Professor Pierre Briant
Judaism
How Persia Created Judaism: The
Rise of Persia
Abstract
The shah had divine authority. He was God’s chosen one, and held his hand. Shahs were God’s regent
on earth. To justify it, they propagated monotheism in the lands they conquered. For Persians,
Ahuramazda was the only true god, and each subject nation had to have one God to confirm the shah as
the King of Kings—the Shahanshah. Law was important to the Persians, and even Greeks said Persians
were just. The Iranian word for law “data” entered Hebrew from the Persians. Two systems operated,
local law based on local custom, and imperial law, the decrees of the shahanshah. Darius hoped for rule
by consent and so to pass off his laws to local communities consensually as religious restoration. The
great Persian scholar, A T Olmstead affirms that Darius meant to set a code of law for the whole empire.
Thiery Petit noted the actions of Darius in Egypt were part of a wide program of legislation.
The scriptures say that Yehouah put Cyrus in charge of the world. Egyptian inscriptians say that Ra made
Darius king of Egypt. Darius built a large new temple to Amun-Ra, the Egyptian god closest in nature to
Ahuramazda, at the oasis of el-Khargeh. A letter to his Egyptian satrap tells him to intervene in the
appointment of high priests, proving that emperors could not avoid interfering in influential positions like
the priesthood. It is imperative that the posts most influential on the people had to be king’s men. The
Demotic Chronicle of Egypt takes the same attitude of the judgement of God on Egypt as the
Deuteronomic History does on the Jews. Persian propaganda was used in Egypt as elsewhere. The
Persians did in Egypt what they did in Yehud, a finding important for Egyptology.
Zoroaster had subjected the Iranian tribal gods to the one Most High God, Ahuramazda. Ezra, at the
behest of the Persian king, did the same in Yehud. Around 400 BC, with Jerusalem Persian, Ezra and
Nehemiah invented Judaism. They made the Jewish gods into a single monotheistic god akin to
Ahuramazda, and the Judahites into a civilized people. About 450 BC, Herodotus had no knowledge of
Yehouah, the Jews or their ancient temple in Jerusalem, though the temple was supposedly 500 years
old! His history ended before Ezra, the priest, or Nehemiah, the Persian Eunuch, had arrived in Judah.
Only with Ezra was Judaism with its famous law founded. Jews or Yehudim were worshippers of
Yehouah. Ezra objected that some Judahites were not worshipping Yehouah. Ezra was concerned about
religious purity and the purity of the ruling caste of priests, the Jewish Magi. Marriages outside of
Zoroastrianism violated Zoroastrian law, so he purged the priesthood.
The Babylonian year began at the vernal equinox and the Iranian new year at the autumnal equinox.
Then the Achaemenian kings fully adopted the Babylonian calendar and Babylonian month names, with a
religious and a civil year, reflected in the Jewish calendar. The spring festival was the important New Year
festival for Zoroastrians, beginning on “No Roz” (Norouz), New Day in Persian. The Babylonian calendar
began in Nisanu at the corn harvest with an akitu or ritual placing of the images of the gods from the
temples to the outside of the city boundaries, a festival full of pageantry lasting a week. The Persians
copied the whole festival, and they made it their New Year festival.
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Wednesday, August 11, 1999;
Thursday, 13 August 2009
Achaemenid research still suffers from persistent marginalization in the academic
world… Achaemenid studies have been persistently undervalued…
How Persia Created Judaism: The Rise of Persia
1
Ziony Zevit, The Religions of Ancient Israel
Persian History
A World State
Pacification by Transportation
Cyrus the Deliverer of Oppressed Peoples
Darius the Great (522-486 BC)
Darius Re-Writes History
Darius II Favours Jerusalem
Nehemiah and Ezra
Judaism and Zoroastrianism
Eschatology
Purity
A Law for the Priests
The Later Persian Kings
The Calendar—Feasts and Dates
Alexander and the Persian Heritage
Temple and Diaspora
Persia and the Essenes
As the religion of a great empire, Zoroastrianism exerted its widest influence, notably
on the Jews, contributing thus to shaping the beliefs and hopes of a large part of
mankind.
Mary Boyce
Almost all biblical historiography bearing on pre-exilic Israel [is] so many fictions
concocted by non-indigenous residents of the Persian province Yehud in an
archaeized form of some Canaanite dialect to justify their presence in the land.
Persian History
The Medes and Persians had roamed slowly over several hundred years from the
steppes to the Iranian plateau but they had been preceded 1000 years before by
earlier bands of Aryans who had found an opportunity to advance into the near east
when the Sumerian Empire staggered just before Hammurabi, the Amorite, steadied
the central power in Mesopotamia about 1700 BC. When this power then collapsed
the Aryans wasted no time in advancing further.
The empires of Sumer and Akkad did not stretch politically to India but culturally
they did to judge by artefacts found in the Indus valley. Strong states in the valley of
the Tigris and Euphrates apparently extended a benign cultural stability to the east
also. Their collapse therefore left a large gap vulnerable to the invaders from the
north and east. Eventually the Kassites grew and spanned the Hittites, also
Indo-European invaders.
Before the start of the last millennium BC, the Phrygians, Armenians, Thracians and
Mycenaean Greeks had invaded the Aegean area and Asia Minor and eroded the
Hittite empire. Like the Medes and Persians, the Greeks and the Philistines, all of
these were Indo-Europeans. The Greeks knew of the Medes and Persians at an early
date and they both appear in Greek mythology as Perseus and Medea.
Conceivably these Indo-European tribes were part of the same invasion, perhaps
through the Caucasus to Anatolia where the Greeks moved west while the Medes and
Persians moved east. In myth, Medea is associated with Colchis at the end of the
How Persia Created Judaism: The Rise of Persia
2
Black Sea, in the Caucasus. Her uncle is Perses, mythical founder of the Persian
nation, and her son, the mythical founder of the Medes, is Medus. Perseus cuts off the
head of Medusa and fathers Perses by Andromeda.
In the early centuries of the last millennium BC the Semitic Assyrians under their
clever and aggressive military leaders began to set up a universal state centred in
Mesopotamia. The Assyrian king, Shalmaneser III, first mentions Parsua when
recording his campaigns on his black obilisk of 843 BC. Shalmaneser also ravaged
Mahi Dasht extracting tribute from 27 Persian chiefs as far as the land of the Medes.
The Assyrians linked together the Parsuans, the Medes and the Mannaeans
suggesting that all were in the region of modern Iranian Kurdistan. Parsua was the
next country to the east of Assyria in a line between Nineveh and Egbatana. The
Medes were further away on the Iranian plateau up to the salt desert. The Medes
were considered the more dangerous to the Assyrians and are mentioned constantly
in records at the time of Ashurbanipal (668-627 BC).
The basis of the economy on the Iranian plateau at the beginning of the first
millennium BC was the class of small landowners and stockholders who grew crops
and reared horses and cattle (R Ghirshman, “Iran”, London 1954). The social system
was similar to that in Greece described by Homer. Barons or princes held single
towns or small regions and ruled some nobles, some land-owning free men, some
landless free men and same slaves.
These barons were forced to pay tribute to the Assyrians, whose records suggest that
the Parsuans were a static population in the ninth and eighth centuries. The core
culture of the Mesopotamian peoples was common, and this long static period as
neighbours of the Assyrians would explain why Persians were not ignorant strangers
or wild savages. They were familiar with the culture that they had been adjacent to for
hundreds of years and became its descendants. Sometime in the 200 years after
Shalmaneser III, the Persians migrated or were deported south east along the valleys
of the Zagros Mountains until they settled in the ancient area called Elam. The
decline of the Assyrians facilitated this move.
The eastern Medes remained free of Assyria and set up their own kingdom in 711 BC,
under Huakhshathra Daiukku—Uaksatar to the Assyrians and Deioces to the Greeks.
Sargon II (721-705 BC) had Daiukku transported to Syria as punishment for helping
the king of Urartu (Ararat). Persian art, architecture and irrigation suggests at some
stage they were subject to, or allies of, the kingdom of Urartu (Ararat), to the north of
Assyria in the region of Lake Van. Urartian craftsmen seem to have sheltered in
Media and influenced arts in the new kingdom. Another view is that a relative of
Daiukku sought a confederacy with the eastern Medes, as a result of the punishment
of his family, and this became the Median kingdom.
Sennacherib (692 BC) forced an alliance which included Parsua with other allies from
around Elam, implying that Parsua was also in that area much nearer the gulf.
Another of the allies was Anshan, the country that Cyrus the Great tells us his
ancestors ruled, and a Kurash (Cyrus), king of Anshan, appears in the Assyrian
records for 640 BC. Since Anshan was ruled by the kings of Elam until 692 BC, it
looks as though the country of Anshan was obliged to be yielded up to the Persians
who moved bodily from Parsua to Anshan renaming the land Pars (Fars). It looks
How Persia Created Judaism: The Rise of Persia
3
almost like another Assyrian deportation, but deportations were of troublesome
populations not allies, so we have to assume that the Persians continued their
migration. The alternative is that Persians had settled in several different areas.
The desiccated Iranian plateau might not look too attractive compared with well
watered valleys to either side, but Iranian princes owned the copper, iron and lapis
lazuli mines and protected the Semitic merchants who plied the caravan routes to the
east. The ancient center of Zoarastrianism seems to have been Bactria, a source of
lapis lazuli, much valued by the Assyrians. The Medes controlled trade from the east
through their town of Ragha, on their eastern border where caravans from east and
west met to exchange and barter. The merchants traded in expensive goods like gold,
silver, precious stones and rich clothes, so the princes who charged them for
protection in crossing their lands were not badly off.
It is along this trade route that Zoroastrianism came west. Ragha was the center of
dispersion of Zoroastrianism among the Medes, a fact that led to the belief that
Zoroastrianism had been born there. It became a sort of Zoroastrian Mecca, Rome or
Canterbury.
The extension of the skills of iron tool making and the associated demand in the
eighth century gave southern Iran particularly an economic boost that contributed to
the growth of Persian power. The Persians had the iron ore and gained the smelting
and ironworking skills but important too was the value of readily available iron tools
for cultivating the plateau and improving its productivity. The copper mines however
remained important because iron did not immediately displace bronze and copper
was preferred for everyday utensils and ornaments for a long time.
The Assyrians noted the plateau both as a potential danger and as a source of iron,
copper and horses, and raided Iranian towns often, but usually the people had
warning enough to take to the hills. When the Assyrians had taken what they wanted
and departed, the people returned, rebuilt and carried on with life. The Assyrians,
like the Egyptians, would boast on their stelae that a town had been razed and left
lifeless, but it was rarely true.
And, the Iranians would resist, if they thought their chances were favourable. Their
cavalry tactics were novel and effective, especially against the foot soldiers and
chariots of the Assyrians in countryside too rugged for chariots. The Assyrians learnt
about cavalry from the Persians and adapted just as the Han emperors of China had
to learn from the mounted Huns and adapt to them.
The Achaemenids from the outset showed that they were experts in human
psychology. They had moved through the country of the Elamites to settle in Anshan
but seem not to have raised any animosity from them. The Elamite kingdom itself
with its capital at Susa remained independent, but its decline gave the Persians a
constant supply of educated servants for long afterwards as scribes, administrators
and bureaucrats in the chancellery and royal palaces. The Elamites were an old and
civilized nation, and the Achaemenids seem to have gained their support by giving
them the impression that they were restoring their old kingdom. The Persians for
everyday and for state occasions took to wearing the long flowing robes of the
Elamites rather than the trousers and short tight tunic of the horseman. When
attacked by the Assyrians the Elamite Kingdom sought assistance from the tougher
How Persia Created Judaism: The Rise of Persia
4
J Blenkinsopp, Persia and Torah (ed J W Watts)
Persians.
The second king of the eastern Medes however subjected the Persians about 700 BC,
and ruled their cousins for about 100 years influencing them greatly. The king,
Khshathrita, formed an alliance against the Assyrians with the Mannaeans, an
Iranian tribe near the Caspian Sea, and the Scythians who rode in to plunder the area
often. But Esarhaddon subjugated the Medes again in 672 BC.
