Isaiah’s life the Assyrian empire (unsuccessfully) threatened to demolish Jerusalem.
Many years after Isaiah died the Babylonian empire did demolish Jerusalem and the temple.
About seventy years later the Persian empire demolished Babylon.
So then Cyrus the Persian let Jewish exiles return and rebuild demolished Jerusalem.
So Isaiah made a very specific hard-to-believe forecast about the distant future.
It would be like me saying that in 2203 a man named Joe will recapture the territory that southern Alberta lost to Montana and that Joe will re-establish Medicine Hat as the capital of Western Canada. Something like that.
I guess one way of managing Isaiah’s incredible prediction would be to say that some guy who was a contemporary of Cyrus fraudulently wrote up Cyrus’ edict as a forecasted event and pre-dated it back to Isaiah’s time.
Another way would be to accept Isaiah’s startling prediction.
Note: quote from Isaiah 44:28 (NLT)