The Two Voices
The book of Isaiah contains the work of two prophets separated by a century and a half. Cyrus the Persian is named, by name, in chapter 45, where he is also called the LORD's messiah — the only non-Israelite in the Hebrew Bible to receive that title.
The six installments of this series so far have examined edits at progressively expanding scales. A word inside a sentence. A phrase inside a verse. A doctrine across the canon. A figure across centuries. A foreign-language verse inside a Hebrew book. A class of figures emerging across the post-exilic literature.
This installment escalates again.
The specimen is no longer a verse, or a figure, or a doctrine. The specimen is an entire prophetic book. The forensic claim is that the book is not one composition but two — joined together at a specific seam, attributed to a single prophet, but in fact authored by two different prophets separated by approximately one hundred and fifty years.
The book is Isaiah.
The forensic evidence for the doubled authorship is extensive. It includes vocabulary shifts, theological developments, historical referents that postdate the alleged author's lifetime, manuscript divisions, and a specific verse — chapter 45, verse 1 — in which the second author identifies, by name, a Persian king whom the first author could not have known. The specimen has been recognized in mainstream biblical scholarship for over two centuries. It is the canonical case of higher-critical textual analysis.
What has not always been emphasized, in the standard scholarly treatment, is the forensic significance of the seam itself.
The seam is the edit. The seam reveals what the editing process was for. And inside the second half of the book, the editorial agenda becomes visible in a way it does not anywhere else in the Hebrew Bible.
The two books
The book of Isaiah, as transmitted in every Bible, contains sixty-six chapters. The chapters are presented as a unified prophetic work attributed to Isaiah son of Amoz, who prophesied in Jerusalem in the eighth century BCE — during the reigns of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, between roughly 740 and 700 BCE.
The first thirty-nine chapters of the book are consistent with this attribution. They contain prophetic oracles addressed to a specific historical situation: the political crisis caused by the expansion of the Neo-Assyrian Empire in the eighth century BCE. The named foreign powers are Assyria, Egypt, Syria, and the northern kingdom of Israel. The Judean kings addressed are the kings of the eighth century. The military and diplomatic concerns reflect the period of Sennacherib's siege of Jerusalem in 701 BCE. The political vocabulary fits.
In chapter 40, the situation changes.
The Assyrian crisis has disappeared. Assyria is no longer the threatening power. The named foreign power is now Babylon — the empire that did not become the regional hegemon until more than a century after Isaiah of Jerusalem's death. The historical situation is no longer the siege of Jerusalem by Sennacherib in 701 BCE. The historical situation is the Babylonian exile, which occurred between 597 and 539 BCE — a hundred to a hundred and fifty years after the death of the prophet whose name the book carries.
The audience has changed as well. The first thirty-nine chapters address an audience living in Jerusalem under threat. The chapters from forty onward address an audience already in exile. They have already lost the Temple. They have already been deported. They are being told to take comfort because their punishment is ending and their return is imminent. The exile is not predicted as a future event. It is described as a present reality, with the addressees already inside it.
By the time the second half of the book is finished, a new political situation has emerged. A new empire has arisen. A new king has begun to liberate the Jewish exiles. The king is named in the text. The king is not from the eighth century BCE. The king is from the sixth.
His name is Cyrus.
The naming of Cyrus
In Isaiah 44:28, the prophet announces:
"That saith of Cyrus, He is my shepherd, and shall perform all my pleasure: even saying to Jerusalem, Thou shalt be built; and to the temple, Thy foundation shall be laid."
In the next chapter, Isaiah 45:1, the announcement escalates:
"Thus saith the LORD to his anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I have holden, to subdue nations before him."
Cyrus the Great — Cyrus II of the Achaemenid dynasty — was born around 600 BCE and ascended to the throne of Persia around 559 BCE. He conquered the Median Empire around 550 BCE, the Lydian Empire around 546 BCE, and the Neo-Babylonian Empire in 539 BCE. The Edict of Cyrus, authorizing the return of Jewish exiles from Babylon and the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem, was issued in 538 BCE.
Isaiah of Jerusalem died around 686 BCE.
The named Persian king of Isaiah 44:28 and 45:1 was born roughly a century after the alleged author was dead. The events the second half of Isaiah celebrates — the rise of Cyrus, the fall of Babylon, the imminent return from exile — occurred a century and a half after the alleged author's death.
