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If Esther was the mother of Cyrus, and knew the destiny that awaited her son, we may
be sure that however small her influence may have been in his training, such a woman as
Esther would have left some lasting impression behind.
When Isaiah described the march of Cyrus against Babylon in Isa. 21: 1-10, he used
the strange figure of a chariot drawing asses and camels. Herodotus tells of an oracle
which said:
"Be afraid when the Medes shall be commanded by a mule, and Nebuchadnezzar
some time before his death foretold a disaster which none of the gods could avert, when
`A Persian mule shall come against you, who, with the help of the gods, shall bring you
into bondage'."
Cyrus, the child of a Persian father and a Jewish mother fulfilled this strange figure.
Let us now return to the prophecy of Isaiah and observe some of the utterances that were
so closely and accurately fulfilled:
"That saith to the deep, Be dry, and I will dry up thy rivers" (Isa. 44: 27).
What have these words to do with Cyrus or prophecy? We learn that when Cyrus
invested the city of Babylon, he, accompanied by his chief officers, rode around the
walls, in the vain attempt to find some weak spot, or assailable point. It was then that
Cyrus conceived the scheme, already foreshadowed by Isaiah. It meant nothing less than
the deflection of the course of the river Euphrates. A great trench was dug, ostensibly for
the purpose of blockade, and Herodotus comments:
"If the besieged had either been aware of the designs of Cyrus, or had discovered his
project before its actual accomplishment, they might have effected the total destruction of
the troops. They had only to secure the little gates which led to the river, and to man the
embankment on either side, and they might have enclosed the Persians as in a net from
which they could never have escaped." (Herodotus lib. 1:191).
Xenophon records that Cyrus said:
"My friends, the river yields to us its bed, to make for us a way into the city; let us
enter it with confidence."
And so while Belshazzar and his lords were drinking wine to the gods of wood and
stone, that finger was seen writing his doom `upon the plaster of the wall', while the army
of Cyrus was marching into the city:
"One post shall run to meet another, and one messenger to meet another, to show the
king of Babylon that his city is taken at one end, and that the passages are stopped"
(Jeremiah 51: 31, 32).
Thus, as Cyrus has recorded on the cylinder, which is in the possession of the British
Museum, "Without battle and without fighting" Babylon was taken.
As our space is limited, it will assist us in obtaining a clear view of the general trend
of this passage if we set out in barest outline the structure (regrettable split) as follows: