Then how did the name of Cyrus
come to be there at all? There are four possible explanations of this:
1.
It is a misguided-rabbinic comment which has
crept into the text.
2.
It is a misreading of a similar Hebrew word
meaning “(God’s) workman” or “craftsman”—a deliberate contrast between Hezekiah’s
zeal for the temple and the fashioner of idols whose work Isaiah has so often
and so caustically derided.
3.
The name of Cyrus was deliberately inserted by
Jews (political Zionists) who wanted to influence the new king onto helping
them back to their homeland.
4.
By reading the Hebrew “to Cyrus” (LCVRS) as two
words, with the slightest possible alteration (a yod for a wawa, a common
enough mistake in the Hebrew MSS!), the passage reads: “that saith to thee, the
inheritor (s. w. 65:9), my shepherd.” If this is the correct approach, then
there comes to light a very intriguing play on words, for now the Hebrew words
for “inheritor” and “perform” (in v. 28) make up the name of Jerusalem (also in
v. 28).
It is the third or fourth
explanations which is the most likely. The Jews have always evinced a
willingness to influence politically powerful Gentiles in their favour by
phoney exposition of their Holy Scriptures.
In just this way Josephus got to
work on Vespasian. His own record (B.J. 3.7.3,9 and 4.9.7 and 6.5.4) implies
that he made unscrupulous use of Biblical prophecies and shrewd fabrications or
interpretations of his own dreams, about the explanation of Vespasian, and
later Titus, to the dignity of Caesar.
Onias the high priest used Isaiah
19:19, 20 as a prophecy to persuade Ptolemy and Cleopatra to grant him
permission to build a temple in Egypt (Ant. 13.3.1.) It seems very probably
that Ptolemy Soter the first Greek king of Egypt took his royal name (Saviour)
from that prophecy.
Similarly the high priest Jaddua
claimed a divine revelation in a dream and succeeded in softening up an angry
Alexander (the Great) by showing him a prophecy in Daniel about himself (Ant.
13.8.4.5).
And in modern times political
Jews, unbelievers without any confidence whatever in the authority of their own
Scriptures, have been ready enough to use the Promises in Genesis to bolster up
their claims to the Land of Israel.
In exactly the same way, it is
suggested, Babylonian Jews made the smallest alterations imaginable to their
copy of Isaiah in order to gain the special favour of Cyrus. Josephus records
(Ant. 11.1.2) that Isaiah’s prophecy was brought to the attention of the Persian
king: “Accordingly, when Cyrus read this, and admired the divine power, an
earnest desire and ambition seized upon him to fulfil what was so written; so
he called for the most eminent Jews . . .”
The Cylinder of Cyrus quotes
phrases out of Isaiah: “whom he (Marduk!) took by his hand . . . he called him
by name” (45:1, 3). Also, Isaiah’s words: “That they may know from the rising of
the sun, and from the west, that there is none beside Me” (45:6), are very
closely matched by a passage in the Cylinder of Cyrus, only applied to himself,
not to the God of Israel.
Another expression: “Their
sighing I stilled,” is quoted from Isaiah 21:2. How would Cyrus know these
words without having some Jewish mentor to steer him to an out-of-context
application of this Scripture himself? The implication seems to be that someone
was more intent on making an impression on Cyrus than on rightly dividing the
Word of Truth.
Strabo says that originally Cyrus’s
name was Agrodates. Since Cyrus is Elamite for ‘shepherd’ (Is. 44:28), it
begins to look fairly likely that it was in pleased reaction to the prophecy of
Isaiah that the king changed to the more familiar name. The remarkable fact
that Xenophon refers to Cyrus as “God’s shepherd” tends to strengthen this
conclusion.
The over-all result from this
analysis would appear to be that the Scripture, a genuine prophecy of Isaiah,
was not about Cyrus at all, but . . .about Hezekiah and about the Messiah of
whom he was so splendid a prototype. (Harry Whittaker, Isaiah [Wigan:
Biblia, 1988], 396-97)