The two ways to handle this are well established in the scholarly literature. The traditional approach treats the naming of Cyrus as predictive prophecy: Isaiah of Jerusalem, by direct divine inspiration, was given the name of a foreign king who would be born more than a century after his own death and was permitted to write it down. The critical approach treats the naming as historical reference: the chapters in which Cyrus is named were written during or shortly after the events they describe, by a different prophet, in the late sixth century BCE.
The choice between these approaches is not strictly textual. It is a choice between two prior commitments. The traditional approach is required by the position that the entire book is the work of Isaiah son of Amoz. The critical approach is required by the position that biblical texts reflect the historical conditions in which they were composed.
But the choice is constrained by considerations beyond Cyrus's name alone. The naming is not an isolated reference. It is embedded inside an entire prophetic discourse that addresses the political and theological situation of the late sixth century BCE — the situation of a community already in exile, already aware of the rise of Cyrus, already organizing its theological response to the prospect of return. The Cyrus passages are not a single anachronism. They are the textual core of a literary unit shaped by the conditions of its time.
The literary unit is what the critical tradition has come to call Second Isaiah, or Deutero-Isaiah — chapters 40 through 55, the central section of the second half of the book, organized chiastically around the figure of Cyrus.
The vocabulary fingerprint
The case for two authors does not rest on Cyrus alone. It rests on the cumulative pattern of differences between the two halves of the book.
The vocabulary diverges. The first thirty-nine chapters use one set of theological terms and proper names. The chapters from forty onward use another. The Hebrew word go'el — "redeemer" — appears ten times in chapters 40 through 55 and not at all in the first thirty-nine chapters as a divine title. The pattern is consistent across multiple terms. Second Isaiah has a working vocabulary that First Isaiah does not share, and First Isaiah has a working vocabulary that Second Isaiah does not share.
The theological emphasis diverges. The first half of the book emphasizes judgment — the coming destruction of Judah for its unfaithfulness, the political crisis caused by failure to trust the LORD, the demand for repentance. The second half emphasizes comfort. The opening words of chapter 40 are "Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God" — and the entire second half develops the theme. The contrast is so stark that the conservative defenses have to explain it by appeal to genre shifts rather than content shifts. The genres do shift. The genres shift because the historical situations being addressed are different.
The theological vocabulary on God's nature diverges. The first half of the book speaks of the LORD as the Holy One of Israel — a phrase used in a covenantal and judgmental context, emphasizing God's set-apartness from his unfaithful people. The second half speaks of the LORD as the Creator who made the heavens and the earth, as the only God in all the earth, in a polemical context against polytheism and dualism. The monotheistic intensity of Second Isaiah is more elaborate and more polemical than anything in First Isaiah. The intensity matches the historical situation of a community in exile, surrounded by Babylonian and emerging Persian theology, that needs to assert the exclusive reality of its God against impressive alternatives.
The poetic style diverges. First Isaiah uses shorter prophetic oracles, often with sharp polemical edges, addressed to specific political situations. Second Isaiah uses longer rhetorical units, more lyrical in form, with sustained development of themes across many verses. The literary character of the two halves can be distinguished by any reader who knows Hebrew.
The cumulative weight of these differences is the foundation of the two-author hypothesis. The hypothesis is not a fringe position. It has been the mainstream view in academic biblical scholarship since the late eighteenth century — first articulated systematically by Johann Christoph Döderlein in 1775 and Johann Gottfried Eichhorn in 1783, refined by Bernhard Duhm in 1892, and accepted across virtually all critical traditions since. The Encyclopædia Britannica, the standard reference work, states the position without controversy: "Chapters 40–66 are much later in origin and therefore known as Deutero-Isaiah." The Israel Museum's official description of the Great Isaiah Scroll from Qumran, the oldest complete manuscript, states: "Modern scholarship considers the Book of Isaiah to be an anthology, the two principal compositions of which are the Book of Isaiah proper (chapters 1-39, with some exceptions), containing the words of the prophet Isaiah himself, dating from the time of the First Temple, around 700 BCE, and Second Isaiah (Deutero-Isaiah, chapters 40-66), comprising the words of an anonymous prophet, who lived some one hundred and fifty years later, around the time of the Babylonian exile and the restoration of the Temple in the Persian Period."