Khshathrita was killed fighting the Assyrians and another Huakhshathra (Cyaxeres to
the Greeks) succeeded him, and reorganized the army. Ashurbanipal (668-627 BC)
had come to power in Assyria and punished the western Medes again, boasting of
destroying 75 towns. Later in his reign he wasted Elam permanently, effectively
leaving it to revive as Persia, which he did not attack, placated by the diplomacy of
Kurash who thought it was wise to donate large gifts to the Assyrian royal house.
When Ashurbanipal died, Cyaxares took his chance to ally with the Babylonians,
Scythians and subject Medes against Assyria, and laid waste Ashur in 614 BC. In
612 BC, Nineveh and Nimrod fell, and in 610 BC, Harran too, and Assyria had gone
for good. But the savage Scythians took over the kingdom of Urartu, devastated by
the Assyrians, and used it as a base for plundering everywhere around for 28 years.
From 590 BC, for five years, the Scythians and Lydians allied against the Medes, but
eventually lost. The Scythians were driven back across the Caucasus and the Lydians
were forced to accept the Halys river as the border with Media. The Medes had now
replaced the Assyrians as the northern power in Mesopotamia. Urartu and
Cappadocia were now in Media.
Cyaxeres was succeeded by Astyages (Greek. Ishtuwegu, Babylonian). Herodotus said
Astyages ruled all of Asia beyond the Halys, and it might have been true as far as
Bactria or at least a substantial way along the highway east from Ragha. Whoever
ruled Media and Persia later seemed automatically to have control of the east as far
as India, so it is a reasonable conclusion that Astyages ruled Zoroastrian people.
A World State and Religion
The archaeological record to date reveals negligible evidence for specifically Iranian
culture.
The Persians were already acculturized to the Akkadian culture of the Two Rivers by
the time they took on the Babylonian mantle. The Aramaean culture of Syria, at the
beginning of the first millennium BC, was merging with the more warlike countries to
the east, first the Assyrians and Babylonians, then the Persians and Scythians to form
a world state with Aramaic as its language. By the eighth century BC, the Assyrians
controlled the area. The spoken language of the Assyrian court and its bureaucracy
was Aramaic—the lingua franca of the ancient near east.
The reasons for the spread of the Aramaic language were not only the expansion of
the Aramaeans themselves into the Fertile Crescent, about the beginning of the first
millennium BC. It coincided with the political expansion of the Assyrian Empire, with
the consequent mixture of the political term “Assyrian” and the linguistic term
“Aramaic speaker”. The Assyrian state had a policy of transfering populations,
How Persia Created Judaism: The Rise of Persia
5
notably in the eighth century BC under Sargon II and Tiglath-Pileser III. Many
defeated and captured people were moved, and Assyrians were also settled as
colonists all over the ancient near east within the Assyrian hegemony. The use of the
term “Assyrian” for “Aramaean” is even found in the sixth century AD when the
Talmudic rabbis speak of their Aramaic alphabet as “Ashuri”.
The Aramaic language spoken and written all over the ANE came to be called Syriac
in the West or Assyrian (Asori) in the East. In the second century AD, the satirist,
Lucian of Samosata (in Syria), wrote a book in Greek, De Syria Dea (The Syrian
Goddess). Lucian calls the people of Syria by the term Assyrian, and vice versa:
I who write am Assyrian.
He came to Syria, but the people beyond the Euphrates did not receive him.
The Greeks considered Aramaic as the Syrian language and called those who spoke it
Syrians. The biblical “Aram” is Greek and Roman “Syria”. Aramaean speakers were
Syrians, and later they seem often to have been identified with the Jews. Macrobius, a
writer of the 5th century AD, and a pagan, wrote a book called Saturnalia which
recalled a cult in which the Assyrii (Syrians) dedicated offerings to the sun in the
village of Heliopolis (modern Baalbek). The Armenian author, Moses of Chorene, has
“Asori” as a synonym of “Chaldaean” meaning Aramaean. Michael the Jacobite
patriarch of Antioch (1166-99) says the Syriac language, Aramaic, is from Edessa
(Urfa).
Dom Gregory Dix, in Jew and Greek, refers to Syrian culture and sees it as the source
of ancient near eastern religion. He says that only two of the great “spiritual”
religions of today, Confucianism and Buddhism, began outside of “Syriac” culture. He
means by this Assyrian. He continues that the Persians were “heirs by adoption of the
Syriac culture”. The Syriac culture was the Assyrian culture, and the language they
spoke was Aramaean. The Persians were greatly influenced by the centuries they were
in contact with the Assyrians but only adopted the Aramaean language about half way
through the lifetime of their great empire, and not any Aramaean religion. Cyrus had
his religion at the outset.
The general historical trend to the world state was not altered by the change of
central power when the Persians became leaders after the Mesopotamians. The
Persians had been students of the Assyrians in the several hundred years that they
had taken to move into Iran, and they or their allies the Indo-European Scythians
had been mercenaries of the Assyrians. The refined culture and science of the long
established civilisations of Syria and Mesopotamia merged with the vigour and
technical innovations of the warlike Aryan invaders from the north.
Dix writes that Zoroastrianism, Mithraism and the solar monotheism of Akhenaten
“appear” to have been born under Syriac influence. Perhaps they would “appear” thus
to a Catholic monk, who believed the myths of Moses, but “appear” betrays nothing
other than an opinion. When the myths of the Jewish scriptures are recognized as
fiction then Judaism can no longer rival Zoroastrianism in antiquity and proper
priorities can be established.
How Persia Created Judaism: The Rise of Persia
6
A world state was the way of enforcing stability and was obviously welcomed by most
people, but especially trading peoples and those making specialized products for
trade. Besides the use of military and administrative means of control, such empires
depended on the propagation of a universal religion. The Assyrian universal state that
the Persians took over, with the brief interlude of Babylon, had a god called Ashur
(Asshur, Assur) who was depicted as a man rising from a winged solar disc and
shooting a bow or offering a ring, often thought to be a diadem or coronet but
probably symbolising a bond (like a wedding ring) or covenant such as we find often
in the Hebrew scriptures. The Persian god, Ahuramazda, was depicted in a similar
way as a man rising head and shoulders above a solar disc also offering a ring, or
sometimes apparently a blessing.
Ahura is the Persian rendering of Vedic asura which is uncommonly like Ashur,
though the Assyrian language was Semitic. J H Moulton, who knew something about
these things, agreed with Dr Martin Gemoll who proposed in 1911 that Ahuramazda
was the same god as Ashur.
John A Tvedtnes, in an article in J Near Eastern Studies 40 (1981) rejected the
long-accepted statement of Herodotus (Histories 7.63) that “Syrian” was the Greek
way of saying “Assyrian”. Tvedtnes proposed that Syria is derived from Hurri, an old
Egyptian word for the Hurrians, which in Coptic would have changed to Suri. Richard
N Frye says the vocalization of the word Syria and the supposed Middle Egyptian
word “Suri” do not favour the hypothesis.
Both Tvedtnes and Frye can be right in a sense if Syrian equates with Assyrian as
Herodotus says but both of them are at source the same as Hurrian. The Greeks first
used the term Syrian at the beginning of the seventh century BC for the people of
Cilicia and Cappadocia. Herodotus says that Syrians are called Cappadocians by the
Persians. Cappadocia is in Anatolia not Assyria or Syria. It is the centre of the area
settled by the tribes called Hurrians who were the same race as the Mitanni whose
brief empire was centred in Syria, near Harran.
There seems probable philological connexions between Assyria, Syria, Surya (Indic
sun), Assur, Asura, Ahura, Hurri and biblical Horites and Hivites. All might be
connected with the sun or brightness, and Lordship, and perhaps hills and highlands,
sun worship being often conducted in high places.
The solar nature of the disc is clear in the picture of Ashur offering the ring but, in the
picture of him with a bow and in the picture of Ahuramazda, the ring is plainly a
symbolic girdle, presumably the equivalent of the Zoroastrian Kusti girdle. Did
Assyrians have the same custom of wearing a girdle as the Persians? A tasselled cord
is plain on their depictions of people. Ahuramazda is said to wear the heavens as his
Kusti girdle and in the depictions of him it will be the circle of the ecliptic, the circle
of the zodiac. Since the Indians also wear a sacred cord, it seems that the Assyrians
had adopted Aryan customs, presumably from an earlier Aryan invasion—perhaps
the Hurrians or Mitanni.
Already in the first century of the second millennium BC, the kings of Assyria were
being called Ashur and were adopting the bow and arrows as a sign of office and the
handed-over-ring as a sign of favour by gods and goddesses. A god called “Assara
Mazas” has been noted in Assyrian lists of gods. Mazda appears in the names of
How Persia Created Judaism: The Rise of Persia
7
Medes from about 700 BC.
Ashurbanipal took the hands of Sin and Ninku at Harran, according to a royal
inscription. It echoes the practice of the monarch taking the hand of Bel Marduk at
the Babylonian new year ceremonies and copied by Cyrus. These observations hint at
syncretic tendencies in these religions, and it is interesting to speculate whether
Bel-Marduk, the god of Babylon, had also begun to take on universal characteristics
at this time.
Cyrus accused the king of Babylon of neglecting Marduk, the great universal god. Of
course, Cyrus was intent on giving universal qualities to all of the principle gods of his
conquests, and this was perhaps merely the start of it for Marduk, but the earlier
Babylonian kings might have seen Marduk in a similar light. Berosus says Medes
ruled Babylon for up to 200 years giving some credence to the idea, but Berosus was
not reliable in his lists of kings.
The Assyrians, in the west, at any rate, seemed to regard Sin as a universal god. S W
Holloway claims the “locally manufactured glyptics symbolizing the cult of Sin at
Harran proliferated in the western arm of the Fertile Crescent” showing that the
Assyrians must have been promoting the spread of the cult.
It is historically probable that the spread of the moon god cult of Harran by Assyria
was a self-conscious act of imperial statecraft, designed to foster the acceptance of a
cult whose pantheon was understood as protecting and legitimizing Assyrian
interests in the West…
The equivalent of the cross, Constantine’s “in hoc signo vinces” for the Assyrian
kings in the West was the lunar crescent of the moon god.
This lunar crescent symbol had been found by 1993 at fourteen stratified sites in
Palestine and Transjordan—at Hazor, Tell Kosan, Tell es Samak, Megiddo and Tell
Doshan, Samaria, Gezer, Tell en Nasbeh, Tell Jemmah, Horbat Uzza, Nebo and
Taliwan. An unstratified example of a seal stamp was found at Gezer, showing a lunar
crescent and a pendant star, datable by eponym to 649 BC and declared as belonging
to Netanyahu, a name indicating the god Yehouah.
Religion was used for political purposes by ancient kings in the near east. Indeed,
that probably is its purpose!
In reorganizing the cult, the king sought to bring the total life of the nation under the
domain of the national deity. The king built a temple for the nation’s god and
constructed a palace for himself as the god’s earthly regent. He established
sanctuaries as cultic and administrative centers and created other structures for
storage and security. He appointed private and other civil servants to implement royal
policy, and deployed military personnel. He fixed the religious calendar and fulfilled
the cultic duties of the head of state. Thus “religion was an arm of royal
administration”.
Carl D Evans here summarises, in a few sentences, Gosta Ahlström’s Royal
Administration and National Administration in Ancient Palestine, ending with a
quotation from it that epitomizes the work and what should have been obvious to all
How Persia Created Judaism: The Rise of Persia
8
historians. Yet, Steven W Holloway who has carefully studied the Assyrian cults in a
biblical connexion declares that the Assyrian foreign service were not interested in
the cultic practices of their vassals and their provinces, unless they might have
political consequences.
Since it would be hard to know whether there was a political implication in cultic
practices without first taking an interest in them, we can assume that they were
interested in them all, initially, and only lost interest in those that offered no likely
challenges. The Urartians or Chaldians in the hills to the north of the Assyrian
steppes had shown they were a danger to the Assyrians who accordingly had a keen
interest in stopping the Chaldians from using their temple to their god Chaldi at
Musasir. A puppet king Urzana was appointed to Musasir with instructions not to let
the officials and the king of Urartu use the temple.
