Isa 41:25
The more conclusively and incontrovertibly, therefore, does Jehovah keep the field as the moulder of history and foreteller of the future, and therefore as God above all gods. “I have raised up from the north, and he came: from the rising of the sun one who invokes my name; and he treads upon satraps as mud, and like a potter kneadeth clay.” The object of the verb hâ‛ı̄rōthı̄ (I have wakened up) is he who came when wakened up by Jehovah from the north and east, i.e., from Media and Persia (ויּאת = ויּאתּ for ויּאת, with evasion of the auxiliary pathach, Ges. §76, 2,c), and, as the second clause affirms, who invokes or will invoke the name of Jehovah (at any rate, qui invocabit is the real meaning of qui invocat). For although the Zarathustrian religion, which Cyrus followed, was nearest to the Jehovah religion of all the systems of heathenism, it was a heathen religion after all. The doctrine of a great God (baga vazarka), the Creator of heaven and earth, and at the same time of a great number of Bagas and Yazatas, behind whose working and worship the great God was thrown into the shade, is (apart from the dualism condemned in Isa 45:7) the substance of the sacred writings of the Magi in our possession, as confirmed by the inscriptions of the Achemenides.
But the awakened of Jehovah would, as is here predicted, “call with the name, or by means of the name, of Jehovah,” which may mean either call upon this name (Zep 3:9; Jer 10:25), or call out the name (compare Exo 33:19; Exo 34:5, with Exo 35:30) in the manner in which he does make use of it in the edict setting the exiles free (Ezr 1:2). The verb יבא which follows (cf., Isa 41:2) designated him still further as a conqueror of nations; the verb construed with an accusative is used here, as is very frequently the case, in the sense of hostile attack. The word Sâgân, which is met with first in Ezekiel - apart, that is to say, from the passage before us - may have owed its meaning in the Hebrew vocabulary to its similarity in sound to sōkhēn (Isa 22:15); at any rate, it is no doubt a Persian word, which became naturalized in the Hebrew (ζωγάνης in Athenaeus, and Neo-Pers. sichne, a governor: see Ges. Thes.), though this comparison is by no means so certain as that σατράπης is the same as the Ksatrapâv of the inscriptions, i.e., protector of the kingdom.
Without at all overlooking the fact that this word segânı̄m, so far as it can really be supposed to be a Persian word, favours the later composition of this portion of the book of Isaiah, we cannot admit that it has any decisive weight, inasmuch as the Persian word pardēs occurs even in the Song of Solomon. And the indications which might be found in the word segânı̄m unfavourable to Isaiah’s authorship are abundantly counterbalanced by what immediately follows.