Ezra 1:2 Commentary and Bible Study

The proclamation itself reads, ‘Thus set Cyrus king of Persia, The Lord God of heaven hath given me all the kingdoms of the earth, and he hath charged me to build him an house at Jerusalem, which is in Judah.’ Now we do have the so-called Cyrus cylinder in the British Museum, which is this proclamation or edict, but it is not quite as we find it in the Bible. The Cyrus cylinder is a little different in its wording. Is there a discrepancy? No. Believing the Scripture, we believe that what we have here is the words of the original proclamation. The Cyrus cylinder is possibly one of a number of writings. It is a baked clay cylinder, but it's probably one of a number that went throughout the empire, and they would all have differed from each other a little bit. They were not inspired documents and some would have been written by officials, who would have cast them in the usual mould of these inscriptions and written them in the same way. So the Cyrus cylinder bears some of the markings of a heathen, pagan documents. But the original proclamation is that which you read preserved in Scripture: ‘Thus saith Cyrus, king of Persia, The LORD God of heaven’ – ‘the LORD’ in capital letters. It's the sacred name, the unpronounceable Jehovah: Cyrus is using that name. ‘The Lord God of heaven hath given me all the kingdoms of the earth.’ He attributes his station, his position, his conquest, to the God of Israel, and he goes on to call him the God, the only God. This is very powerful. People like to draw attention to the differences between the biblical proclamation given by Ezra and the Cyrus cylinder. Well, it was a pagan empire and the various copies that went out would have reflected their various copyists and authors and the style in which they worked, but this would seem to be the original. ‘And he [the God of Israel] hath charged me to build him an house at Jerusalem, which is in Judah.’ That is uppermost in Cyrus’ mind. That is the key matter, the primary matter.