This is the position of the museum displaying the oldest manuscript of the book. The position is settled in the institutional memory of the discipline.
What the cave shows
The Great Isaiah Scroll — 1QIsa^a — is the most complete and most ancient manuscript of the book of Isaiah currently known. It was discovered in Qumran Cave 1 in 1947, dates to roughly 125 BCE, and preserves all sixty-six chapters of Isaiah in continuous Hebrew text. It is over a thousand years older than the earliest medieval manuscripts.
The conservative defense of single authorship has historically pointed to 1QIsa^a as proof that the book was always read as a unit. The argument observes that the scroll contains all sixty-six chapters in the same sequence as the Masoretic Text and does not, at the chapter 39 to chapter 40 transition, exhibit any obvious paragraph break, scribal mark, or column division that would suggest the ancient scribe perceived the book as composite.
The conservative defense, however, has not always engaged with what the scroll actually shows.
The Great Isaiah Scroll is physically divided into two halves. The first half occupies twenty-seven columns of text and contains thirty-three chapters. The second half occupies twenty-seven columns of text and contains thirty-three chapters. The division is exact. Twenty-seven and twenty-seven. Thirty-three and thirty-three. This binary structure is not present in the medieval Masoretic manuscripts. It is a feature unique to the oldest complete manuscript of the book.
The break does not fall at the modern critical seam between chapter 39 and chapter 40. It falls between chapter 33 and chapter 34 — a different location from the one critical scholars have identified as the seam between First and Second Isaiah. But the existence of the binary division at all is itself significant. The scribe of 1QIsa^a, working in the late second century BCE, treated the book as composed of two halves of equal length. The scribe's perception of a doubled structure was already in place.
And there is a more recent finding that bears directly on the question.
In April 2021, a research team at the University of Groningen — Mladen Popović, Maruf Dhali, and Lambert Schomaker — published a peer-reviewed study in the journal PLOS ONE titled "Artificial intelligence based writer identification generates new evidence for the unknown scribes of the Dead Sea Scrolls exemplified by the Great Isaiah Scroll." The team used pattern recognition and digital paleography techniques to analyze the handwriting of the scroll at a microscopic level. Their finding contradicted the long-standing assumption that the entire scroll was written by a single scribe.
The team reported "new evidence for a breaking point in the series of columns in this scroll." Statistical analysis of the script samples showed that the columns from the first and second halves of the manuscript ended up in two distinct zones across multiple independent feature-space analyses. The handwriting of the first half and the handwriting of the second half could be distinguished by computational measures sensitive to features that human eyes typically cannot resolve.
The implication is direct. The Great Isaiah Scroll — the oldest complete manuscript of the book of Isaiah, dating to the late second century BCE — was written by two different scribes. The first scribe wrote one half. The second scribe wrote the other. The change of hand corresponds approximately to the physical division of the scroll into two halves of twenty-seven columns each.
The physical artifact, in other words, preserves a doubled structure. The manuscript division and the scribal division converge on the same point. The book that critical scholarship reconstructs as the work of two authors was already, in its oldest extant copy, the product of two scribes.
The pattern is consistent at every level the evidence reaches. Authorial composition, textual development, literary structure, manuscript transmission, scribal production. The book is double. The forensic record confirms the doubling across every category of evidence available.
The political center of Second Isaiah
Now the deeper forensic question.
Second Isaiah is not just a book written later than First Isaiah. It is a book with a specific political and theological agenda, expressed in a specific literary structure, organized around a specific historical figure. The figure is Cyrus the Persian.
Chapters 41 through 48 of Isaiah are organized chiastically — a literary structure in which the themes at the beginning are echoed in reverse at the end, with a central point of focus at the heart of the structure. The center of the chiasm is chapter 45 — the chapter in which Cyrus is named, called the LORD's anointed, and identified as the agent of the divine will. The architecture of Second Isaiah's central section is built around the Persian king.
The prophet calls Cyrus the LORD's mashiach — the LORD's messiah, the LORD's anointed one. This is the only place in the entire Hebrew Bible where a non-Israelite is given this title. The title is reserved, throughout the rest of the Hebrew Bible, for Israelite kings, priests, and prophets — figures consecrated within the covenant community to perform a specific function on behalf of the LORD. The title's covenantal weight is enormous. By the late Second Temple period, it had acquired eschatological resonance, becoming the term applied to the awaited deliverer who would restore Israel at the end of days.
Second Isaiah applies this title — the title that would become "the Messiah" in later Jewish and Christian thought — to a Persian king. A pagan emperor. A worshiper of Ahura Mazda. A foreigner who, by Second Isaiah's own admission in verses 4 and 5 of the same chapter, "has not known" the LORD of Israel: "I have surnamed thee, though thou hast not known me. I am the LORD, and there is none else, there is no God beside me: I girded thee, though thou hast not known me."
The prophet is saying that the LORD has anointed a king who does not know the LORD. The LORD has appointed a Persian to function as Israel's messiah. The deliverer of the chosen people is a foreigner from the empire that has just defeated Babylon, the empire that will rule the Jewish community for the next two centuries, the empire whose religion the post-exilic editing community will spend those two centuries absorbing.
This is, in pure form, the political theology of the Persian Restoration. The Jewish community has been liberated from Babylonian captivity by Cyrus's conquest. The community is now organizing its theological response to this liberation. The response is to declare the Persian king the LORD's messiah and to integrate his political role into Jewish prophetic discourse.
The integration is what Second Isaiah accomplishes. It is not a coincidence that Cyrus appears in the prophetic book. It is the purpose of the prophetic book. The author of Second Isaiah is constructing a theology in which the Persian Empire's rise is the fulfillment of Israel's covenant promises and the Persian king himself is a divine instrument equivalent to the kings of Israel's own anointed lineage.
This is what the editorial process looks like when the editing community is integrating itself into the political theology of the empire that has just liberated it.
The Zoroastrian backdrop
The integration goes further than political theology.
In the same chapter that names Cyrus as the LORD's messiah, Second Isaiah makes one of the most striking theological declarations in the Hebrew Bible. Isaiah 45:7:
"I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things."
The declaration is not random. It is a polemic. It is responding to a specific theological position that the Persian religion held — the position that the universe is divided between a god of light and a god of darkness, between the principle of good and the principle of evil, between Ahura Mazda and Angra Mainyu. The Zoroastrian cosmos is a dualistic cosmos. Light and darkness, good and evil, peace and calamity belong to two opposing principles in conflict.
Second Isaiah is denying the dualism. The author is saying that the LORD — Yahweh, the God of Israel — is the source of both light and darkness, both peace and evil. The dualism is wrong. There is one God, not two. The principle of light and the principle of darkness are both the work of the single creator. This is the older Hebrew theology of strict monism, deployed here as a polemic against an alternative theology that the author's audience would have recognized.
The polemic is acknowledged in mainstream scholarship. The standard secular history-of-religion source on the Cyrus passages — the Livius site, citing scholarly consensus — observes that the Persian religion stressed "a wise Lord with an ethical message" and that "it is possible that these ideas about a wise Lord with an ethical message influenced the lines 45.7-8 quoted below." The connection runs in both directions. Second Isaiah is responding to Persian theology. The response is shaped by what is being responded to.
What this means, in forensic terms, is that Second Isaiah is operating inside a Persian theological frame. The author knows the dualism. The author knows the principle of a single wise lord. The author is selectively integrating some elements — the universal monotheism, the ethical message, the political theology of Cyrus as anointed liberator — while polemically rejecting others — the cosmic dualism, the two opposing principles.
The selection is the editorial signature. The author of Second Isaiah is sorting through the available Persian theological material, accepting what can be Hebraized and rejecting what cannot. The process is visible at the surface of the chapter that names Cyrus as messiah. The Persian frame is the background. The selection happens against the background. The selection produces the text that Hebrew tradition will preserve as the second half of Isaiah.
Why the defense fails
The conservative defense of single authorship for the book of Isaiah has had to do a great deal of work over the past two centuries. The work consists, primarily, of explaining away the cumulative evidence for the two-author hypothesis.
The defense's first move is to claim that the prophet Isaiah, by direct supernatural inspiration, predicted events more than a century in advance, including the name of a foreign king. The argument requires accepting that prophetic foreknowledge could specify proper names of yet-unborn historical figures and that this specification is the only place in the Hebrew prophetic corpus where such precise long-range naming occurs. The argument is consistent with the conservative theological commitment to direct revelation. It is inconsistent with how the rest of the Hebrew prophetic corpus operates.
