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The testimony of the inscriptions brings to light the genealogy of Cyrus, the
foreknowledge and provision of God, and the character of the man that Isaiah prophesied
would be the Lord's "Shepherd" and "Anointed". The combined evidence of the
cuneiform inscriptions and the history of Herodotus is set out in The Companion Bible,
appendix 57 at great length. The following short extract focuses our attention on one
feature of supreme interest:
ASTYAGES
married
ESTHER
(Herodotus 1:73)
(Esther 2: 17)
Ahasuerus (Esther 1: 1)
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Artaxerxes (Ezra 6: 14; Neh. 2: 1)
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Darius the Median (Dan. 5: 31)
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CYRUS
"The Persian" (Isa. 45: 1; Ezra 6: 14).
No proof is offered here that Ahasuerus, Artaxerxes and Darius the Median are titles
of one and the same person. The interested reader must consult Records of the Past for
himself, or failing that he should give very careful attention to appendix 57 of The
Companion Bible which sets out the genealogy of the Persian kings. If Esther was the
mother of Cyrus, we can see the hand of the Lord preparing a deliverer for His people
and we can see how timely this prophecy comes in the book of Isaiah, giving a pledge
and a foretaste of that fuller restoration which should be accomplished by the true
"Shepherd" and the true "Anointed" Who was to come.
The edict of Cyrus is recorded in the book of Ezra:
"Thus saith Cyrus king of Persia. The Lord God of heaven hath given me all the
kingdoms of the earth; and He hath charged me to build Him an house at Jerusalem,
which is in Judah" (Ezra 1: 2).
Dr. Samuel Davidson criticizes this record, and speaks of the edict as "A Judaizing
paraphrase of the original". Instead of this being damaging evidence, it is in reality a
very wonderful confirmation, for Prof. Sayce says:
"In Reading the words of Cyrus, we are irresistibly reminded of the language in which the
Books of Samuel describe the rejection of Saul and the selection of David in his place."
But not only so:
"It is a fact the most Hebraic of all the cuneiform texts known to us . . . . . Even the
vocabulary of the inscription is not altogether free from what we may term a Hebraism. There
we find malka, the Hebrew melech, used in the sense of `king' in place of sarru, the Hebrew
sar. Everywhere else in cuneiform literature sarru is `king', malka the subordinate `prince'.
It is only here that the Hebrew usage is followed, according to which melech was the `king'
and sar the `prince'." (Records of the Past, Prof. Sayce).