In the long electoral period leading to the recent win of a foolish and scary apocalyptic figure, the New York Times kept talking about Trump on its first page, no matter the inanity of the news: two articles on Thursday the 11th of January 2024 for instance. The first one explains why a new breed of evangelical Christians supports the ex-president in spite of his lack of Christian bona fide or perhaps because it allows supposed Christians to have a taste of hell.

Some Christians justify their vote by comparing him to a messianic Cyrus the Great and his support of Jewish subjects in the sixth century BC. No matter that the passage of Isaiah 45 is a pure piece of ideology and that Persian kings would in fact use compulsion and violence when necessary against their internal and external enemies. The repression of Egypt’s repeated rebellions is a case in point. Successive empires, including Persia, nonobstant the glamorous reputation made to Cyrus II, used the same combination of force and religious pressures, not to say political, to enforce tribute and avoid further rebellion. Like all large realms before and after them, the Achaemenid kings were seeking political gains and order at the lowest transactional cost possible once they were at the head of a large empire and had reached the typical limits of their power to conquer.

The messianic cloak given to Cyrus by the “second book” of Isaiah is therefore to be replaced in that old (and not so old) context. Only insiders who accepted Persian domination could interpret the Bisitun inscription of Darius I as “a peaceful state made up of many nations maintaining the protection of the cultural and religious integrity of each” (Schmid 2019, p. 241). The inscription makes clear that obedience and fidelity were considered paramount and that numerous wars and demonstrative cruelties awaited those ethnic groups that rebelled. Still, why was it politically required for the author of deutero-Isaiah to
declare Cyrus II to be YAHWEH’s messiah? I would think that the answer is in an attitude that was parallel to that of the priests of Marduk in Babylonia—and that those positions could change quickly. Finally, let it be said that the Marduk and Judaean priests were not the only subjects forced to invent the protection of a new master. Even modern Christians are apparently drawn do the same conclusion and tempted to recast Trump as their only Persian-like (Iranian?) messianic master. It is most puzzling and even contradictory to see the MAGA crowd need to take such a long detour in the feverish hopes they nurture. They consider the renewal of America’s greatness an urgent and spiriitual modern matter when what is at stake, now and then, is how to share the spoils.

I shall end here with the story world of Cyrus. He made sure that broadly known legends circulated about his birth and suggested that his destiny was out of the ordinary. Like Sargon of Akkad (23d century BCE) and even like the legendary Moses—though in reverse order—, Cyrus was expected to die by exposure but of course did not. A modest (wild?) shepherd, Mithridate, adopted him and staged an elaborate deception in which his real baby son was set to float on a river. You will need to fish the details in Pierre Briant’s book: L’histoire de l’empire perse (Paris: Fayard, 1996), 25–26.