The defense's second move is to attribute the vocabulary and stylistic differences between the two halves of the book to genre and audience. First Isaiah, the argument goes, addresses the political crisis of the eighth century in one style; the same author, addressing the future situation of the sixth century, naturally adopts a different style. The argument has some literary plausibility but does not handle the historical-referent problem. An author writing about a future situation does not typically describe it with the immediacy and presentness that characterizes Second Isaiah. He does not say to the exiles "comfort, comfort my people" as if he is speaking to them now. He does not address Cyrus directly as if Cyrus is presently active. The stylistic shift the defense identifies is real, but the shift includes the kind of textual immediacy that an actual eighth-century author writing about a sixth-century situation would not have produced.
The defense's third move is to invoke the Great Isaiah Scroll as evidence of an undivided book. As established above, this move has not engaged with what the scroll actually shows. The scroll is divided into two halves of twenty-seven columns each. The 2021 Groningen AI palaeography study found a documented break point between two distinct scribal hands. The conservative claim that the scroll preserves "the entire sixty-six chapters without division" is, on the evidence currently available, factually wrong.
The defense's fourth move is to appeal to the New Testament treatment of Isaiah as a unified composition. The argument observes that New Testament authors quote from both halves of the book and attribute the citations to Isaiah, treating the prophet as the single source. The argument is true as a description of New Testament practice. It does not, however, establish anything about the authorship of the Hebrew text. First-century Jewish and Christian writers operated within the inherited textual tradition that had treated the book as unified for several centuries. Their citation practice reflects the tradition they inherited, not an independent judgment on authorship that should override the textual evidence.
The defense's fifth move, and the most candid, is to acknowledge the textual evidence and simply prefer the traditional attribution on dogmatic grounds. This move at least has the merit of clarity. It does not pretend that the evidence is ambiguous. It accepts the evidence and chooses, for theological reasons, to weight the traditional view more heavily. This is a legitimate religious choice. It is not a textual conclusion.
The honest position is the critical position. The textual evidence indicates two authors. The historical evidence indicates two authors. The manuscript evidence indicates two scribes. The vocabulary, theology, political referents, and structural organization all indicate a composite work. The position has been the mainstream view in academic scholarship for over two centuries because the evidence is overwhelming.
What the edit proves
The edit examined in this installment is the largest in the series so far. The previous installments examined edits at the scale of a word, a phrase, a doctrine, a figure, a verse, and a class of figures. This installment examines an edit at the scale of an entire prophetic book — two compositions joined together, separated by one hundred and fifty years, attributed to a single author, transmitted as a unified work for two and a half millennia.
The forensic significance of the edit is fourfold.
First, it demonstrates that the canonical structure of the Hebrew Bible is itself a product of editorial decision. The boundaries between books are not always natural literary boundaries. Sometimes they are editorial creations. The book of Isaiah, as transmitted, is not the book of Isaiah as composed. It is two books joined under one name. The decision to join them, the decision to attribute the whole to the earlier prophet, the decision to transmit them as a unit — these are editorial decisions, made at specific moments by specific communities for specific reasons.
Second, it demonstrates that the editorial process operated at large scale. The earlier installments documented changes inside verses. This installment documents the joining of entire literary corpora. The same editorial process that substituted words in single sentences was capable of binding together compositions separated by a century and a half. The scale of the process matches the scale of the changes the rest of this series has documented.
Third, it demonstrates that the editorial process was responding to specific political circumstances. Second Isaiah was composed during and after the Persian liberation from Babylonian captivity. It addresses that liberation directly. It names the liberator. It assigns the liberator the highest theological title available in Hebrew religious vocabulary. The composition is, in part, a Jewish theological response to a specific Persian political achievement. The integration of this composition into the Hebrew prophetic corpus is the textual record of that response.
Fourth — and this is the largest forensic point — Second Isaiah preserves, at the surface of its text, the editorial moment at which Hebrew theology became Persian-adjacent. The chapter that names Cyrus as messiah is the same chapter that polemicizes against Zoroastrian dualism. The author is responding to Persian theology in real time. He accepts what he can accept. He rejects what he must reject. He produces a synthesis in which the Persian king is the LORD's anointed but the Persian dualistic cosmology is denied. The synthesis is visible in the text itself.
