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20 Nebuchadnezzar "'my servant"—had decided to make the Babylo- nian king the instrument of His wrath against the gods of Egypt: Thus sayeth Yahweh, Lord of Hosts, the God of Israel: "Indeed will I send for and fetch Nebuchadnezzar, my ser- vant. ... And he shall smite the land of Egypt, and deliver such as are for death to death, and such as are for captivity to captivity, and such as are for the sword to the sword. And I will kindle a fire in the house of Egypt's gods, and he will burn them. . . . And he will break the obelisks of Heliopolis, the one which is in the land of Egypt; The houses of the gods of Egypt shall he bum with fire." In the course of this campaign the Lord Yahweh announced that Jerusalem, too. shall be punished on account of its people's sins, having taken up the worship of the "Queen of Heaven" and of the gods of Egypt: "Mine anger and my fury shall be poured upon this place. . . and it shall burn and shall not be quenched. . . . In the city on which my name has been called, the doom will I begin." And so it was that in the year 586 B.C. "Nebuzaraddan, captain of the guard of the king of Babylon, came into Jerusalem; and he burned the House of Yahweh. and the king's house, and all the houses of Jerusalem . . . and all the walls around Jerusalem were torn down by the army of the Chaldeans." This desolation, Yah- weh promised, however, would last only Seventy years. The king who was to fulfill this promise and enable the re- building of the Temple of Jerusalem was Cyrus. His ancestors, speaking an Indo-European language, are believed to have mi- grated south from the Caspian Sea area to the province of Anshan along the eastern coast of the Persian Gulf. There Hakham-Anish ("Wise Man"), the leader of the migrants, began a dynasty we call Achaemenid; his descendants—Cyrus, Darius. Xerxes—made _his- tory as rulers of what was to be the Persian empire. When Cyrus ascended the throne of Anshan in 549 B.C., his land was a distant province of Elam and Media. In Babylon, then the center of power, the kingship was held by Nabunaid, who be- came king under most unusual circumstances: not by the custom- ary choice by the god Marduk. but as a result of a unique pact between a High Priestess (the mother of Nabunaid) and the god THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN