Isaiah Named a Persian King 150 Years Before He Was Born

Most prophecies describe what's gonna happen. Isaiah does something weirder: he names the guy who's gonna do it.

"This is what the Lord says... who says of Cyrus, 'He is my shepherd and will accomplish all that I please; he will say of Jerusalem, "Let it be rebuilt," and of the temple, "Let its foundations be laid."'" — Isaiah 44:28

"This is what the Lord says to his anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I take hold of to subdue nations before him..." — Isaiah 45:1

Isaiah wrote these lines somewhere around 700 BC. Cyrus the Great was born around 600 BC and conquered Babylon in 539 BC. The prophecy names a foreign king roughly 150 years before he existed — and accurately predicts what he's gonna do.

Look at what the prophecy assumes when Isaiah writes it:

• Persia isn't an empire yet. In Isaiah's day, Persia is a tiny tribal region under Median control.
• Jerusalem hasn't been destroyed. The Temple is still standing. There's nothing to rebuild.
• The Babylonian Exile hasn't happened. Most of the Jewish people are still living in their own land.

So Isaiah is predicting (1) Jerusalem will be destroyed, (2) the people will be exiled, (3) a future world power will rise, (4) a king named Cyrus will lead it, and (5) he'll personally order the rebuilding of the city and the Temple.

That's five layers of prediction stacked on top of each other, and the centerpiece is a name.

Around 605 BC, Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon started deporting Judeans. By 586 BC, Jerusalem and the Temple were rubble. The exile was real.

Then in 539 BC, a Persian king named Cyrus rolled up on Babylon and took the city without much of a fight. The whole empire flipped overnight. Cyrus's first major move as ruler over the former Babylonian territories was issuing a decree — preserved both in the Bible AND on a clay artifact called the Cyrus Cylinder — telling displaced peoples to go home and rebuild their temples.

The Jewish version of that decree opens the book of Ezra:

"This is what Cyrus king of Persia says: 'The Lord, the God of heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth and he has appointed me to build a temple for him at Jerusalem in Judah.'" — Ezra 1:2

Cyrus is doing the exact thing Isaiah said he'd do, and crediting the exact God Isaiah said sent him.

The Bible isn't the only place we hear about Cyrus's restoration policy. We have three completely separate streams of evidence:

1. The Cyrus Cylinder. A baked clay artifact discovered in Babylon in 1879, now in the British Museum, written in Cyrus's own voice. It literally says: "I returned to these sacred cities... the sanctuaries of which have been ruins for a long time... I also gathered all their former inhabitants and returned to them their habitations." That's the policy. From the king himself. In cuneiform.

2. Greek historians. Herodotus and Xenophon, writing more than a century later, both describe Cyrus as an unusually tolerant conqueror who restored displaced peoples and respected local religions. Xenophon's "Cyropaedia" was basically the ancient world's leadership handbook — Roman elites read it for centuries.

3. The Bible's own paper trail. Beyond Isaiah and Ezra, Jeremiah (writing during the exile) predicted the exile would last 70 years and end in restoration. Daniel 9 records Daniel praying at the end of those 70 years for the prophecy's fulfillment — and Cyrus's decree drops shortly after.

Three completely separate traditions — Persian royal propaganda, Greek historical writing, and Hebrew prophetic literature — all converge on the same king doing the same unusual thing.

"Isaiah 40-66 was written later, after Cyrus showed up." This is the most common objection — the so-called "Deutero-Isaiah" theory. The argument is that some unnamed later prophet wrote the back half of Isaiah after the fact and slipped Cyrus's name in.

The evidence cuts both ways. The Hebrew style does shift between the early and later chapters of Isaiah — that's real. But the Dead Sea Scrolls include a complete scroll of Isaiah (the Great Isaiah Scroll) dated to roughly 125 BC — and it treats the book as one unified work, with no chapter break, no second author marker, and no editorial seam at chapter 40. Whatever the dating debate, by the time of the Dead Sea Scrolls the Cyrus prophecy was already centuries old.

"Cyrus issued similar decrees to lots of peoples — it's not unique." True. The Cyrus Cylinder shows Cyrus had a general policy of returning exiled peoples and restoring local temples. But that doesn't weaken the prophecy — it strengthens it. Isaiah didn't just predict that Cyrus would do something nice; he predicted the specific king, by name, who'd have exactly this policy. The fact that Cyrus's restoration policy is independently confirmed in Persian records isn't a problem for the prophecy. It's the receipt.

Isaiah writes a name. A century and a half later, a Persian king with that exact name conquers Babylon, frees the Jewish exiles, and personally funds the rebuilding of the Temple — citing the God of Israel as his authority.

The prophecy didn't depend on Jewish action. It depended on a pagan emperor making decisions that benefited people he'd never met, in a city he'd never seen, for a God his ancestors didn't worship.

Isaiah named him. Persia (without knowing it) delivered him. The receipt is in the Cyrus Cylinder.