This is the forensic snapshot of the editorial environment. Other installments of this series have shown the products of that environment — the words substituted, the figures assembled, the doctrines imported, the angels named. Second Isaiah shows the environment itself, captured at the moment of composition, with the author selecting from the available theological material and producing the text the editorial process would preserve.
The Edit Room contains not only edited verses but the workshop in which the editing was done. Second Isaiah is the workshop.
The pattern with Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6
Seven installments. Seven edits. Seven different operations.
Part 1: a single word substituted inside a sentence. The Chronicler's swap of Satan for the LORD.
Part 2: a single phrase substituted inside a verse. The Masoretic swap of sons of Israel for sons of God.
Part 3: a single doctrine introduced through borrowed vocabulary. The arrival of bodily resurrection in Daniel 12:2.
Part 4: a single figure assembled across centuries. The satan's promotion from functionary to adversary across Job, Zechariah, and Chronicles.
Part 5: a single verse inserted in a foreign language. The Aramaic curse in Jeremiah 10:11.
Part 6: a single class of figures emerging across the canon. The named angels of Daniel and the post-exilic literature.
Part 7: an entire book composed and joined to another book under a single attribution. Deutero-Isaiah bound to Proto-Isaiah, with the seam invisible in the canonical text but documented at every other level of evidence.
The forensic logic of the series has now demonstrated editorial activity at seven different scales, by seven different mechanisms, across multiple centuries and across multiple books of the Hebrew Bible. The pattern is consistent in direction and method. The Hebrew Bible underwent a sustained editorial process. The process produced changes. The changes consistently pushed the text in the direction of integration with the theological and political vocabulary of the empires under which the editing was conducted.
Seven specimens. Seven confirmations.
The case is no longer being made by the persuasive force of any single specimen. The case is being made by the consistency of the pattern across specimens that operate at radically different scales and involve radically different mechanisms. The pattern would not exist if the data were not consistent. The pattern exists because the data is consistent. The pattern is what the data, at this point, shows.
The honest reading
The honest reading of the book of Isaiah is that it is a composite work containing the writings of at least two prophets separated by approximately a century and a half. The first prophet — Isaiah of Jerusalem, son of Amoz — wrote in the eighth century BCE during the Assyrian crisis and produced material now contained in the first thirty-nine chapters of the book. The second prophet — anonymous, conventionally called Second Isaiah or Deutero-Isaiah — wrote in the late sixth century BCE during and after the Babylonian exile, in response to the rise of the Persian Empire under Cyrus the Great, and produced material now contained in chapters 40 through 55. A third stratum, sometimes called Third Isaiah, was added during the post-exilic restoration period and forms much of chapters 56 through 66.
The two compositions were joined together under the name of the earlier prophet at some point in the post-exilic period. The joining produced the unified book that has been transmitted in every Bible since. The unification was successful enough that the seam between the two compositions is, in the canonical text, almost invisible — chapter 39 ends with a Hezekiah narrative and chapter 40 begins with the comfort oracle, but no scribal note, no editorial introduction, no marker informs the reader of the change of voice. The two voices became one voice. The two books became one book.
The forensic evidence for the doubling is overwhelming. Vocabulary, theology, historical referents, manuscript division, scribal production. Every category of evidence available points the same direction. The position has been mainstream in academic biblical scholarship since the late eighteenth century. The position is preserved in the standard reference works, the major encyclopedias, and the official descriptions of the relevant manuscripts at the institutions that hold them.
The chapter that names Cyrus as the LORD's messiah is also the chapter that polemicizes against the dualism of the Persian religion. The two activities occur in the same breath. The author is integrating with Persia and simultaneously protecting Hebrew monotheism against Persian dualism. The integration is selective. The selection is the editorial work.
Every reader of the book of Isaiah who reads chapter 45 reads a Hebrew prophet calling a Persian king the messiah of the God of Israel. The verse is in every Bible. The implication is in front of every reader. The implication has been read for two and a half millennia.
The Hebrew Bible's anointed deliverer, in the only verse that uses the term for a non-Israelite, is the founder of the Persian Empire.
The Persian Empire is where the editing happened.
The verse is the editing.