Richard Frye of Harvard (The Heritage of Persia) thought the Persian kings had a
concept of “One World” and the “fusion of all people and cultures” in one “Oecumen”
was their important legacy, inherited by Alexander, the Romans and the Arabs. In
ancient times “culture” essentially was religion.
Pacification by Transportation
Transportation of populations has long been used for pacification. In Egypt, at the
time of Amenhotep II (1453-1419 BC) and Thutmose IV (1419-1386 BC), these
pharaohs deported about 80,000 Canaanites, many from Gezer. Amenhotep III
(1386-1349 BC) fortified Gezer and other cities in Palestine to hold the royal
garrisons. He provided these cities with fine temples and palaces. The Canaanites will
have been moved to outposts in Nubia or Libya, and Nubians or Libyans were
probably moved into Canaan. So, the leaders of the native populations were removed
and others were transported in to replace them.
In the eighth century, the Assyrians had a warrior leader, Tiglath-Pileser III, who
proved to be a great pacifier of troublesome populations. His policy was to set up
colonies, claiming to be saving the colonized people, then to deport the leading
elements of a colony to another colony elsewhere. Thus the bulk of the population left
behind were leaderless and lacked necessary skilled people and the clever and
perhaps dangerous people who were uprooted were planted hundreds of miles away
in the midst of a hostile population. Thus 65,000 Medes were deported to Diyala near
modern Baghdad and were replaced by Aramaeans.
In Israel, Tiglath-Pileser deposed the native king and replaced him with a vassal
called Saviour or Salvation (Hosea), proof that the action of the invader was
presented as a deliverance (2 Kg 15:29-30). 2 Kings 17:3 tells us that later Hosea was
paying tribute to Shalmaneser but eventually sought an alliance with Egypt and was
deposed by the Assyrian king. When Sargon (Sharru-Kin) II captured Samaria
(biblical Israel) he implemented the policy of transportation, moving 30,000
Israelites to other parts of the empire, some of them to Halah near Haran and Habor
on the upper Euphrates, others to Rhages near Teheran, the “cities of the Medes” of
2 Kings.
He replaced them with people transported in from Cuthah in Babylonia and Avva,
How Persia Created Judaism: The Rise of Persia
9
Hamath and Sepharvaim in Syria. These people incur the anger of the writer of
2 Kings for worshipping their own gods, despite them also taking up the worship of
the native god, Yehouah. It seems a safe guess that the displaced ruling class of Israel
did the same in the lands in which they settled in the Assyrian plains and Syria. They
will therefore have taken up the worship of Ashur, who was the god of the earlier race
of Indo-Europeans that ruled in Assyria. This might be why an apparently Semitic
people, the Assyrians, seemed to worship a god of the Aryans, similar to Ahuramazda.
The Median prince Daiukku, called by Herodotus, Deioces, possibly founder of the
kingdom of the Medes, was deported with his extended family to Syria. The tribes of
the Medes were called “Bit” so-and-so, meaning the house of so-and-so, like the
Semitic habit (“beth”, “beit”), so the House of Deioces was lost just as the ten houses
of Israel were supposedly lost.
New waves of Indo-Europeans were crossing the Caucasus—the Cimmerians and the
Scythians who lived by plunder. The Cimmerians entered Asia Minor and ended the
kingdom of the Phrygians led by king Midas. However Ashurbanipal defeated and
dispersed them into the general horde of Scythian invaders. These new bandits from
the north promised to ally with the Medes to attack Nineveh but took advantage of
the absence of the Median king to take over his country, which was then ruled by
Scythians for possibly 30 years.
Using Media as a base, the Scythians attacked Assyria then rampaged on through
Syria and Palestine, stopping at Egypt only because they were offered a lot of gold to
go away. Biblical scholars like to think Jeremiah’s description (Jer 4:13) of chariots
like whirlwinds and horses swifter than eagles refers specifically to the Scythians, but
Jeremiah speaks only of the north, which is where any such danger to Palestine
would be, and he is a poet of considerable imaginative invention. His is probably a
poetic description of any fearful invader from the north, Yehouah wanted to inflict on
His Chosen, but particularly suits the Scythians.
Graves, dated to later than the eighth century BC, are found in Luristan in the south
of the Iranian plateau that are of keen horsemen because everything found in them is
portable and much of the ornamentation of the graves were bronze bits and other
accoutrements of horses. Furthermore, there is no sign of any towns in the same
place that could correspond to these evidently nomadic people.
Among the grave relics are depictions of a goddess and a god rather like Ahuramazda.
Perhaps the goddess was Anahita (Aramaiti?) who was later known to have been
revered by Persians but perhaps was at the beginning too. The subjects of the artwork
are remarkably cosmopolitan, including pictures typical of Assyria, Babylonia, Syria
and Asia Minor. Belt plaques look typically Scythian. The cultural mix is what might
be expected of the Scythians that had crossed the Caucasus, plundered and raided
various peoples, and mixed with the Indo-European stock already present, the Medes
and Persians.
Cyaxares, the Median leader, learnt the skills of the Scythians, threw off their yoke
and started conquests of his own. The Assyrians had exhausted themselves with
constant warfare over several centuries. Cyaxares allied with the Babylonians to
defeat them and their Scythian mercenaries, and in 612 BC, Assyria disappeared from
history as a world power. The authors of Ezekiel and Jeremiah, writing long after the
How Persia Created Judaism: The Rise of Persia
10
event make their heroes “prophesy” that Assyria would be defeated by the Medes and
sure enough it was!
The state of Urartu submitted to the Medes about the same time, and Lydia about
590 BC. The kings of the Medes had evidently already subdued the states to the east
so their empire stretched from Anatolia almost to India with only Babylonia standing
free in between.
In the middle period of Elamite history, the Anzanite dynasty rose to power after a
two century dark age. From the fifth king in the line, Untash-Humban
(1275-1240 BC), contemporary with Shalmaneser I of Assyria (c 1273-1244 BC), Elam
increasingly faced the rising power of Assyria. Tukulti-Ninurta I of Assyria
(c 1243-1207 BC) campaigned in the mountains north of Elam. The Elamites raided
Babylonia, but the Assyrians asserted their power and the Anzanite dynasty came to
an end. Shutruk-Nahhunte (c 1160 BC) founded a new dynasty, and Elam again grew
in military status, just as Assyria declined. He captured Babylon and carried off to
Susa the stela of the law of Hammurabi. But then Elamite power in Babylon was
broken, and soon Elam was overrun by Nebuchadrezzar I, ending the Middle Elamite
period (c 1100 BC).
Another dark age centuries long separate the Middle and Neo-Elamite periods, until
Humban nugash is king of Elam, about 740 BC. Curiously there is a mirror of the
earlier period with Assyria and Elam vying with each other for influence in Babylon.
Campaigning from 692 BC to 639 BC, Ashurbanipal’s armies eventually destroyed
Susa. It is around this time that the Persian rulers were established in Elam, possibly
as a consequence of an Assyrian deportation of Persians to rule the troublesome
province.
Cyrus the Deliverer of Oppressed Peoples
Dom Gregory Dix says that Herodotus recognized the sudden rise to empire of the
Persians under Cyrus in 550 BC as the turning point of Greek history. Second Isaiah
saw him as God’s saviour of the world! If God’s chief prophet and the world’s first
historian tell us that Cyrus was so important, why do modern theologians and
modern historians ignore the man?
Cyrus recognized the importance of the older civilizations and wished to unite them in
a world empire.
G M Cook
The Persians arrived in Parsumash, traditionally known as Anshan, sometime around
700 BC and Achaemenes founded a small kingdom nominally subject to Elam, an old
country in terminal decline. Assyria had forced its choice of rulers on to the Elamites
and the country was thoroughly divided between pro-Assyrian and anti-Assyrian
factions. While the Scythians ruled Media, Achaemenes’ son, Teispes (Chishpish),
took over the province of Fars or Parsa. Teispes was a diplomat and avoided the
imbroglios of the great powers, but when he died, he divided his kingdom between
his two sons. A gold tablet found at Egbatana (Hamadan) in 1920, where it must have
been taken with Achaemenid archives during the empire, says:
How Persia Created Judaism: The Rise of Persia
11
This land of the Persians which I possess, provided with fine horses and good men,
was given to me by the Great God Ahura Mazda. I am the king of this land. I pray that
Ahura Mazda will help me.
Aryaramnes (640-590 BC) one of the sons of Teispes, was the author. This is the
earliest mention of Ahura Mazda (Ahuramazda, Ormuzd). The parallel between the
Persians migrating landless for a long time then being delivered by the grace of God
into a wonderful land and the mythical journey of the Israelites into their land of milk
and honey should not be missed. Both have the sound of deportation propaganda.
Ultimately the two branches of the family were to be united again under the more
vigorous of the Achaemenid kings though there seemed to have been no bad feeling,
the subject branch carrying on as governors of what was their own country, an early
example of the generosity of the Achaemenids towards losers and perhaps the
influence of the Zoroastrian religion.
In Zoroastrian mythology, the king converted by Zoroaster, Vistaspa, convinced now
of the support of the Good God and committed to defeating the followers of the Evil
Spirit—anyone who refused to submit—set out on the “Wars of Religion”. The
blessing of Ahuramazda or perhaps the novelty of fanaticism kept the Zoroastrians
winning. There is no historical record of any of this, unless they are stylised versions
of the victories of Cyrus, but set down in the annals, they were to be an inspiration to
religious maniacs for millennia.
The Zoroastrian tradition suggested by Vishtaspa’s “Wars of Religion” enjoined on
the Persian monarchs an enthusiasm for Holy Wars. It glorified the dissemination of
Zoroastrianism by the sword, and the Arabs later took their cue from it, as the
founder of the Persian empire Cyrus (Kurash) the Great did immediately. Herodotus
confirms that his epithet was justified—he was a noble king.
Historically, Cyrus the Great became a Zoroastrian at some time in his career, for at
his death Zoroastrianism was the official religion of his empire, and the Magi had
attained the monopoly of religion. It was the proper religion of the Medes and
Persians, so that being a Zoroastrian meant being a Persian. The two became
equivalent, religion and ethnicity being identified, as they later did in Judaism.
As a devoted Zoroastrian, Cyrus believed that his religious duty was to bring about
the eschatological promises of Zoroastrianism through active warfare. If the universe
was an epic struggle between the forces of Ahuramazda and the forces of evil, Cyrus
saw his job as personally bringing about the victory of his god. As an extension of
this, Cyrus would bring Zoroastrianism to all the peoples he conquered, but not by
forcing them. Zoroastrianism recognized all the gods of other people—some were of
Ahuramazda’s Good Creation, and some were of Ahriman’s Evil Creation. Cyrus
distinguished between them on the basis of the resistance the worshippers of the god
offered him.
A scholarly Parsi, Ruhi Muhsen Afnan (Zoroaster’s Influence on Anaxagoras, the
Greek Tragedians, and Socrates, New York, 1969), shows that expansion of the
Persian Empire under the Achaemenids was motivated by a “divine mission to offer
mankind” a true belief, like the wars of Islam. These wars “were dominated by a
religious fervor that must be taken into account” in the sudden emergence of Persia,
How Persia Created Judaism: The Rise of Persia
12
just as the Arabs suddenly emerged with a divine militancy and conquered most of
the world.
Cyrus first refused to bow to the Medes and carefully planned to defeat them, thus
merging the two strong Indo-European tribes of the plateau. Typically, he treated the
defeated median king, Astyages, with generosity. Defeating the Medes gave him a
ready made empire from Asia Minor to the Caspian Sea, with Babylonia ruling to the
south. He moved his capital immediately from Persis to Egbatana, taking the royal
archives with him.
Asia Minor, including the Ionian Greek cities, were subject to the wealthy kingdom of
Lydia ruled by the legendary Croesus. Croesus was too rich and proud to bow to the
upstart so was defeated in battle and had to yield to the new power in the near east.
