Joseph and Cyrus

Cyrus, King of Persia, as representative of Joseph

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 Cyrus



Biblical Locations of the Lost Ten Tribes

  Scriptural Proof  
The Joseph Aspect 

 by Yair Davidiy

Biblical Evidence 

Cyrus

http://www.nationalreview.com/kopel/kopel031803.asp
David Koppel: Religious Fright
In the latest issue of Books & Culture, a Christian book review monthly, Gerald McDermott details the role of Truman's Southern Baptist faith in his Israel policy. While mainline Protestants (with some important exceptions,  such as Schlesinger's friend Reinhold Niebuhr) tended to disparage Zionist hopes for a Jewish state, religious conservatives (a group that included people like Truman who were not necessarily political conservatives) rejoiced in Zionist aspirations as the fulfillment of prophecy and the just restoration of the Jewish homeland which God had promised the Jews by sacred covenant. Only hours after the declaration of the State of Israel, President Truman overrode the objections of the State Department and the War Department, and made the United States the first nation to grant recognition to Israel. Truman used American clout to convince the U.N. to recognize Israel, too. When ceasefire lines were being drawn after the failed Arab war to exterminate the Jews, Truman insisted that Israel have the Negev, which more than doubled Israel's territory. Israelis believed that without Truman they would not have survived. As recounted in the Second Book of Chronicles, in the 6th century B.C. the Jewish kingdom was conquered by the Babylonian Empire, the Temple was destroyed, and the Jews were carried into Babylonian captivity. Half a century later, the Babylonian Empire was overthrown by the Persian Empire of Cyrus the Great. Cyrus allowed the Jews to return to their holy land:
In the first year of Cyrus king of Persia, in order to fulfill the word of the LORD spoken by Isaiah, the LORD moved the heart of Cyrus king of Persia to make a proclamation throughout his realm and to put it in writing: "This is what Cyrus king of Persia says: 'The LORD , the God of heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth and he has appointed me to build a temple for him at Jerusalem in Judah. Anyone of his people among you may the LORD his God be with him, and let him go up.'" Paul Charles Merkley's book, 'The Politics of Christian Zionism: 1891-1948,'  describes a meeting in 1949, at the end of Truman's presidency, between Truman and the Chief Rabbi of Israel:  The Rabbi went on to assert: "God put you in your mother's womb so you would be the instrument to bring about Israel's rebirth after two thousand years." We are told by a witness that, "On hearing these words, Truman rose from his chair and, with great emotion, tears glistening in his eyes, he turned to the Chief Rabbi and asked him if his actions for the sake of the Jewish people were indeed to be interpreted thus and the hand of the Almighty was in the matter."  A few months later, retired President Truman was honored at the Jewish Theological Seminary. One of Truman's friends introduced him to the professors as "the man who helped create the State of Israel."

 

Truman said, "What do you mean 'helped to create'? I am Cyrus. I am Cyrus!"

"Conclusion: The Verdict of History"
Polowetzky, Michael,  "Jerusalem recovered : Victorian intellectuals and the birth of Modern Zionism," Westport (Conn.): Praeger, 1995, Moshe Davis has left us record of a visit which Harry Truman made a few months after the end of his Presidency to the Jewish Theological Seminary, together with Truman's friend, Eddie Jacobson. Jacobson introduced Harry Truman to the professors: 'This is the man who helped create the State of Israel', but Truman corrected him: 'What do you mean "helped to create"? I am Cyrus. I am Cyrus.' It seems that the analogy to Cyrus had already been suggested to President Truman by the Chief Rabbi of Israel, Isaac Halevi Herzog, on the occasion of a visit to him in the White House early in 1949. The rabbi went on to assert: 'God put you in your mother's womb so you would be the instrument to bring about Israel's rebirth after two thousand years.' We are told by a witness that, 'On hearing these words, Truman rose from his chair and, with great emotion, tears glistening in his eyes, he turned to the Chief Rabbi and asked him if his actions for the sake of the Jewish people were indeed to be interpreted thus and the hand of the Almighty was in the matter'.

These words of Truman's - 'I am Cyrus' - were uttered neither casually nor ironically. We must take them with the fullest seriousness, and when we do, we will have the key to understanding Truman's constant pro-Zionism.

Harry Truman frequently turned over the name of 'Cyrus the Great' as he rehearsed the names of the 'Great Men of History'- a mental exercise which he performed regularly, as a concert pianist performs scales. The American democratic process, he knew, had put him in the place where Cyrus redivivus was expected. His awareness of all this is what explains the consistency of his refusal to allow himself to be worn down by the emotional and sometimes brutal arguments of the Zionists, fully as much as it explains his serenity in the face of the arguments from anti-Zionist Jews, the pro-Arab blandishments coming from the State Department, the 'realistic' military judgments coming from George Marshall and George Kennan, and the economic-geopolitical arguments of James Forrestal. To doubt his personal fitness for this great role would have been the same as to doubt the fitness of the American political system which had put him in place. To set his own name at the end of that long catalogue of the Great Men (in which Cyrus always figured) was not, he believed, an act of vanity, but a requirement of fidelity to received religion and to his own self-confidence as a student of history.