1. Hence the term Achaemenid as a synonym for the Persian dynasty.
2. The Greek historian Herodotus describes Astyages as Cyrus' grandfather. This supposed root legitimized Cyrus' claim to represent both Persian and Median, and explains both the habit of Daniel of referring to "the Medes and Persians" in the same breathe, and of the Greek historians' of using Medes as synonymous with Persians.
3. The other capitals of Cyrus' empire included Pasargarde and Babylon.
4. Deutero-Isaiah is the label often used by scholars for Isa 40-55. The "three great civilizations" referred to are Greece, Syria, and Persia.
5. A mule is the offspring of an ass/donkey with a horse, and thus a synonym for a half-breed.
6. Herodotus, History, I:53.
7. Herodotus, History, I:80.
8. In these same chapters in which Isaiah foretold the coming of Cyrus as Yahweh's servant, we also read of another Servant of the Lord, one who "had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him, who was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering" (53:2-3). We shall have more to say about him later.
9. Isn't it interesting that Islam, which grew out of this same soil that Nabonidus found so endearing a millennium later, takes the crescent for its symbol? Belshazzar is mentioned in Dan 5 as the king who had the audacity to profane the gold and silver goblets taken from the temple in Jerusalem for his drinking party, whereupon the fingers of a human hand appeared and wrote him a simple message, "Mene, Mene, Tekel Uparsin."
10. James B. Prichard, ed. The Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955) 305f. Bel simply means 'lord,' and here refers to Marduk. Esagila is the temple in Babylon.
11. F. F. Bruce, Israel and the Nations (Exeter: Paternoster Press, 1973) 99-100.