The Greek cities saw this as a chance of independence and also refused homage and
were duly individually beaten or bribed into submission. Miletus was the only city to
yield readily, and must have had some privileges as a reward. Herodotus notes the
name Oromedan, a citizen of Cilicia about 540 BC, just about the time Cyrus
subjected Anatolia. Oromedan is a Greek rendering of Ahuramazda.
So, from the earliest days of the Persian empire, Greeks were a part of it. They were
soldiers, merchants and entrepreneurs and were vital to this very young country from
its coming out into the world. It is childish school learning that depicts the Greeks as
defenders of teutonic Europe against the Asian hordes. Greeks were serving in the
armies of the Persians, and not just as infantry—as generals too.
Cyrus turned east to secure his boundaries there, facing India and particularly the
north east where armed bands from central Asia liked to gallop in to plunder. In each
case of conquest, Cyrus allowed the defeated country to continue with its normal
culture and practices, and left most of the officials in post. He knew he did not have
enough trained men to administer all his conquered territories. It was a dangerous
but necessary policy. Meanwhile he founded a college of seven Persian princes and
later many more Persian nobles would be trained for colonial administration.
Cyrus was always astute enough to realize that most people he was conquering were
far more cultured than his own, and made no attempt to impose a Persian “culture”
nor was he interested in directly forcing the Persian religion on to others. He thought,
though, that the universal god, Ahuramazda, was favouring him, his house and the
Persian nation, and he was keen that people ahould see some god as universal so that
the idea of a universal god would confer legitimacy on the idea of a universal king of
kings on earth.
Cyrus still had a strong and rich country independent at the centre of his empire and
decided it had to be made to submit. Chaldeans [† CHALDÆANS. Chaldæa, also
spelled “Chaldea”, Assyrian “Kaldu”, Babylonian “Kasdu”, Hebrew “Kasdim”, spoken
of in the Old Testament, was an alternative name of Babylonia. Chaldæans were
thought to have been an Arab tribe from the marshlands in the south of modern Iraq
near the Persian Gulf. However, there certainly was a tribe of “Chaldians” in the
north allied with the Urartians. Chaldæans later meant the priests and sages versed
in Babylonian traditions of astronomy and astrology—the Magi.] were a Semitic
people who invaded Southern Babylonia in the early centuries of the first
millennium BC, while the Aramaeans occupied Syria. Chaldaea is first mentioned in
How Persia Created Judaism: The Rise of Persia
13
the annals of the Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal II (883-859 BC). When they ruled
Babylonia, after the Assyrians, they followed the practice of their predecessors,
pacifying people by deportation including part of the Judahite [† THE MEANING OF
THE WORD JEW. In the Oxford Dictionary of the Bible, W R F Browning defines
Jews (“Yehudim”) as the people who worshipped the god Yehouah and lived in the
region around Jerusalem after the return from exile in Babylon. Thereafter Jew was
the name of worshippers of Yehouah there and elsewhere in the Diaspora. Even in
the bible, the people of Judah were not called Jews, and Jew was not synonymous
with Israelite, though the biblical Yehudites were presented as among the Israelite
people. As one of the tribes of the Israelites, the males of the tribe of Judah in the
pre-exilic myths in the bible were called “men of Judah” (“ish Yehuda”, 1 Sam 11:8).
The word “Yehudi”, meaning a “son of Judah”, occurs in 2 Kg 16:6. It is an
unnecessary confusion to speak of historical people, especially Canaanites or even
Israelites, as Jews before the Persian colonisation of Yehud. Thus Tiglath-pileser III
did not take “Jews” into Medea, even though his annals mention Jehoahaz as king of
“Iauda-ai”. The people of the kingdom of Judah when it was formed should be
distinguished from the later Jews by calling them Judahites.] population, supposedly
10,000 nobles and craftsmen. It is doubtful that many, if any, of these people or their
descendents willingly returned to Palestine, but the people who themselves were
deported into Palestine by the Persians, a hundred or so years later, were
nevertheless called the “Returners from Exile”.
Cyrus returned from the east in 539 BC determined to settle the Chaldaean question.
Nabonidus (Nabunaid) (555-539 BC), was apparently a cultured but loopy king,
interested in the worship of the god, Sin—neglecting Babylon’s principal god,
Marduk, who symbolized the city as well as the faith of its people—and in
archaeological research, and quite uninterested in warfare, which he left to his son,
Belshazzar. Cyrus had a large army with Medes and Persians at the core but lots of
soldiers of conquered nations in support. He needed no army. Babylon submitted and
only a few days of token resistance came from the guard of the royal compound. As
ever, Cyrus was generous to the defeated king and his family, but Nabonidus died a
year later anyway. Cyrus joined in the public mourning.
The victory over Babylonia expressed all the facets of the policy of conciliation which
Cyrus had followed until then. He presented himself not as a conqueror, but a
liberator and the legitimate successor to the crown. He took the title of “King of
Babylon, King of the Land”.
Cyrus made cylinder seals and inscribed tablets with declarations of his treament of
and welcome by the Babylonians. He entered Babylon “amidst exulting shouts”. His
victory was “desired to the joy of their hearts” and “him did they bless with joy”.
Then, “Marduk the great Lord made the honourable hearts of the people of Babylon
inclined towards me because I was daily mindful of his worship” “the inhabitants
realized the satisfaction of their hearts desires” and “their sighs I hushed, their anger
I appeased”.
If Cyrus said all of this regarding Marduk and the Babylonians, it is credible that a
similar tactic should have been employed in respect of the Jews, and indeed many
other people, the evidence of which is now lost. Cyrus claimed to have been visited in
a dream by Yehouah, a god of the Hebrews, the people who lived in “Beyond the
River”, the Assyrian province of “Eber-niri” (Persian “Abarnahara”). Yehouah
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14
declared he was of the Good Creation and asked to be worshipped in the land of
Yehud. The Jewish scriptures, not an unbiased source, tells us that Cyrus sent the
“Returners from Exile” there to introduce the proper worship of Yehouah in the
Temple at Jerusalem.
Thus saith Yehouah to his messiah, to Cyrus, whose right hand I have holden, to
subdue nations before him, and I will loose the loins of kings, to open before him the
two leaved gates, and the gates shall not be shut.
Isaiah 45:1
Thus saith Cyrus king of Persia, Yehouah Elohim of heaven hath given me all the
kingdoms of the earth; and he hath charged me to build him an house at Jerusalem,
which is in Judah.
Ezra 1:2
“Yehouah Elohim of heaven” means “Yehouah of the gods of heaven” not “The Lord
God of heaven” as the dishonest translators will put it. For Indo-Europeans, the gods
of heaven are the Daevas, the wicked gods derogated by Zoroaster. It seems the
Persians saw all national gods as Daevas, but were ready to allow their worshippers to
show by their deeds that they were really Yazatas, good spirits.
In fact no one, or very few volunteers went there and later kings were obliged to send
deportees to shore up Jerusalem as a citadel against the Egyptians. It was set up as a
temple City in which the people, a Nation of Priests, were privileged in return for
their loyalty.
The Reverend Mills recognized that ancient politicians were sensible of propaganda.
He comments on the propaganda of Cyrus: “All this piety was of course political” but
still showed the Persian king as a man of faith. When Cyrus flooded the empire with
these cylinder seals and inscriptions, he knew that they would be read by the literate
and repeated by story tellers for a long time. He knew they would become the stuff of
legends. Mills observes:
The empire was as complex in its religious types as it was vast in extent, and the
amount of business entailed in administering it must have been phenomenal.
Beyond a question there existed a “Ministry of Public Worship”.
The objective of this ministry was to make a show of restoring gods and temples to
please the peoples of the nations, but it is utterly naïve to imagine that the
“restoration” had no strings attached or was simply restoration of an ancient worship
rather than its “improvement” in the sense of arranging it in a form more conducive
to civil obedience. No subtle king could miss the chance to cast the restoration in a
direction favourable to himself. As Mills says:
These Achaemenids were men of business and practical to the finest point.
Darius took the same line but was more keen on monumental inscriptions than
Cyrus. His main legacy is the immense carved cliff face at Behistun but other
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15
inscriptions are at Persepolis, Naksh-i-Rustem, Elvend, Kerman, Susa, Suez, Van and
Egbatana, as well as on seals, tablets, pillars, weights and vases. Mills points out that
“what the great Iranian inscriptions said, all officers of the kings government must
have known”.
The interesting thing was that Cyrus offered himself to the Babylonians as a deliverer
or Saviour (in Greek, Soter), just as he did to the Judahites. He said Babylon’s god,
Marduk-Bel, had chosen him, Cyrus, as a righteous king who would rule the world.
To prove it he ritually took the god’s hand at the new year festivities, thus legitimising
him in the official title of the Babylonian king—“king of the land” of Babylon.
Marduk-Bel was offered to his own worshippers in a new light—as a god with a world
outlook not merely a local one.
Cyrus told the Babylonians that earlier kings, like Nabonidus, had taken their gods
from their rightful homes and he promised to “restore” them. Nabonidus had used
exactly the same approach in Harran when he persuaded the people he deported to
the town that the proper god of the city was Sin. Even then the policy was not new.
An inscription of Hammurabi who rules in Babylon from 1792 to 1750 BC speaks of
him restoring to its rightful place the god who favoured the city of Assur.
Persians called Cyrus “Father”, Greeks “Lord” or “Master”, and “Law-Giver”, and
Jews called him “Messiah”. Greek writers like Aeschylus depict the Persian king as a
god, and Curtius Rufus has a sycophant encouraging Alexander the Great to accept
divine honours by assuring him the Persians had worshipped their kings among the
gods. It was not true. They did not and no Persian king claimed to be a god, but they
did like to depict themselves as god-like. They had a doctrine equivalent to the divine
right of kings. The shah had divine authority. He was king by virtue of God’s will. He
was God’s chosen one, and held his hand. Shahs were God’s regent on earth, and if
that meant some people thought they were an angel of God, doubtless they would be
hardly likely to send an envoy to correct their misconception. They showed
themselves larger than men and, as it were, conversing with God. To justify it, they
propagated monotheism in the lands they conquered. The shah ruled with divine
authority, and that authority was that of God—one single monotheistic God. For
Persians, Ahuramazda was the only true god, and each subject nation had to have an
equivalent of Ahuramazda to be able to confirm the shah as the King of Kings—the
Shahanshah.
Historians like to say Cyrus had “no thought of” moulding conquered countries in a
Persian mould. That was perhaps true and realistic, but Ahuramazda was always
depicted as a god rising above the solar or equinoctial disc, implying that the Persians
saw him as transcendental, and certainly Cyrus was interested in persuading people
that the true god was universal in outlook. His purpose seems to have been practical
and political rather than religious, but it was a policy that led to all the main
patriarchal religions of today. Cyrus was the founder of the modern great religions!
His novel and clever policy of conquest was to be generous to defeated people. In his
propaganda he painted himself as the saviour and legitimate ruler of a conquered
country. This must have been such a shock to people who expected to be massacred
by conquerors that they could only conclude it was true.
Cyrus’s religious policy was an extension of this practical policy—to make it seem to
How Persia Created Judaism: The Rise of Persia
16
be God’s will, whoever the local god was. He reshaped the Marduks and Yehouahs as
Ahuramazdas—transcendental gods, suns beyond suns. To do so, he “restored” the
local gods, but the restoration was in a mould that suited a universal king. The
“restored” god was willing to look beyond his traditional worshippers to a world scale
to recognize a righteous king when it saw one and approve of him in the appropriate
way.
He got people to believe his propaganda by transporting them to a country that he
declared was their proper homeland, where they had to start anew from the facts the
Persians provided. Cyrus was their saviour, so-and-so was their rightful god, the god
recognized Cyrus as the saviour—“Go thee and do likewise” and we Persians will help
you.
Cyrus “restored” Yehouah to Jerusalem and supposedly 40,000 worshippers of
Yehouah—Jews, for that is the name of people who worship Yehouah wherever they
come from—“returned” to Jerusalem. The truth seems to be that very few did. Into
the third generation of captivity and having the privileges of a deported class, the
Judeans are unlikely to have wanted to return.
In the Jewish scriptures, Cyrus is presented as a saviour and an agent of God—the
Jewish god, Yehouah—and is even described as the messiah (the anointed). Yehouah
had used the righteous but foreign king, Cyrus, to avenge the Jews against Babylon.
