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Dear Folks:
I am intrigued that the president-elect is compared to King Cyrus of Persia. I turned to my textbooks on the history of the Babylonian Exile and found this: “…history has remembered Cyrus as a great liberator of captured peoples…an image which he and his officials sought to foster and the historical conditions of the time facilitated.” 1 Cyrus capitalized on being a liberator through propaganda. King Cyrus ruled from 559-530 BCE, and he captured Babylon in 539 BCE. Finding many thousand Jews in Babylon, he declared a return of certain workers to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem, a policy that he had undertaken in other places he had captured.
The Babylonian Exile came after more than 100 years of shifting loyalties in the region. The two kingdoms of Judah and Israel, at the strategic crossroads between Egypt to the southwest, Syria to the north, Assyria to the northeast, and Babylonia to the east, were tossed back and forth among these nations. The northern kingdom of Israel was captured in 722 BCE by the Assyrians, and the southern kingdom of Judah became a fealty state to Assyria, which rose to great prominence until around 630 BCE, when all the loyal states began to revolt and gain independence. Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar, starting in 604, violently subsumed all of Assyria and subdued Jerusalem in 597, taking the ruling class into exile. Following Judah’s revolt in 589, another Babylonia invasion led to the destruction of Jerusalem and the Jerusalem Temple in 586, which led to more of the elite classes being exiled to Babylon. Forty-five years later, King Cyrus of Persia captured Babylon and decreed a rebuild of the Jerusalem Temple. The rebuild was halted for a few decades and completed under the reign of Cyrus’ grandson, Darius.
One of the things I am hearing people say about our next president is that he is areligious like Cyrus was, and yet Cyrus was called by God to liberate people from exile. Cyrus was certainly important in the exilic and post-exilic literature: Isaiah 45, Ezra 1 and 4, II Chronicles 36, and others name him as called by God. Cyrus, however, was religious; he was a practitioner of the ancient faith of Zoroastrianism, which calls followers to good thoughts, good words, and good deeds, doing charity, spiritual egalitarianism between men and women, and doing good for goodness’ sake. The magi that visited Jesus at his birth are thought to be Zoroastrian priests.
One of the things to remember is that only the elite classes were taken in exile; the remnant who were left behind were the working class, poor, and underprivileged, and their daily life may not have changed much. The Exile was traumatic, and it was during that time that Jewish theologians solidified ideas of monotheism and a God who lives beyond the Jerusalem Temple. My wonderings lead me to ask how we in today’s church feel like we are in exile, and who can lead us home.
As we face into Thanksgiving and Advent, I wish you blessings, I offer gratitude for each of you, and I pray that Christ is our guide in emerging from what may feel like exile.
Peace,
Pastor Tony
1 Miller, J. Maxwell, and Hayes, John H., A History of Ancient Israel and Judah, (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1986), p 440.
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