Ezra 1:1 Now in the first year of Cyrus king of Persia, that the word of the LORD by the mouth of Jeremiah might be fulfilled, the LORD stirred up the spirit of Cyrus king of Persia, that he made a proclamation throughout all his kingdom, and put it also in writing, saying, 2 Thus saith Cyrus king of Persia, The LORD God of heaven hath given me all the kingdoms of the earth; and he hath charged me to build him a house at Jerusalem, which is in Judah. 3 Who is there among you of all his people? His God be with him, and let him go up to Jerusalem, which is in Judah, and build the house of the LORD God of Israel, (he is the God,) which is in Jerusalem.
When I awoke to the news that America and Israel had struck Iran, and then shortly afterward learned that Ayatollah Khamenei was dead, I was almost unable to process my thoughts. I have prayed for the people of Persia for so long; to see them on the cusp of freedom nearly brought me to tears.
This sentiment may not make sense to those who do not understand the Biblical tie-in to all of this.
The people of Persia go back in history to at least the time of Genesis 14. They were called Elamites then. As they grew in prominence through the long years, Persia became their common designation; records of that go back as far as nearly a thousand years before Christ. But it would be in 539 BC that they vaulted to world fame when they, allied with the Medes, toppled mighty Babylon. The Biblical account of that is in Daniel 5.
For a year, the Medes, under Darius, were the titular heads, though Persia was the more dominant of the two. But when Cyrus took the throne alone, everything changed for the Jews. After seventy years of captivity, just as Jeremiah had prophesied in Jeremiah 25:11-12 and 29:10 (and in secular records, as is described in the Cyrus Cylinder), Cyrus issued the famous decree allowing the Jews to return to their homeland. This was unheard of in the ancient world; what king would ever let valuable subjects simply leave? And yet, Cyrus the Persian did just that, and that deed has never been forgotten by the Jewish people.
In later years, a Jewish queen, Esther, would be married to Ahasuerus, king of Persia, and would use that position to save her people from a planned extermination even at the hands of Haman. A bit after that, another prominent Jew, Nehemiah, would be allowed by King Artaxerxes to go and rebuild the walls of Jerusalem.
The paths of those two peoples diverged for a long while after that. The Persians eventually fell to Greece, and then Greece, Israel, and everyone else was subjugated to Rome. And then in AD 136, after Hadrian provoked the Jews into a conflict, one that took Rome three years to put down, the Jews were kicked out of their ancestral homeland. For 1,676 years, they were dispersed among the countries of the world, fulfilling the heart-wrenching prophecy of Hosea 9:17 that they would be “wanderers among the nations.”
In 1948, though, everything changed; as Ezekiel 37 (among many other passages) foretold, the sons and daughters of Abraham came home, and the state of Israel was reborn in modern times. She was quickly targeted for extermination by the nations around her, yet fought off every attack and rebuilt a vibrant land in what had, for so long, been a desolation. Mark Twain, who visited there in 1867, called it “a silent, mournful expanse,” going on to say, “A desolation is here that not even imagination can grace with the pomp of life and action.”
Fast forward to 1979, and the other ancient people in this story, Persia. Since 1935, that name had been set aside in favor of Iran. In 1979, though, when the caliphate took over, they lost much more than their name. In my recent column “Rise Up, Sons And Daughters Of Persia,” I described their horrific conditions at length. For millennia, Persia had been a vibrant, free, colorful place; now, though, all was shrouded in the darkness of tyranny.
On February 28, 2026, though, the most ancient of friends repaid a very, very old debt. Israel, alongside the United States, struck the caliphate, eliminating the people who had so long held the cords of oppression that bound the Persian people. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu then sent a video message to the people of Persia, saying, “The nation of Iran and the nation of Israel have been true friends since the days of Cyrus the Great. The time has come for the Iranian people to unite around its flag and its historic legacy, by standing up for your freedom from the evil and oppressive regime.”
When Cyrus extended his hand of kindness to the Jews, he could never have known that 2,564 years later, the Jews would return the favor to his people. Kindness is a lot like that, though; it has a way of benefiting not just us but our children’s children’s children through hundreds of generations.
Thank you, Israel, for remembering the debt of kindness. Thank you to my own country, America, for lending your strength to the effort. And to the people of Persia, please know that I and everyone I know are pulling for you and praying for you.
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