We even find Yehouah shaking Cyrus by the hand (Isa 45:1) just as Bel had done:
Thus saith the Lord to his anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I have holden, to
subdue nations before him.
Two separate gods, Marduk and Yehouah, of people who were enemies, Babylonians
and Jews, saying kind things about a foreign prince, choosing him as a deliverer and
taking him by the hand in proof. It all begins to look suspicious—like pro-Cyrus
propaganda—Cyrus depicting himself as the benefactor of conquered peoples and the
“restorer” of gods to their rightful place.
The leaders of the “returners” were Zerubabel, supposedly a member of the Jewish
royal family, and Joshua, supposedly the descendant of a dynasty of High Priests. The
name Joshua means “saviour!” They were accompanied by an assortment of Persian
officials.
Is it not curious that Zerubabel, a Jewish leader, should have a distinctly Babylonian
sounding name, and one that in “Zeru” suggests “Zara” (Zoro), the beginning of
Zoroaster’s name, the latter part simply meaning Babylon? Zara pertains to the sun
and seems to have connotations of “power” or “strength” and so “protecting” or
“saving”. Zerubabel is the “saviour from Babylon”. The same is true of a later and
more famous Jewish leader to “return”, Ezra, where again we have the characteristic
consonants “ZR” appearing in a language which did not write vowels, so that it could
equally be rendered as Zara—another saviour!
In fact, Zerubabel was the Tirshatha, the Persian governor, whose duty was to act on
behalf of the king, Cyrus, and whose bogus Jewish royalty was to give him authority
over the skeptical natives of Judah. He is also called Sheshbazzar which seems to
mean “mighty power of the king” or “citadel of the king”.
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The society of Jerusalem was a feudal class system based on aristocracies called
“houses” of princes and nobles, rulers and elders. The Persian governor was the top
official but then came the priestly houses, led by the High Priest, a hereditary
position. Sacred objects supposedly stolen by Nebuchadnezzer from the temple in
Jerusalem were returned by Cyrus, but Nebuchadnezzer would have melted down or
broken up any valuables to make them easier to transport, and so these were new
items given by Cyrus to furnish the new temple.
Historians, believing the bible rather than their inspection of the relevant documents,
have said that Cyrus was kind to Jews because he found the Jewish God so impressive
and akin to his own god, Ahuramazda. Most biblical scholars would not be interested
in anything that cast any doubt upon the bible, and if it looked threatening, would
denounce it as fraud or copying or anything else they could think off. Here the
evidence is as clear as could be that Cyrus manipulated the worshippers of Yehouah
that he had returned to Jerusalem, exactly as he had manipulated the worshippers of
Marduk.
Before the exile, Judahites conceived of their anthropomorphic tribal God as a
fertility and storm god. The earlier Yehouah had been a local god that the simple hill
folk of Palestine could easily recognize. Most called him “Baal” their word for “Lord”.
The Jews who “returned” worshipped a different Yehouah from those who had been
originally deported. This Yehouah was a universal god like Ahuramazda, the Persian
Most High God, who thought nothing of choosing a foreign prince as a Jewish
messiah. He was good, perfect, remote and a God of righteous living—just like
Ahuramazda. He was, however, also a vengeful god for those who did not live
righteously. Naturally, since no one previously had known that Yehouah was like this,
all of His earlier worshippers were sinners! That is why He had had His revenge, but
now He had sent the Persian kings as His saviours.
Cyrus was killed on the eastern front in 530 BC and his body was laid embalmed in a
tomb with a pitched roof typical of ancient Indo-European tombs. He was still there
200 years later and was seen by Alexander the Great. Evidently Cyrus was not
exposed in a silent tower as the Zoroastrian religion requires, showing the
Achaemenids were not strictly Zoroastrian or that this was a requirement introduced
later.
AN ARCHETYPAL RETURNER. The Jewish scriptures have a remarkable clue that the Yehudim were not
natives of the hill country but were from Babylon. It is the story of Abraham, supposedly the father of
the Jewish race who in the legend travelled from Ur “of the Chaldees” to Judaea. Abraham was
allegedly travelling about 2000 BC but the Chaldees did not exist then, it was the name of the
neo-Babylonian empire at the time of the “exile” so Abraham is simply a symbolic “returner” shoved
into the past anachronistically.
Darius the Great (522-486 BC)
The son of Cyrus, Cambyses, a more ruthless man than his father completed the
conquest of Egypt, ending traditional pharaonic rule for good. Following standard
policy, Cambyses transported the ruling class of the Egyptians, including Pharaoh
and his family, to Susa, but legitimized his rule by paying homage to the Egyptian
gods. Then, so as to appear to the common people as a deliverer, he ordered the
administration to introduce reforms to benefit them. While conquering Egypt he
How Persia Created Judaism: The Rise of Persia
18
incidentally made several north African Greek colonies, like Libya and Cyrenaica to
submit, thus bringing more of the Greek world into the Persian ambit.
In Egypt, Cambyses set up or sponsored a garrison of Jewish soldiers at Elephantine.
According to a later letter, a temple to Yehouah had been set up here before the
Persians came, and the polytheistic nature of the gods worshipped there besides
Yehouah serves to confirm the idea. The name of Yehouah or Yeho as a god appears
all over the Levant, not just in the Judaean hills, and even as far south as the Sinai,
which is where Yehouah first appeared to Moses in the biblical myth. So the Semitic
people of the Levant had Yehouah among their other gods and expatriate Semites in
Egypt had apparently set up a temple for their devotional purposes. Perhaps, though,
Cambyses tried to help the “returners” to Jerusalem by conscripting leaders of the
Am ha-Eretz opponents of the new Yehouah temple and deporting them to Egypt
where he allowed them to set up a temple to the traditional Yehouah and his heavenly
court.
Cambyses was said to have disparaged the Egyptian gods and killed the Apis Bull, but
inscriptions cast doubt on this. It seems to have been Egyptian and Greek
propaganda, made possible because Cambyses was soon dead, either of suicide in the
face of mass uprisings or, more likely from gangrene in an accidental wound caused
by his own knife (Persian nobles all wore a knife) loosing its sheath and impaling him
in the groin as he jumped on to his horse. A cousin of Cambyses, Darius, one of the
seven Persian princes, seized power and, though faced with considerable opposition
eventually put down the rebellions and re-united the vast Empire.
To mark his success, Darius built the large monument at Behistun between Egbatana
and Kirimanshah. Ahuramazda or his fravashi, typically rising head and shoulders
above a winged circlet, overlooks Darius treading over a usurper while eight other
false kings trail behind in bonds. The inscription tells the story of the revolts but says
“Ahura Mazda and the other gods helped me” confirming again that the Achaemenids
did not consider Ahuramazda the only god, but the highest of them. Even Persis had
been in revolt and Darius moved his capital to Persepolis. The dangers of the
liberality of Cyrus had been proved and Darius determined to set up a much more
formal and effective system of governance.
A Greek admiral was ordered to build a fleet in the head waters of the Indus and find
a way to Egypt. He succeeded in 30 months. Darius wanted to secure the north and
planned to invade Scythia via the Hellespont. In preparation he forced Byzantium to
submit, conquered Thrace and Macedonia and moved a massive army across the
Hellespont and the Danube on bridges of boats built by Ionian Greek engineers. He
was ready to force the European Greeks to submit and the Athenians were happy to
do so, but the Spartans objected.
Attempting to be assured of Athenian loyalty with a large bribe, the Persians came up
against the paradox of democracy. The Athenians were now offended and sided with
the Spartans. Meanwhile the Greeks of Ionia decided it was a good time to revolt and
set up the Ionian league, supported by Athens, seizing Sardis, the Persian regional
capital, except for its citadel. The Persians re-asserted themselves in 497 AD and
treasure was taken and populations deported. Milesian Greeks were settled at the
mouth of the Tigris where earlier the settlement of Aramaeans had helped to
destabilize the country of Elam, allowing the Persians to take root. At Lesbos, young
How Persia Created Judaism: The Rise of Persia
19
women were taken for the harems and young men were castrated, leaving the
remaining women to satisfy themselves in unconventional ways.
Darius sent a fleet under a Median admiral to secure Athens. He captured the town of
Eretria on Euboea and transported the citizens to Susa as slaves. They were settled at
Arderikka and still spoke Greek in the first century AD, according to the supporters of
Appollonius of Tyana. Their abduction was bad psychology for creative and perverse
people like the Greeks and it only had the effect of again uniting them and allowing
them to win the battle of Marathon (490 BC). Turning to a rebellion in Egypt, Darius
died in 486 BC.
Marathon and Salamis are written off as ignominious failures for the Persians, who
are depicted in history as fools and poltroons, but the inventive and creative Greeks
lived on the mainland in Ionia, and were for long vassals of the Persians. All Greek
achievements before the Persian wars were Ionian, and the Ionians taught the
western Greeks seamanship and citizenship. The constitution of Athens took its main
clauses from those of the Ionian cities. The talent, art, main population, wealth and
commerce of the Greeks were in the eastern cities, while the Balkan cities were
impoverished.
That, above all, is why the Persians were not unduly interested in European Greece,
and the invasions of Darius and Xerxes were less aimed at conquest than to punish
the western Greeks for helping the eastern Greeks in rebellion. If they hoped to
subdue the western Greeks, the Persian kings failed, but those Greek cities who did
not surrender as far south as Athens were razed, and Thrace was set up as a Persian
buffer in Europe. When the independent Greeks defeated the Persians at Plataea, the
spoils of victory were dedicated to Apollo at Delphi as “the spoils of the Persians, the
Macedonians and the Thebans” so both Macedonians and Thebans were subject to
the Persians and fought with them. The Persian empire therefore began in Europe,
about forty miles from Athens. Macedonia was Persian for the first half of the Persian
empire’s existence, and Thrace for even longer. Ionia remained a Persian colony, or
in its sphere of influence.
The Persians lost some critical battles that the Greeks worked up in their propaganda,
but the Persian kings considered that they had achieved most of their goals, and were
able to keep the undefeated Greeks fighting each other for a hundred years until they
exhausted themselves. Alexander was subject to Persian as well as Greek influences, a
factor that might have been crucial to his success against the Persians.
From the time of Darius, the kings were laid in rock tombs. In his tomb inscriptions
at Naqsh-i-Rustam, Darius praises Ahuramazda as creator of earth, sky, man and
man’s happiness, and as the god who made Darius the king. The inscription lists
people who were obedient to the king, through the favour of Ahuramazda, and it lists
provinces where disturbances were qwelled, through the grace of Ahuramazda. On it,
Darius says his law did not allow the strong to strike the weak. He then lists the
buildings he has erected and concludes with a prayer for Ahuramazda and “the gods”
to protect him, his dynasty and his inscriptions.
Darius’s inscriptions generally pray for Ahuramazda to protect the Royal House and
the country from foreign armies, famine and the Lie. The “Lie” in Zoroastrianism is
the equivalent of “sin” in Judaism—it is disobeying the word of God. The
How Persia Created Judaism: The Rise of Persia
20
consequence of this in practical terms for Persian kings was that avoiding the baneful
influence of the “Lie” meant, among other things, that the people would have to
accept the Shahanshah as God’s regent on earth. Herodotus notes that Persians never
prayed for personal benefit but only for benefits for Persia—they prayed for the good
of the king, the people and the country.
Darius realized Cyrus had been too generous—in diplomacy generosity is often taken
advantage of. The policy of the Great King as protector was continued but the
individual kings were now effectively governed by the Satraps (Khshatrapavans)
—“Protectors of the Kingdom”—a Persian noble. Darius divided the empire into
twenty Satrapies to which he appointed his own loyal generals and Persian
administrators, richly endowed with land and exempt from taxation. But there was
no question of trying to force obedience by force of arms. The old diplomacy of Cyrus
still had to be at the core but now Persians were to be the senior administrators.
