The Book of Cyrus

In the winter of 1938, among the uncatalogued Persian manuscripts of the Biblioteca Nacional, I found a history of Cyrus the Great which differed from every history I knew.

The book had no title.

This is not entirely accurate. There had once been a title, but someone—perhaps the author, perhaps a later reader—had scraped it from the leather binding with such determination that only three letters remained.

They might have belonged to the Persian word for king.

They might equally have meant servant.

This ambiguity, which at first seemed accidental, proved to contain the book.

The manuscript consisted of two histories.

One was written in black ink.

The other, much later, in red.

The black history was conventional.

It described Cyrus, son of Cambyses, king of Anshan, conqueror of Media, Lydia, and Babylon. It named generals, battles, roads, cities. It recorded alliances and betrayals with the confidence peculiar to historians who know that the dead cannot contradict them.

The red history was stranger.

It did not dispute the facts.

It disputed the author.

Beside a description of Cyrus crossing a river, someone had written:

He believes he is going east.

Beside the account of a victory:

He does not know who has given it to him.

Beside a list of cities surrendered without battle:

The doors were opened before he arrived.

And beside the first mention of Babylon:

He has been called by name, though he does not know the Name.

I assumed the red annotations were the work of a Jewish reader.

Later I became less certain.

There are empires which conquer territory.

There are others which conquer possibility.

The second conquest is more complete.

A wall prevents the body from passing.

An empire, if it is sufficiently old, persuades the prisoner that there is nowhere to go.

Babylon had mastered both arts.

The Jewish exiles had lived there long enough for the improbable to become impossible.

Jerusalem belonged to memory.

Memory, as we know, is a country easily conquered.

There were men and women in Babylon who remembered Jerusalem directly: the angle of a certain street, the smell of smoke from the sacrifices, light upon the stone at evening.

Their children remembered those things differently.

They remembered having been told them.

Their grandchildren remembered that there had once been people who remembered them.

It is possible that by the third generation Jerusalem was less a city than a grammatical tense.

The past.

Babylon, meanwhile, possessed walls.

This is more persuasive than grammar.

It possessed armies, archives, gates, taxes, markets, temples, officials, monuments, calendars.

Above all, it possessed the present.

No empire willingly admits that the present is temporary.

Its inscriptions say forever.

Its buildings say forever.

Its soldiers say forever.

Its maps omit the border between now and always.

Eventually the conquered learn the imperial tense.

Things are as they are.

Things will be as they are.

There was perhaps once another world.

There will not be another one.

I am reminded of an observation attributed to the heretical historian Menard: the most perfect prison is not the one whose doors cannot be opened, but the one whose inhabitants have forgotten that doors exist.

The Jews of Babylon had not forgotten entirely.

That was the problem.

They possessed songs.

Promises.

Stories.

The fragments of another world.

These can be more painful than chains.

A promise remembered long after its apparent failure is a peculiar form of torment.

One asks not merely:

Will the door open?

One eventually asks:

Was there ever a promise?

And then:

Was there ever a door?

The anonymous red commentator writes, beside an account of Babylonian fortifications:

They began by waiting for God. Later they waited for nothing.

Then someone speaks a name.

Cyrus.

This is the point at which the manuscript becomes almost unbearable.

Cyrus was not a Jew.

He had not learned the songs beside the rivers of Babylon.

He had not mourned Jerusalem.

He had not prayed toward its ruins.

He was not a descendant of David.

He did not know the covenant.

He did not know the God of Israel.

Indeed, the Hebrew prophet whose words concern him takes pains to repeat this last fact.

Though you do not know me.

Twice.

Yet the prophet gives Cyrus a title which ought to have belonged elsewhere.

Anointed.

The Hebrew word is mashiach.

Messiah.

I have known theologians who, upon reaching this verse, become suddenly interested in nuance.

Their instinct is understandable.

Certain words seem to require guards.

We fear what will happen if they cross the border.

But the prophet places no guard here.

He takes the word used for Israel’s consecrated kings and places it upon a Persian conqueror.

Cyrus.

Anointed.

The juxtaposition is so violent that familiarity has concealed it.

Had the prophet written Nebuchadnezzar, priest, the effect would scarcely be stranger.

The red annotator writes only:

Whose word was it?

I cannot determine whether this is a question of philology or accusation.

Cyrus, meanwhile, advances.

He does not advance because he has discovered monotheism.

He does not advance because the cries of Jewish exiles have moved him to compassion.

He advances because he is Cyrus.

Kings conquer.

Empires expand.

Armies move.

The black text records these things without embarrassment.

It tells us of campaigns and calculations, of rivals defeated, cities acquired, territories absorbed into the widening geometry of Persian power.

Cyrus believes he understands his own motives.

This may be the greatest illusion granted to human beings.

He knows why he moves armies.

He knows which kingdom he intends to defeat.

He knows what he will gain if Babylon falls.

He knows himself to be the author of these events.

The Hebrew prophet knows otherwise.

