The Persian king who, in roughly two decades, rose from a subject people to overthrow the Medes, Lydians, and Babylonians and assembled the Achaemenid Empire — the largest the world had yet seen — governing it through a pragmatic policy of restoring local cults and ruling through local elites that the Hebrew Bible praised and that a clay cylinder recorded, a record later, and contestedly, called the first charter of human rights.
In 539 BCE a king walked into Babylon, one of the greatest cities of the ancient world, and, by the Babylonian account, met almost no resistance. He did not raze its temples or deport its people. Instead he restored their gods and let displaced peoples return to their lands. One of those nations was Judah, and its scripture would call him the LORD's anointed — a foreign, non-Jewish king named as a deliverer. The man was Cyrus of Persia, and the empire he built outlived him by two centuries.