Conquered lands were the property of the king, who had his lands surveyed,
estimated their yields and levied a rent on what could be produced, then charged
people rents for its use. So tribute or tax was technically a rent. Persians lived in their
own land and so paid no rent. Satrapies and vassal states had to pay a fixed sum in
talents of gold or silver to the Persian exchequer. The satrap stood alongside a local
army commander and a local collector of taxes, all equal but independent and
reporting only to Darius. Thus local power was divided. As extra safeguards, the
satrap had an official secretary whose task was to record everything that the satrap
did and report it to the emperor. Finally, Darius also appointed inspectors—“Ears of
the King”—whose job was to call unexpectedly on any area official to check what he
was doing. He had an independent small force of armed men to protect himself and
enforce his actions if needs be.
The royal inscriptions of Persian kings often mentioned Truth or Order, and Justice,
“arta” and “asha”, and “data” meaning law as the order (“arta”) brought to the world
by the king’s will. The Iranian word for law “data” entered Hebrew and other Semitic
languages of the ancient near east, at the time of the Persian conquest. Law was
important to the Persians, and even Greeks said Persians were just. Famous stelae of
law like that found in Babylon, together with the moral code of his own religion,
inspired Darius to set down just laws. Persian judges held office for life as long as
they were not corrupt. Two court systems operated in Babylon—and doubtless
elsewhere—the local law based on local custom and practice, and the imperial law,
the decrees of the shahanshah. Babylonian and Aramaic sources call imperial Persian
judges “databar”. Rule by consent was still aimed for, and Darius hoped for rule by
consent and thus to pass off his laws to local communities consensually under the
guise of religious “restoration”. The great Persian scholar, A T Olmstead affirms that
Darius meant to set a code of law for the whole empire, and more recently Thiery
Petit noted that the actions of Darius in Egypt were only a part of an empire wide
program of subtle legislation.
In Egypt, Darius had the rules and immunities granted by the pharaohs to the
temples “codified” and made available in Demotic and Aramaic script. The Ptolemaic
regime in Egypt was started by Alexander’s general, Ptolemy, only ten years after the
defeat of the Persians. The Ptolemies were keen on preserving the written word, and
began the collections of the Alexandrine library. The reverse of one Ptolemaic
papyrus bearing the Demotic Chronicle, dated to the third century BC, carried an
How Persia Created Judaism: The Rise of Persia
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P Frei, Persia and Torah (Ed J W Watts)
account of Darius setting up a commission of priests, sages and warriors to “codify”
Egyptian law. It says it took 16 years to report. In fact, Diodorus Siculus had already
given Darius credit for being one of the Egypt’s main lawgivers, and the Egyptian
satrap, Arsames, had the same honour.
Curiously, the text specifies that Darius made made no innovations. Why should it
make this point explicitly unless Darius was keen that no one should imagine he had
done so? No codification of the law can be done while leaving it unchanged. The
whole point of a code of law is that it should be systematic and therefore easier to
use—law is codified for use, not as an idle pursuit, and it is hard to believe that
practical rulers like the Persian shahs will have wanted to waste sixteen years on a
project that would not give them some direct benefit. Someone must have suspected
that the “codification” was indeed to make legal innovations, and so it must indeed,
but the king was keen to stifle any such impression.
Cambysis had the reputation of having openly interfered with the Egyptian temples,
and Darius wanted his own propaganda to counter any such thought by
meretriciously proclaiming this shah had no intention of doing the same as his
predecessor. Egyptians were not used to be subjects of foreigners, and many thought
they had the wealth and power to declare UDI. In short, flagrant legal changes in a
country that was notionally as powerful as its conqueror could have caused
dangerous rebellion. A hand-picked commission of the good and the great taking
sixteen years to report did just what any modern government commission does—it
allowed plenty of time for tempers to cool, and changes to operate before any report
emerged. But, if the changes made by Cambyses had been so badly received, why did
Darius not simply reverse them, thus getting great kudos as a righter of wrongs? That
is what he did not do. If Cambyses thought Egyptian laws were better for the Persians
changed, Darius will have felt the same way. By making “no innovations”, Darius did
not have to reverse the legal changes Cambyses had made. So, Diodorus tells us
Darius “dealt with” the priests, by bribes and the delay in codifying the legal content
of holy books.
The Persians were well aware people had their price, and the privileges of the priests
would have been secured as long as they were cooperative. In the process of
codification, many a clause will have been inserted favourable to Persian rule that no
priest could object to if simply because no one knew the full corpus of religious law
anyway! He also restored the Houses of Life, the schools and hospitals, attached to
the temples. He was doing the same in Egypt as he did elsewhere. At Magnesia on the
Meander river in Ionia, a satrap was rebuked for trying to curtail the privileges of the
priests of Apollo. Persian kings, as in Jerusalem, were keen to have the priesthood on
their side.
The introduction of a law book by a commissioner empowered for that purpose was
not possible unless the central government approved of its contents.
Besides these legal and administrative reforms, Darius built a fine road network, only
patches of which now remain. The Royal Road from Susa to Sardis in Asia Minor was
1600 miles long and could be traversed by caravan in 90 days, but post stations every
15 miles kept fresh relays of horses for the king’s couriers who could cover the
distance in seven days. Such good roads and sound administration encouraged
How Persia Created Judaism: The Rise of Persia
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commerce.
The royal road was said to pass for its whole length “through country that is inhabited
and safe”. This great highway made much of central Asia Minor accessible to Iranian
colonists, who were attracted by its fertile river-valleys and wide plains. Noble
fiefholders naturally had an interest in developing their estates, and this interest was
quickened in them as Zoroastrians, for whom good cultivation of the land is a
religious duty.
A Persian landowner in Lydia dwelling in a fortified manor house on his own estate,
had armed retainers in his service, as well as slaves to work the land. His house was
attacked by Greek raiders and a beacon was lit which brought a Persian neighbour to
his aid, with his own body of fighting men, and some official forces also, and the
marauders were driven off. The incident suggests a number of Persian estates in this,
and doubtless other, fertile regions of western Asia Minor, with mutual support
among the landowners and in general effective Persian vigilance and control.
Persian nobles must have brought skilled farmworkers with them from Iran, for still,
in the fourth century AD, many villages scattered about Cappadocia were entirely
inhabited by Iranians, descendants of the original colonists. Achaemenid armies were
generally accompanied by women, and the long survival of some of these settlements
must owe much to their being ethnically and culturally homogeneous, founded by
Iranian families.
Another practical policy adopted by the Persians and useful to commerce and
diplomacy alike was to use the popular and widespread language, Aramaean, rather
than Persian as a lingua franca. Few people in the world at the dawn of the
Achaemenid age knew Persian and, since it was not a written language, a special
script now called Old Persian script was invented from Assyrian cuneiform script.
The kings used it on inscriptions but for pragmatic reasons they used Aramaean
otherwise, and helped to spread it as far as India.
Mesopotamian languages after the Sumerians were all Semitic and Aramaean was
Syrian Semitic which gradually spread naturally then got a boost when the policy of
transportation was introduced. Many Aramaean speakers were transported into the
areas of Old Sumeria and Elam, as well as elsewhere, and it became the language
everyone picked up a bit of, until it became the language everyone spoke.
Significantly, the traditional script of the Hebrew language is this Aramaean script
introduced by the Persians, and it differs from the Old Hebrew script used by the
Samaritans.
The Persian empire above all improved commerce. The Persians introduced standard
taxation, introduced coinage, first used by king Croesus of Lydia. Persian coinage did
not catch on everywhere, so Darius introduced accurate weights and measures to
ensure fair trading. They are however mentioned in the Jewish scriptures (1 Chr
29:7) where king David’s nobles offer Persian darics (adarkons, translated “drams” in
KJV) for the upkeep of the temple. This is almost 500 years before darics were
invented, but shows when and by whom the myth of David was written. Darics were
gold coins but a lesser silver coin was called by a Babylonian word, segals—shekels.
Darius employed people in public works in mines, roadmaking and canal digging,
How Persia Created Judaism: The Rise of Persia
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drained swamps, spread useful animals and plants including domestic fowl and
doves, promoted other useful activities in foodstuffs like the drying and pickling of
fish so that it could be transported inland. They took pistachios to Aleppo, sesame to
Egypt and rice to Mesopotamia. Persian kings were interested in public welfare.
Later, the Greek kings continued this policy.
The standard of living rose throughout and was higher in the centres of Persia than it
was in the Greek cities we so much admire. Partly this was because the greater
volume of trade and enterprize took goods downmarket that had previously been the
exclusive interest of the rich. More people benefited and standards as a whole rose.
Banking boomed also. Banking had traditionally been the prerogative of the temples
in, for example Babylonia, but there were private bankers too. It was private banking
that boomed, although the general swell of wellbeing spread so far as Greece and the
temples of Delos, Delphi and Olympia all opened as banks based on Asian models.
The role of the Temple of Jerusalem as a private bank in which the simple deposit
their money as “corban” and the priesthood drew it out is well known!
Darius specified fair wages for workers and, since wages were often paid in kind, the
values of standard goods were also specified so that the worker knew they were
getting the right weight. Some serfs were tied to the estates but many were free and
workers moved around in an extensive labour market. Tablets at Persepolis speak of
workers from all over the empire. There must have been a labour exchange. There
was certainly an imperial direct labour force working on palaces, temples and other
large projects for the king. After 520 BC, Persian names are increasingly found in the
city rolls of Babylonia, a result of the displacement of Persian smallholders from the
plateau by the larger more efficient estates.
Deportations continued and some were depicted as having been voluntary.
Herodotus tells of Milesians transported from Ionia to the Persian gulf to establish
sea-going routes to India and Egypt but little impression was made, perhaps simply
because the wood to make ships was not readily available. The Peonians of Thrace
were deported to Phrygia by Darius, but Herodotus says that many were shortly able
to escape back home during an uprising encouraged by the Greeks.
Alexander used the same policy after the end of the Persian empire and, in the second
century BC, it was still being used by the Parthians. Mithradates II transported
Scythians into Seistan, now on the border of Iran and Afghanistan.
All of the imperial powers that the Iranians met had a powerful national god. In
Urartu—Khaldi, in Assyria—Assur, in Babylon—Marduk, in Elam—Humban. As Mary
Boyce puts it: “This was the time of ethnic faiths, when every people honoured their
own gods”. Maybe it was a reason that the Achaemenids adopted Zoroastrianism. It
meant that generally an imperial state like Assyria would respect the gods of vassal
states—the gods the vassal called upon as its witnesses to the vassalage treaty. The
suzerain would make votive offerings to the gods of a subject people as a sign of
good-will, most notably if they had surrendered rather than resisted.
Such “respect” did not mean that the imperial power would not impose its own gods
on to people of countries it annexed into the empire rather than ruled as a colony, nor
did it mean that the imperial power would not use diplomatic, cultural and
propaganda campaigns to influence the attitudes of conquered or subject peoples in
How Persia Created Judaism: The Rise of Persia
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the colonies. They fully realized how much better it was to promote a sympathetic
party in a nation than to batter it head-on with armies. Such methods were
necessarily subtle because they would obviously not work if people realized they were
being manipulated. These great conquering powers were not unsubtle—subtle
enough to fool Jews and Christian scholars for millennia!
Western historians, especially Biblicists, persuade themselves that ruthless soldiers
like the leaders of these imperial nations became pussy-cats when it came to religion.
Out of pure kindness, they rebuilt temples, restored gods that had been suppressed,
and returned plundered divine images stolen centuries before to the renovated
temples. All in the hope the people would be grateful. It just does not hack. They
knew human nature was more perverse than that. They did it, but the god restored
and the ritual presented as proper were what suited the conquerors! And it is most
unlikely that the restored priesthood were independent. They were agents of the
conqueror.
Proof that the Persians were not tolerant in general is their treatment of their near
neighbours, the friendly Elamites, non-Iranians who eventually were attacked for not
worshipping Ahuramazda, and were punished severely for “hostility”. The Persians
doubtless reached a point where they questioned the Elamites adherance to daeva
gods, the people having been closely linked for a long time, but whatever the cause it
shows that Persians were interested in other people taking up the worship of
Ahuramazda.
