The prophecy includes details
(45:14) which were never true of Cyrus in any sense: “The labour of Egypt, and
the merchandise of Ethiopia, and the Sabeans . . . shall come over unto thee,
and they shall be thine . . . in chains they shall come over . . . they shall
make supplication unto thee, saying, Surely God is in thee; and there is none
else.” But such words as these, however, understood, are very clearly applied
to God’s glorying Israel: 39:23; 60:9-16. It is easy to find an
application of these words to Israel in the time of Hezekiah, but they are
palpably untrue regarding the restoration from the later Babylonian captivity.
It is also to be noted that the
associated phrase: “I will direct all his ways”, makes little sense regarding
Cyrus, the pagan empire-builder. But reference to godly Hezekiah presents
little difficulty.
And in the same verse, the words:
“not for price, nor for reward” appear in flat contradiction with 43:3: “Egypt
for thy ransom.” Yet the Crus expositors are logically committed to apply both
passages to the Persian king. They are logically committed to apply both
passages to the Persian king. The modernists casually cut this Gordian knot by
pronouncing “not for price, nor for reward” an interpolation (e.g. Wade, p.
295). (Harry Whittaker, Isaiah [Wigan: Biblia, 1988], 395)
