The Great Destroyer: Cyrus, Babylon, and Jerusalem
The ancient world found him to have achieved greatness and thrust it upon his name, but was the destruction of Babylon Cyrus’ divinely ordained destiny?
How deserted lies the city,
once so full of people!
How like a widow is she,
who once was great among the nations!
She who was queen among the provinces
has now become a slave.
So begins the Hebrew Bible’s Book of Lamentations, mourning the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians at the beginning of the sixth century BC. In Near Eastern theology, if a god abandoned a city, that city would be destroyed. This was Jerusalem’s fate; it was also how the Babylonians understood the destruction of their own city by the Assyrians at the end of the seventh century.
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