Encyclopedia › The Bible in stone
The Bible in stone
Cyrus Cylinder
Clay barrel, 23 cm long · soon after 539 BC · found 1879 at Babylon
This barrel of baked clay, about 23 centimeters long, is covered in Babylonian cuneiform. It was written for Cyrus the Great, the Persian king who took Babylon in 539 BC. Hormuzd Rassam found it during his excavations at Babylon in 1879, and it is now in the British Museum. The text, about a thousand words in translation, presents Cyrus as the rightful king. It blames Nabonidus, the last Babylonian king, for neglecting Marduk, the city’s chief god, and says that Marduk chose Cyrus and let him enter Babylon without a battle.
Cyrus then says that he sent the peoples who had been carried off back to their homes, returned the images of their gods to their own sanctuaries and helped rebuild their temples. The cylinder does not name the Jews or Jerusalem; the places it lists are in Mesopotamia and the lands beyond the Tigris. By one view, the return described in Ezra 1 was part of this same general policy; by another, the cylinder speaks only of those cities, and Cyrus’s decree for Jerusalem was a separate one. The Bible also records that Cyrus gave back the temple articles that Nebuchadnezzar had taken (Ezra 1:7).
Key verses
In the first year of Cyrus king of Persia, to fulfill the word of the LORD spoken through Jeremiah, the LORD stirred the spirit of Cyrus king of Persia to send a proclamation throughout his kingdom and to put it in writing as follows:“This is what Cyrus king of Persia says: ‘The LORD, the God of heaven, who has given me all the kingdoms of the earth, has appointed me to build a house for Him at Jerusalem in Judah. Whoever among you belongs to His people, may his God be with him, and may he go to Jerusalem in Judah and build the house of the LORD, the God of Israel; He is the God who is in Jerusalem.King Cyrus also brought out the articles belonging to the house of the LORD that Nebuchadnezzar had carried away from Jerusalem and placed in the temple of his gods.In the first year of King Cyrus, he issued a decree concerning the house of God in Jerusalem: Let the house be rebuilt as a place for offering sacrifices, and let its foundations be firmly laid. It is to be sixty cubits high and sixty cubits wide,Sources
Adapted and shortened from the Tyndale Open Bible Dictionary · CC BY-SA 4.0
Tyndale Open Bible Dictionary © 2023 Tyndale House Publishers · CC BY-SA 4.0 — Cyrus Cylinder*; Inscriptions: Historical Records; Cyrus the Great*
Adapted from Tyndale Open Bible Dictionary: articles chosen, shortened and retold in our own words (history, nature and daily life only) and, in languages other than English, machine-translated. The original work by Tyndale House Publishers is available for free at tyndaleopenresources.com.