A further example that Persians had no excessive respect for other people’s religions
is given by Xerxes, who took over the kingdom when his father died in 486 BC. He
had been satrap of Babylonia for ten years but, on accession, had to put down
rebellions in Egypt, then one in his former satrapy of Babylonia. He put them down
with ruthlessness and no religious niceties. In Babylonia he destroyed the temple at
Esagila that Cyrus had endowed, and even destroyed the statue of Marduk! It had
been the centre of the official religion and therefore of religious and state ceremonial,
so it was a punishing blow.
Some scholars see in the action a new policy of intolerance, but the intolerance was of
ingratitude or ineptitude by priests who had been granted favoured positions to make
sure such rebellions never happened. Tolerance was always shown towards those who
co-operated but not towards those who caused trouble. There was no change in policy
because Xerxes otherwise continued to favour temples and priesthoods that
remained loyal and did their job of keeping people obedient. Herodotus confirms
this, saying that when Xerxes marched through Greece, he allowed the destruction of
the temples of those who were hostile but respected those of people who submitted.
Destruction of temples is recorded only as a punitive measure after political
provocation.
M Boyce
Darius Re-Writes History
The propagandizing inclination of the Persian rulers is well illustrated by Darius, who
claims he defeated an impersonator of Cambyses’ brother to take the throne. The tale
How Persia Created Judaism: The Rise of Persia
25
Y 6:1
does not hold water. It is propaganda to cover his own murder of his cousin. The
whole tale is written for everyone to read on the great monumant he erected at
Behistun. It was also circulated widely in the regions.
Cambyses’ popular brother seems to have instituted a coup in his brother’s absence in
Egypt, but Darius thought he was the better man, if coups were the order of the day,
and so it proved. To cover his crime, Darius said Cambyses had murdered his brother
before he left for Egypt, and that the uprising was led by an imposter, a magian called
Bardiya (Greek, Smerdis) who looked like the dead prince and so pretended to be
him, yet the imposter would have had to have fooled close family and courtiers. It is
impossible. The man was who he claimed to be, and was really killed by Darius.
Cambyses therefore was blackened as a fratricide while Darius became a hero for
righting an awful wrong. Boyce draws the parallel of the propagandists of Henry VII
blackening the character of Richard III so successfully (with the help of Shakespeare)
that the calumny has only recently been exposed. At Behistun, Darius followed the
convention used by the Assyrians of attributing his success to the main god, here
Ahuramazda, whose symbol floats above the scene, because the god recognized the
victor as true and just—the upholder of Asha, righteousness. The example is clearly
one of rationalization of the outcome. Darius had schemed and murdered, but for the
greater good, it was necessary and right. His success proved that Ahuramazda
approved. In the Zoroastrian scheme, misdeeds could be atoned for by a greater
weight of good deeds, so Darius would escape with his soul in the balmy place by
living righteously for the rest of his life.
Darius had six princes helping him in his plot and he set up them all as special
advisers with great privileges. This by accident, or more likely intent, matched the six
Amesha Spentas of Ahuramazda, showing again that the Shahanshah was the
reflexion of God on earth. The kings from Darius were depicted on royal tombs
supported by these six nobles, three on each side, and slightly to the back but looking
toward the king.
The winged figure of Ahuramazda does not represent the god, but his grace or
blessing, responsible for wealth and success. The figure in the winged ring often looks
like a miniature of the king, often wearing the same kind of crown as Darius on his
monuments, though sometimes it has an Assyrian crown. In the Avesta, god’s grace is
called “khvarenah” (Median, farnah) and manifests itself as a falcon, just as Horus,
also represented by a winged disc did in Egypt. The word for the sun, “hvar”, can be
seen in khvarenah so presumably it was the benign warmth of the sun (showing
perhaps the origins of the Iranians in colder climates).
When the sun makes his light shine… the invisible yazatas stand ready… They
gather up that kvarenah, they store up that kvarenah, they distribute that kvarenah
over the Ahura-created earth to prosper the world as Asha.
The sun is providing divine grace that the yazatas distribute. The figure on the disc
might be the king rather than the god, thus symbolising the earthly manifestation of
the god, or that, at any rate, is what Darius wanted to remind his subjects of. The
Assyrian king had the title, “the sun god of the whole of mankind”, and Darius
wanted to propagate the same idea. Of course, we have no idea now whether even the
How Persia Created Judaism: The Rise of Persia
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Persian people understood these symbols as the god, the king, the god’s fravashi or
kvarenah or soul, and indeed these concepts seem to mingle to a degree even in the
Avesta. Legally, the divine Ahuramazda could not be pictured, so if the image was not
the king it had to be a representation of the grace of the god, but that could be
pictured as the king! Simple folk and children might have seen it as god, but the magi
would have known it was a symbol of one of his attributes. It is shown offering or
accepting the divine ring, the bond or promise of god.
Plutarch says the Persian king by custom was “the image of God and preserver of all
things”.
Evidence that the Persians were great propagandists, and used prophecy for
propaganda purposes, comes from an oracle delivered to Nabonidus of Babylon
about 553 BC. Cyrus had ruled about five years, and the discovery of the oracle shows
that in the eight years from his accession to the time when he defeated Astyages the
Mede, he was carefully preparing the ground for it. The oracle prophesied that in
three years time the gods of Babylon would cause Cyrus to rise against the Medes and
take them into bondage. Conceivably this oracle could have been propaganda after
the event pandering to the Babylonians via their gods, and doubtless the Persians did
this too, but scholars are sure this oracle preceded the event, so its aim was to
predispose the Babylonian king to favour Cyrus in his uprising against the Medes.
Nabonidus would have been glad to see the power of the Medes weakened, and would
have been inclined anyway to favour the rebels, but Cyrus was making sure. Boyce
comments:
It suggests that there were skilful Persian propagandists at work among the priests of
Babylon, who had convinced them of the success of Cyrus’s planned uprising.
In other respects Cyrus prepared the ground too—by marrying into the Median royal
family, Mandana, daughter of Astyages, by promoting Zoroastrianism, the religion of
the Medes when Astyages might have favoured the older Iranian gods, and generally
selling himsef to Median nobles as a man worth supporting, because many Medes
were glad to accept his leadership.
The question that this use of prophecy to influence events raises is whether the
prophets of the Jewish scriptures served the same role. Boyce speaks of the
“widespread activities of of Cyrus’s agents” who were “gifted as well as bold men”,
and she accepts that similar religious propaganda appears in the bible, citing Isaiah
40-48. Yehouah picked Cyrus (Isa 44:27-45:4,13) and the Chaldaeans and
Babylonians are punished (43:14;47:14). In reality, they were not because they
surrendered with no trouble. It was also not true that Cyrus conquered Egypt and
Nubia (Isa 45:14). That Cyrus was called the messiah (God’s anointed) even though,
as a gentile, he could not have been descended from David according to the myth,
shows both that this was a newly coined word and that the legend of king David had
not yet arisen so that the messiah was not yet associated with David. The passage was
written by a Persian propagandist.
Though Cyrus is depicted as messiah, and historical errors occur, it does not
necessarily mean that Cyrus had prepared the ground in advance, as he did with
Nabonidus. He might have done, true, but the legend might with more likelihood
How Persia Created Judaism: The Rise of Persia
27
GY 44.3.1-2
Isa 45:8
GY 44.3.3-5
Isa 40:26
GY 45:5.1-3
Isa 45:7
have been built up later, when Babylon had been punished for its own rebellions and
Egypt had long been conquered by Cambyses. The myth of the search for Cyrus’s
decree looks as though it was invented for propaganda purposes at exactly this time.
It was found! The same ploy was used regarding Deuteronomy, but they pretended
the discovery of it was before the Babylonian conquest!
Boyce goes on to say:
To this striking usage, Second Isaiah joins startlingly original theological
utterances… markedly Zoroastrian in charcter.
Plainly they were not original in Iran but Boyce means they were in scriptural terms.
This originality in Judaism is what makes Isaiah such a notable prophet for Jews and
Christians.
Since Genesis and the Psalms are later than second Isaiah, the idea of Yehouah as the
creator appears here in the bible for the first time too. It is a main theme of Isaiah
40-48 even though it is not directly relevant to the objective of assuring the Jews of
deliverance by Cyrus as the agent of Yehouah. The implied power of the god as the
creator would help assure the Jews that the prophecies would be upheld, but the
extent to which the prophet dwells on the creation story shows it was not familiar to
the audience. It was a new and unrecognized message to the “returners”.
The fact that he claims it is old (Isa 40:12;28) is a familiar theme of this type of
propaganda. The people were being “returned” to a land that they had never known,
and were being told legends they had never heard but had to accept were those of
their ancestors who had been unjustly deported. So, the stories had to be presented
as the ancient legacy of the people. Morton Smith sees second Isaiah as drawing on a
specific Gatha of the Avesta. Yasna 44 is the source.
In Yasna 44, Zoroaster asks Ahuramazda questions to which the god replies simply
such as “I am” or “I do”. Isaiah only differs in that the talking is done by Yehouah
rather than the prophet.
Tell me truly Lord, who in the beginning, at the creation was the father of Justice?
Rain justice you heavens… this I, Yehouah, have created.
Who established the course of the sun and the stars? Through whom does the moon
wax and wane?
Lift up your eyes to the heavens. Consider who created it all, led out the host one by
one.
What craftsman made light and darkness?
I am Yehouah. There is no other. I make the light. I create darkness.
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The passages in Isaiah are not merely translations of the Avesta but their
relationship is too close to be coincidence. Someone has paraphrased the content of
the Yasna for a different audience and purpose. Ahuramazda is the Zoroastrian
creator, this being his main title, and this title is being given to the local
Ahuramazda—God of the Heavens, identified with the Greek Zeus, just as Yehouah
was.
The prophets Haggai and Zechariah began to urge the building of a temple in
Jerusalem in the “second year of Darius”. We get the biblical story of the Edict of
Cyrus being sought and found in Egbatana (Hamadan). It sounds like typical Persian
cunning—an application of their popular technique of finding ancient documents that
upheld their foreign policy. Whether the edict was original or not, it suited Darius to
find it and uphold it. Ezra 5:1-6:10 explains that the priests were to be rewarded for
offering sacrifices and praying for the life of the king and his sons. As Boyce rightly
observes, “the king’s generosity had an obvious political ingredient”. Ezra 6:14-15
says the task was completed in four years. As for generosity, the cost was initially
from tribute raised, a loss-leader, so to speak because when the tradition of
obligatory sacrifice and tithes had been accepted, the temple became self-supporting,
and indeed the centre for collecting tribute.
The cosmological teachings of Anaximander of Miletus show marked Zoroastrian
influence, according to M L West (Early Greek Philosophy and the Orient, Oxford
1974). Anaximander lived just before Cyrus conquered Ionia, but Persian magi seem
to have been propagandising before—the priests to the shrine of Apollo at Magnesia
on the Meander welcomed the Persians and Cyrus rewarded the inhabitants of the
town with tax breaks and freedom from forced labour. Satrapal coins issued at Tarsus
in the fourth century BC bore the figure of a god in Persian dress identified in
Aramaic letters as Nergal of Tarsus. Boyce considers this as odd and explains it as
having “a propaganda purpose”. It was meant to induce Nergal’s worshippers to
accept Persian rule “through this courtesy to their god”.
Strabo records a tradition that the temple of Zela in Pontus was set up for
thanksgiving during Cyrus’s war against Lydia. Originally it was an artificial mount
surrounded by a wall, typical of the sort of high open space favoured by Zoroastrians
for worship. From then on, for a thousand years, Zoroastrian temples existed in Asia
Minor.
After securing the east in several years of campaigning, during which his agents
prepared the ground in Babylonia, raising dissention among the priests of Marduk
who had been slighted by Nabonidus, who favoured the god Sin, Cyrus moved against
Babylon. The whole of Chaldaea surrendered with little resistance! Syria, Palestine to
the Brook of Egypt, and Elam all fell simultaeously as vassals of Babylonia.
In 1879 AD, a cylinder was found in Akkadian script, the usual writing of Babylonia,
with 45 lines of an edict of Cyrus. The initial lines berate Nabonidus, but are
incomplete. They speak of a weakling, dishonour, enmity, stopping the daily offering,
presumably to Marduk, and instead offered daily hostility, all the dwelling places had
become ruins and the people of Sumer and Akkad were like corpses.
