As you may remember from an earlier chapter, in all likelihood we owe the existence of the Hebrew Bible to the oppression of the Babylonians, who forced early Jewish communities to write down their oral histories before they were lost. These communities anxiously awaited a messiah, or rescuer, whom they identified with the Persian emperor Cyrus the Great (ca. 600–530 B.C.E.). This isn’t historical speculation; Isaiah 45 specifically calls Cyrus the messiah and identifies him as the divinely-anointed savior of the Jewish people.
