God is jealous, and the LORD avenges; the LORD avenges, and is furious; the LORD will take vengeance on his adversaries, and he reserves wrath for his enemies.
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Cyril of Alexandria
AD 444
It is finished; it is gone. One has come up blowing in your face, rescuing you from tribulation. To suggest in a compressed fashion that the necessary destruction of Nineveh would without any doubt happen, he says that it is finished, thus indicating the wish for its consummation. He also says it is gone, that is, completely felled and utterly done away with. Now, the phrase one has come up also applies perfectly to Cyrus, in my view clearly implying something of the kind that the prophet Jeremiah also said of him in foretelling what would in due course befall Nineveh: “A lion has come up from its lair; it has arisen to destroy nations; it has gone out from its place to make your land a waste; your cities will be left desolate with no one inhabiting them”; he sprang on Nineveh like a savage lion and devoured those in it. While he was like a terrible and untamed enemy to them, however, and showed implacable rage, to the people of Israel, on the other hand, he blew in their face, rescuing them from tribulation, that is, freeing them from the unaccustomed slavery, releasing them from bonds, and rehabilitating them when they were captives by sending them home and ordering them to rebuild the divine Temple. Now, the phrase blowing in the face he cites on the basis of Jewish tradition and custom. We sometimes find mention of such things occurring also in the inspired Scriptures, like the Jews thinking they had to tear their garments in the case of blasphemy against God; Caiaphas, for instance, tore his clothing when Christ called himself Son of God, crying aloud, “He has blasphemed.” The divinely inspired disciples Paul and Barnabas both did this, too, when they were in Lycaonia. When they rid one of the sufferers of his ailment to the amazement of the onlookers, the eyewitnesses of the divine marvel were bent on sacrificing to them, “saying, The gods have come to us in human form, calling Barnabas Zeus and Paul Hermes because he was the chief speaker.” Since their action was a kind of blasphemy, however, they tore their garments, still following Jewish traditions and unwritten customs. But the custom has been repudiated, being completely pointless and not according to law. The God of all, for instance, said to the Jews when they behaved that way and departed grievously from the true religion, “Turn back to me with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping, and with lamenting; rend your hearts and not your garments.” So just as it was the custom for some people to rend their (37) clothing, so too was blowing in the face of people who were in some way ailing. This was the quite wrongful practice of those in particular who were given to taking oaths even with idle incantations, pretending to rid sufferers of spirits and ailments. Hence the example is cited from what was customary with them in the words, One has come up blowing in your face—namely, Cyrus—rescuing you from tribulation; some people pretend to be able to effect this, as I said, by blowing on others. Now, it is a wise and truthful statement that the power of the devil and of sin’s tyranny over us has been checked; death has, as it were, been taken captive, and corruption completely done away with. Christ, in fact, has come up from Hades and returned to life, blowing in the face of the holy apostles and saying, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” We have thus become free of every trouble, sharers in the Holy Spirit, restored to nature’s former beauty, and spiritually stamped with the original image, for our Lord Jesus Christ has taken shape in us through the Spirit.
