Isaiah45chapter 45

The word used of Cyrus is the word for anointed — the term used of Israel's kings and, later, of the Messiah. It is applied here to a Persian who did not know the LORD, and the text says so twice: though you have not known me. God commissions a man outside the covenant to do covenant work.

The details of the taking of Babylon are specific. God says he will open the two-leaved gates before him and the gates will not be shut, and will break the bronze gates and cut the iron bars. Babylon's walls had massive gates, and Herodotus describes the river gates being left open on the night the Persians waded in along the drained channel.

The treasures of darkness and the hidden riches of secret places are the vaults. Cyrus took the accumulated wealth of the Babylonian empire, and before that the treasury of Lydia; the Persian empire was funded by what it inherited rather than what it looted by force.

What Cyrus actually did is recorded in his own words. A clay barrel now in the British Museum, the Cyrus Cylinder, sets out his policy of sending captive peoples home to their own cities and restoring their sanctuaries — the exact policy that let the Jews go back and rebuild. The cylinder credits the Babylonian god Marduk for calling him. Isaiah, a century and a half earlier, says who was really doing it: I girded you, though you have not known me.

The potter's yard supplies the answer to the objection. Woe to the one who argues with his Maker — a potsherd among the potsherds of the earth. Does the clay say to the potter, what are you making? Does the pot ask, he has no hands? A broken piece of pottery arguing with the man at the wheel is as ridiculous a picture as the ancient world could produce, and the yards were full of the shards.