Persia

Persia was the great empire that succeeded Babylon as master of the ancient Near East, forged by Cyrus the Great around 550 BC through the union of the Medes and Persians. At its height under Darius I and Xerxes it reached from the Aegean Sea to the Indus River, the largest realm the world had yet seen, governed through provinces (satrapies) and famed for the unalterable "law of the Medes and Persians" (Daniel 6:8; Esther 1:19). In the prophetic visions of Daniel it is the silver breast of the great image and the two-horned ram, the second of the world-empires that would give way before the kingdom of God (Daniel 2:39; Daniel 8:3–4, 20).

Persia's role in Scripture is, above all, the empire of restoration. Where Egypt and Babylon are remembered as houses of bondage and exile, Persia is the power through which God brought his people home. When Cyrus took Babylon in 539 BC, the LORD "stirred up the spirit of Cyrus," who in his first year issued the decree permitting the Jewish exiles to return and rebuild the temple in Jerusalem (2 Chronicles 36:22–23; Ezra 1:1–4) — so fulfilling Jeremiah's seventy years and, astonishingly, the word of Isaiah, who had named Cyrus the LORD's "shepherd" and "anointed" more than a century before his birth (Isaiah 44:28; Isaiah 45:1).

The post-exilic books unfold within this Persian world. Under later kings — Darius I, who confirmed Cyrus's decree, and Artaxerxes — the temple was completed and Jerusalem's walls rebuilt through the missions of Zerubbabel, Ezra, and Nehemiah, stirred on by the prophets Haggai and Zechariah (Ezra 6:14–15; Nehemiah 2:1–8). In the Persian capital of Susa, under Ahasuerus (Xerxes), the book of Esther tells how a Jewish queen and her cousin Mordecai were used to deliver their people from destruction, an event commemorated in the feast of Purim (Esther 9:20–22). Daniel, too, served into this era, surviving the lions' den under Darius and prospering "in the reign of Cyrus the Persian" (Daniel 6:28).

Persia thus stands in the biblical story as a vivid demonstration of God's sovereignty over the nations: he raises up and directs pagan emperors — even naming one in prophecy before his birth — to accomplish his purposes for his covenant people. Through Persian decrees and patronage the exiles returned, the temple rose again, and the Jewish nation was preserved and re-established in the land, keeping alive the line and the hope through which, in the fullness of time, the Messiah would come.