Updated
The only foreigner the Bible calls "anointed"
Did you know the Bible gives the title "anointed" — in Hebrew, mashiach — to exactly one foreigner?
The word ordinarily belongs to Israel's own consecrated leaders: kings like Saul and David, and the high priests. It is the word that comes into English as messiah. And in Isaiah 45:1, it lands on a Persian: "Yahweh says to his anointed, to Cyrus."
Cyrus was no Israelite. His own inscriptions credit Marduk, the god of Babylon, with his victories. Yet Isaiah says Yahweh held his right hand, calls him "my shepherd," and adds, twice, a phrase with no parallel: "though you have not known me." The prophet's claim is staggering in its setting: the God of a small, deported people is steering the largest empire on earth, through a king who has never heard of him.
Scholars attribute these chapters, Isaiah 40–55, to a prophet writing during the exile itself, as Cyrus rose. Read that way, the first audience was the deportees by the rivers of Babylon, being told that imperial politics, of all things, was their God at work.
Where to see it: read Isaiah 44:28 through 45:6. Watch for "though you have not known me" in 45:4–5. The anointing runs entirely one direction.
Sources
- Isaiah 40–55 (Second Isaiah)exilic dating is the standard scholarly view; the Cyrus Cylinder records his devotion to Marduk
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