God has taken Cyrus by the right hand.

The phrase is nearly grotesque.

The hand that commands armies is itself held.

The hand that carries the sword is guided by another hand.

The conqueror advances because he has been conquered by a purpose of which he knows nothing.

The ruler who imagines nations opening before him does not perceive that he too has been opened.

The black manuscript says:

Cyrus entered.

The red manuscript says:

He was led.

Both statements describe the same footsteps.

This troubled me for many years.

We are accustomed to imagine divine action where human intention is absent.

A miracle interrupts causality.

A voice speaks.

A sea divides.

An angel arrives.

Isaiah offers something more disturbing.

Cyrus remains Cyrus.

His ambition remains ambition.

His armies remain armies.

His strategy remains strategy.

He does not become secretly Jewish.

He does not experience the conversion that would make the story easier.

He does not know.

Nevertheless:

God calls him.

God names him.

God strengthens him.

God takes him by the hand.

There are theological systems in which this would constitute an intolerable ambiguity.

Isaiah appears untroubled.

The red commentator compares Cyrus to an animal.

At first I thought this an insult.

Then I recognized the reference.

Balaam rode toward a destination, confident that he understood both his journey and his vocation.

His donkey saw the angel first.

The prophet was blind.

The animal perceived.

God opened the mouth of the creature whom the religious specialist had beaten for refusing to cooperate with his ignorance.

Only afterward were Balaam’s eyes opened.

The comparison is imprecise.

It is therefore excellent.

God’s purposes appear to suffer from no human anxiety about suitable instruments.

The donkey may see.

The pagan king may liberate.

The authorized person may be blind.

The unauthorized one may become indispensable.

This is not a principle one would advise institutions to adopt without qualification.

It is nevertheless in the Bible.

Cyrus approaches Babylon.

The prophet sees before Cyrus arrives what the king himself cannot see.

Bronze doors broken.

Iron bars cut.

Kings stripped of power.

Treasures hidden in darkness disclosed.

Gates opened.

The details sound military.

The theology is not.

The point is not chiefly that Cyrus is powerful enough to open the doors.

The point is that another has opened them for him.

Babylon possesses gates.

Cyrus possesses armies.

Neither possesses history.

This is the first reversal.

The second concerns Israel.

For your sake.

The words are almost hidden amid the proclamations of sovereignty.

For Jacob my servant.

For Israel my chosen.

The exile has produced a terrible inference.

We have lost Jerusalem; therefore God has lost us.

Babylon has erased our kingdom; therefore our election has been erased.

The years have continued; therefore the promise has expired.

The prophet rejects the logic.

Babylon has not erased their names.

Distance has not weakened God’s memory.

Their children’s ignorance of Jerusalem has not diminished God’s knowledge of them.

The door has been closed.

The promise has not.

God calls Cyrus by name because God has not forgotten theirs.

There is, however, a complication.

The God who remembers Israel refuses to belong to Israel.

This distinction is easily confessed and rarely enjoyed.

We prefer a God who is faithful to us.

Isaiah gives us that God.

We prefer less readily a God whose faithfulness is also freedom.

Isaiah gives us that God as well.

Cyrus is the scandal of that freedom.

God acts outside the expected sanctuary.

Outside the expected dynasty.

Outside the expected religion.

Outside even the knowledge of the person through whom God acts.

The instrument does not recognize the musician.

The sentence still becomes music.

The exiles must therefore learn two things at once.

God has not abandoned them.

God is not theirs to manage.

It would have been easier to learn either truth separately.

A controllable God who had forgotten them would be useless but comprehensible.

A faithful God acting through familiar means would be consoling.

Isaiah offers neither.

The God who remembers them is precisely the God who exceeds their categories.

Consolation arrives disguised as theological offense.

Cyrus?

Yes.

Cyrus.

The man who does not know the Name is called by name.

The symmetry is deliberate.

Or, if it was not deliberate, it should have been.

Then the text widens.

Until this point the question has been Babylon.

Can Babylon fall?

Can Israel return?

Can the locked door open?

The prophet now speaks from east to west.

From the rising of the sun to its setting.

There is no other.

The statement is repeated with the insistence of someone dismantling a universe.

I am the Lord.

There is no other.

This does not mean merely that Israel’s God is stronger than the gods of Babylon.

That would leave the structure intact.

Several gods.

One stronger.

Isaiah destroys the structure.

No rival governs Persia.

No rival governs Babylon.

No rival possesses the darkness while God administers the light.

No second deity has been assigned catastrophe as a jurisdiction.

Then come the words readers have been trying to escape for twenty-five centuries.

I form light.

I create darkness.

I make well-being.

I create calamity.

I am the Lord who does all these things.

The red manuscript contains no annotation here.

Only a vertical line.

It is possible the reader did not know what to say.

Neither do I.

There are verses which invite commentary.

There are others before which commentary is a form of evasion.

One can soften the Hebrew.

One can observe, correctly, that raʿ may mean calamity rather than moral evil.

