Isaiah44chapter 44

The satire is the most detailed workshop description in the Bible, and it is accurate at every step. The blacksmith works the metal over the coals with tongs, shapes it with hammers, and works with the strength of his arms until he is hungry and his strength fails and he gets thirsty and faint. Ordinary shop conditions. Then the woodworker: he stretches out his measuring line, marks the shape with a scribing tool, works it with planes and a compass, and makes it in the figure of a man, to live in a house.

The wood itself gets a history. He cut down a cedar, or a cypress or an oak, or he planted a fir and the rain made it grow. Then the same log is divided. Half of it he burns in the fire — over that half he roasts meat and eats his fill, and warms himself and says, aha, I am warm, I have seen the fire. And out of the rest he makes a god, his carved image, and falls down to it and prays and says, deliver me, for you are my god. The line that lands is the plainest one: he does not consider, and no one has the sense to say, half of it I burned.

Then Cyrus, named. He is called God's shepherd, who will fulfil all his pleasure, saying to Jerusalem, you shall be built, and to the temple, your foundation shall be laid. Cyrus took Babylon in 539 BC, about a century and a half after Isaiah spoke, and the naming of him this far in advance is the sharpest point in the argument over who wrote this book. Two things the traditional view answers with: the courtroom chapters have just made advance prediction God's own proof of deity, so a name given early is the exhibit rather than the problem; and Josephus records that Cyrus was shown this prophecy about himself and was moved by it.

One line in the same paragraph is a piece of military engineering. God says he dries up the deep and the rivers. Herodotus reports that the Persians took Babylon by diverting the Euphrates upstream until the river channel under the walls was shallow enough to wade.