(No. 4)

In Isaiah 45:1, fully one hundred years before King Cyrus was born, we read concerning the capture of Babylon:"Thus saith the Lord to His anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I have holden to subdue nations before him; I will loose the loins of kings (make them careless) to open before him (Cyrus) the two-leaved gates, and the gates shall not be shut."

When we read Daniel's prophecy and Herodotus' account of the fall of Babylon, we see a marvelous prediction this was.

When Cyrus besieged Babylon he soon discovered that it had a wall three hundred feet high and fifty feet wide, and was well provisioned. Finding he could not take it by force, he adopted another plan. The Euphrates river ran right through the center of ancient Babylon, and the great wall was carried over it on pillars. Great two-leaved gates stretched across the river from shore to shore, the water flowing between the iron bars. This prevented any enemy entering the city by way of the river.

Some distance up the Euphrates Cyrus discovered an old channel which once had carried that river around the city of Babylon. Herodotus tells us thousands of men were put to work to dig out this old river-bed, while Cyrus ordered others to build a dam across the present channel. When all was ready, he suddenly withdrew his troops from the city. King Belshazzar thought he had abandoned the siege, and as Daniel informs us, sent out invitations to a thousand of his lords to come to his palace that night and celebrate the event. About midnight Cyrus closed the dam and changed the course of the Euphrates around the city, thus making the river-bed through the city dry. He then marched back to Babylon, found the two-leaved gates wide open, as Herodotus informs us, and thus entered the city exactly as Isaiah predicted he would do. Such a prediction, giving the very name of the conqueror a hundred years before he was born, proves most clearly that the Bible is God's own Book.

-From "The Bible:Its Christ and Modernism," by T. J. McCrossan, 213 pp., $1.00.