One can distinguish metaphysical evil from historical catastrophe.

One can explain the polemic against dualism.

All this is useful.

None of it removes the sentence.

God creates darkness.

God creates calamity.

The prophet does not merely say that God remains present when disaster happens.

He does not say that calamity belongs to another power but will eventually be transformed into good.

He says something more dangerous because his subject is sovereignty.

There is no region of history from which God has been expelled.

Not the light.

Not the darkness.

Not Jerusalem.

Not Babylon.

Not the rise of Cyrus.

Not the fall of an empire.

The claim does not explain suffering.

This distinction matters.

Sovereignty is not explanation.

To say that history has not escaped God is not to say that we understand history.

Cyrus himself is proof.

He stands within a purpose he cannot perceive.

He understands his armies.

He does not understand his place in the sentence.

Perhaps we should assume that we are not more perceptive merely because we have theology.

The red commentator finally writes:

The character does not know the plot.

Underneath, perhaps years later:

Nor does the reader.

I have sometimes suspected that this is the true subject of the manuscript.

Cyrus believes he is the author.

Israel believes Babylon has become the author.

Isaiah announces that neither is correct.

This does not make history less terrible.

It makes it less closed.

There is a difference.

A closed world admits only the possibilities already visible within it.

Babylon has walls.

Therefore walls will remain.

Babylon has power.

Therefore Babylon will remain.

Cyrus is a pagan conqueror.

Therefore Cyrus cannot be an instrument of Israel’s God.

Calamity contradicts divine sovereignty.

Therefore either God has vanished or history belongs to someone else.

Isaiah rejects every therefore.

The world contains an Author not confined to the logic of the characters.

That sentence is dangerous.

All sentences about providence are dangerous.

They have too often been spoken by people standing at a safe distance from another person’s suffering.

Isaiah speaks first to exiles.

To people whose city has burned.

Whose sanctuary has fallen.

Whose political world has ended.

He does not offer them a theory by which destruction becomes pleasant.

Jerusalem remains destroyed.

Exile remains exile.

The dead remain dead.

The theological claim is not that calamity is secretly painless.

It is that calamity has not become sovereign.

Babylon is not God.

Cyrus is not God.

Darkness is not God.

But neither is darkness outside God.

There is no other.

The sentence can terrify.

For the exiles it can also liberate.

If Babylon is not ultimate, Babylon may end.

If the world is not governed by what appears permanent, the permanent may prove temporary.

If God is not imprisoned within Israel’s expectations, then God may already be acting in places Israel has not thought to look.

Perhaps even in Persia.

Perhaps even through Cyrus.

Perhaps even now.

This last possibility is the most difficult.

Hope often arrives first as misrecognition.

We look toward the familiar road.

Nothing appears.

We conclude no one is coming.

Meanwhile someone approaches by another road.

The exiles prayed, presumably, for deliverance.

I doubt many prayed for Cyrus.

This is one of the defects of fulfilled prayer: the answer is under no obligation to resemble the request.

The black manuscript tells us that in October of 539 BCE Babylon fell to Cyrus.

The red manuscript makes a smaller claim.

A gate opened.

I do not know whether the gate in question was historical, metaphorical, or both.

Borges—whose opinion I once sought in a dream—would have said the distinction is irrelevant.

Every gate is eventually metaphysical.

For the Jews of Babylon, the opening meant that a world which had declared itself final was not final.

The empire remained immense.

Persia would become an empire too.

History did not end.

Human beings did not become free of conquest.

Cyrus himself was no saint.

Isaiah knows none of this to be a contradiction.

The opening is enough.

There had been a door.

Babylon had lied.

The future existed.

God had not forgotten.

Near the end of the manuscript the two inks begin to alternate so rapidly that I could no longer tell which history was original.

Cyrus took Babylon.

God took Cyrus by the hand.

The gates opened.

God broke the bronze.

The exiles returned.

God remembered.

Cyrus did not know him.

God called Cyrus by name.

Then a final sentence:

Who, then, conquered whom?

I copied the words into my notebook.

Years later, when I returned to consult the manuscript again, I was told no such book existed.

The librarian was courteous.

We examined the catalogue together.

There was no untitled Persian chronicle.

No Varela provenance.

No manuscript matching my description.

I asked whether a volume could have been transferred.

He assured me it could not.

I asked whether one could have been lost.

He smiled.

Libraries, like empires, prefer not to admit that anything escapes them.

I left near dusk.

The great doors of the library were already being closed.

For some reason I thought of Babylon.

Then of Jerusalem.

Then of the unknown Persian king who knew exactly what he intended to do and did not know at all what he was doing.

As I reached the street, I heard behind me the heavy movement of the lock.

For an instant I imagined the opposite sound.

A bolt withdrawing.

Iron giving way.

A key turning from the other side.

It occurred to me that the exiles had been wrong about only one thing.

They had believed the silence behind the door meant that nothing was happening.

All the while,

beyond the walls,

a man who did not know God

was already on the road.