He brought all of his people to ruin through servitude without rest. Because of their
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complaints, the lords of the gods became furiously angry and left their land. The
gods, who dwelt among them, left their homes, in anger over his bringing into
Babylon.
It seems Marduk took pity on his people and searched everywhere in all lands…
…for a righteous prince, after his own heart, whom he took by the hand. He called
Cyrus, king of Anshan, by name. He appointed him to lordship over the whole
world… Marduk, the great lord, looked joyously on the caring for his people, on his
pious works and his righteous heart. To his city, Babylon, he caused him to go. He
made him take the road to Babylon, going as a friend and companion at his side. His
numerous troops, in unknown numbers, like the waters of a river, marched armed at
his side. Without battle and conflict, he permitted him to enter Babylon. He spared his
city, Babylon, a calamity. Nabonidus, the king, who did not fear him, he delivered into
his hand. All the people of Babylon, Sumer, and Akkad, princes and governors, fell
down before him and kissed his feet. They rejoiced in his sovereignty. Their faces
shone. The lord, who by his power brings the dead to life, who amid destruction and
injury had protected them, they joyously blessed him, honouring his name.
I am Cyrus, king of the world, the great king, the powerful king,
king of Babylon… Eternal seed of royalty whose rule Bel and
Nabu love, in whose administration they rejoice in their heart.
When I made my triumphal entrance into Babylon, I took up my
lordly residence in the royal palace with joy and rejoicing.
Marduk, the great lord, moved the noble heart of the residents of
Babylon to me, while I gave daily attention to his worship. My
numerous troops marched peacefully into Babylon. In all Sumer
and Akkad I permitted no enemy to enter. The needs of Babylon
and of all its cities I gladly attended to… and the shameful yoke
was removed from them. Their dwellings, which had fallen, I
restored. I cleared out their ruins.
Marduk, the great lord, rejoiced in my pious deeds, and
graciously blessed me, Cyrus, the king who worships him, and
Cambyses, my own son, and all my troops, while we, before him,
joyously praised his exalted godhead. …the gods, who resided in
them, I brought back to their places, and caused them to dwell in
a residence for all time. … by the command of Marduk, the great
lord, I caused them to take up their dwelling in residences that
gladdened the heart. May all the gods, whom I brought into their
cities, pray daily before Bel and Nabu for long life for me, and
may they speak a gracious word for me and say to Marduk, my
lord, I permitted all to dwell in peace.
Another cylinder said that Cyrus rebuilt Esagila and Ezida, respectively the temples
of Marduk and Nebo at Babylon and Borsippa. A long poem apparently by a priest of
Esagila praises Cyrus and curses Nabonidus. Interestingly, the Seleucid king,
Antiochus I, did exactly the same as Cyrus, restoring these two temples and making
sure everyone knew about it. Cyrus told these defeated people that he ruled them
through the wishes of their gods. Since Cyrus plainly did not believe that these gods
were legitimate, being a believer in Ahurumazda, it has to be admitted that he was
simply using the foreign gods to manipulate their worshippers. The next question is:
Was the restoration genuine, or did he “restore” what suited the empire. Did he
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restore them in their previous rites and beliefs or did he change them in the process?
The Jewish scriptures should be proof enough that he changed them utterly.
Supposedly, Cyrus allowed deported people to return home as the scriptures say
(Ezra 6:3-5). Several different peoples are mentioned on the cylinder seals and it is
assumed that each of them would have had similar promises to those given above or
in the Jewish scriptures. Frightened Biblicists attribute the whole of this Persian
imperial policy to the magnanimity of the Achaemenids, with no conditions or
ulterior motives. They dare not accept that religion was used for the purpose of
foreign policy, to control the subject people.
In the days before mass communication, it was mass communication! Few people
would not go to their temple or place of worship on the prescribed occasions and hear
the words of their god read out. The strategy of the Shahanshahs was to ensure that
what they heard inculcated respect for the Great King, the god that had picked him
out to rule the world, and the laws that they formulated and presented to the people.
To be rewarded the people must be obedient, and to pay their tithes and taxes was a
duty to god. People who did this were righteous. Just in case they were not, and
proving the practical nature of the whole policy of retoration, is the fact that
“restored” temples in frontier territories nearly always had an attached fortress!—in
Jerusalem, what eventually became the Antonia Tower.
The belief in the universal dominion of a supreme god, the idea that a local deity, let
us say, Koshar of Ugarit, reigns also over Crete and Memphis, changed the formula
of homage but left intact its content. A new ruler received the lordship from each
universal god simultaneously, and established his relations to each god separately as
before.
E J Bickerman
The Persian kings paid dutiful homage to each local god as the universal god. They
had control of the land in fact through conquest, but sought to confirm it in law—the
law of God, whatever name he had locally. So, their policy was to restore what had
previously been national gods that approved local rulers, as a universal god that
approved the Persian rulers. Obviously, this was a long-term policy. It was winning
the hearts and minds, and simple people had to be treated differently from clever
ones. That was the purpose of deportation. Clever people were removed from their
power base and given a power base elsewhere that they held contrary to the local
people and only with the support of the empire. They were made princes and priests
in a strange country to control the local people on behalf of the Great Kings. They
were privileged but precarious. As Mary Boyce says:
It would have been impossible for the Persians to have imposed their own religion on
the numerous and diverse peoples of the ancient lands they now ruled.
Cyrus and his descendants were not so crude. They did not impose their own religion,
they generously “restored” the old one, using the proven method of deportation. But
curiously enough, the old one had significant features of the Persian religion once
restored. Boyce knows that Cyrus was an expert propagandist and there was no better
propaganda than religious propaganda. The religious right in America know it still.
Even liberal Presidents of the USA have to end every speech with the mantric words,
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“God Bless America”.
People of religious conviction are convinced that what is good for their god is good for
everyone. Doubtless Persian kings felt the same way. Cyrus and Darius were not so
foolish as to try to force people to worship an unknown god, but the Jewish scriptures
testify to the fact that the restored god might not have been recognizable to the local
population, despite a familar name and certain traditional trappings. Pace
Bickerman, they rather changed the content of the old religions towards
Zoroastrianism while leaving symbols intact.
Boyce, kow-towing, it seems, to the sensibilities of Jews and Christians, claims that
what influence there was was “not official proselytizing” but only individuals
“speaking ardently” about their Zoroastrian faith. No doubt there were such people
too, but obviously imperial policy could hardly have been openly known without
being self-defeating. It is perverse to say that Cyrus’s propagandists were unofficial
amateur missionaries, and, once it is accepted that they were conducting an official
policy, there is no further reason to draw the line at their use of religion as
propaganda.
Why leave out Cambyses? No reason, despite the bad press he had from the Greeks
and Egyptians. They claimed he was a madman who knifed the Apis bull and had
destroyed Egyptian temples. It seems not to have been true. Though his soldiers had
plundered them, he had quickly taken action to stop it and “restore” them. Like his
father, Cambyses was keen to use religion. He restored the priesthood of Sais,
presented libations for Osiris and venerated Neith, the goddess of the city. He also
claimed he was a legitimate ruler of Egypt because his mother was the daughter of the
Pharaoh that Psamtik III’s father had deposed. Royal inheritance in Egypt remained
in the female line until this point in history.
The well-known letter from the priests of Yeb dated about 410 BC claims the temple
to Yehouah there had been established before Cambyses. It agrees that Cambyses had
destroyed Egypt’s temples but had spared Yehouah’s. The priests over a hundred
years later probably accepted the falsehoods of the Egyptian priests as history. After
Darius had succeeded him, the Persians had no interest in countering such
propaganda. Darius was the legitimate successor of Cyrus. It is easy to see why the
priests of Yeb did not want to admit their foundation by Cambyses.
That Cambyses, a man with a dishonourable reputation, had set up their own temple
was denied by their claiming the temple to Yehouah had preceded his campaign and
victory. Cambyses had intended to conquer Ethiopia but had failed. He will have left
Jewish troops there to guard the border because Egyptians were unreliable, having
just been defeated and resentful, and that will be when the Yeb temple was set up
(524 BC). Since this is before the Jewish temple at Jerusalem had been established,
and long before Ezra, the Jews of Yeb worshipped something closer to the original
Canaanite Yehouah and his family.
Darius sent his Egyptian collaborator, Udja-Hor-Resenet to Egypt to “restore” the
“Houses of Life” attached to the temples where the holy books, inscriptions and
precedents were kept, and theology and medicine were studied. The layman who had
a problem would come here for priestly advice. There was an important house of life
at Edfu, a great temple dedicated to Horus. Edfu, from the Ptolemaic period that
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followed the Persian period, is the best preserved temple in all of Egypt, as it was
covered in sand until recent times.
On one of the walls of the temple is engraved a list of the sacred books kept there.
Along with the books on rules of the temple, inventories of the temple holdings, and
religious calendars, there were numerous books on magic:
The Book of Appeasing Sekhmet, The Book of Magical Protection of the King in His
Palace, Spell for Warding Off the Evil Eye, The Book of Repelling Crocodiles, The
Book of Knowledge of the Secrets of the Laboratory, The Book of Knowing the Secret
Forms of the God.
At the top of the hierarchy of priests was the high-priest, the sem priest, or “First
Prophet of the God”. One of the titles of the priest Nebseni in the Book of the Dead is
“president of the secrets of the temple”. He was a learned man, an elder of the
temple, an accomplished administrator and politician. As in Judaism, only priests of
the highest rank were permitted to enter each temple’s holy of holies and care for the
“oracle”.
Bob Brier in Ancient Egyptian Magic tells us that a function of the priests was caring
for the cult statues of the gods. Oracles were so called because they would nod their
heads in answer to questions, and even talk. No one knows how this was done.
Priests, called by the Greeks Stolists, offered the god food several times a day, clothed
him in the morning and sealed the chamber in the evening.
The priests would interpret dreams, supply incantations, prayers, magic spells,
amulets, charms, or love potions, dispense cures for illnesses, and counteract
malevolent influences. The books were for priests, and were kept from the few
laymen who could read, using hieroglyphs as a secret code long after they had ceased
to be generally used, having been replaced by hieratic and demotic—just as the
Christian priests wrote only in Latin to keep their knowledge from the uneducated.
Why should the Persian king have been interested in Egyptian medicine, law or
theology? In restoring these schools and libraries he had carte blanche to change
what was written down to whatever suited him. Doubtless during the restoration, the
priests will have found invaluable lost books! Should there be any doubt he also
commanded that Egyptian law should be recorded. Egyptologists seem not often to
consider whether the papyri they find are pseudepigraphs written by the Persians to
further their own policies.
Historians must ask themselves whether this was pure altruism, kindness and
concern for an alien culture or whether here was a chance to strengthen Persian rule
through the religious base. We find Egyptian inscriptians that, just as the scriptures
say that Yehouah put Cyrus in charge of the world, Ra made Darius king of Egypt. To
curry favour with the priests, Darius restored to them the revenues that Cambyses
had imposed upon them. He built a large new temple to Amun-Ra, the Egyptian god
closest in nature to Ahuramazda, at the oasis of el-Khargeh, and signs of a
widespread influence in such matter are found elsewhere. He also supported the cult
of the Apis Bull. Finally, a letter to his Egyptian satrap tells him to intervene in the
appointment of high priests, proving what ought to be obvious, that great emperors
like Darius could not avoid interfering in hugely influential positions like the
priesthood. It is plainly imperative that the holders of the posts most influential upon
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Hosea 2:22-23
the views of the people had to be the king’s men.
Darius is properly Darayavahu. Yavahu is uncommonly like Yehouah (YHWH), and
must have sounded similar. Vahu is the Iranian god of the wind, that became, like the
Hebrew, to mean breath and so life, so Yavahu literally means the same as YHWH.
Scholars admit the etymology of “DR” (“ZR”) is puzzling. Literally, “zara” refers to the
action of sowing seed in the fields (Gen 26:12; Isa 37:30), and seems to be a Semitic
root. So, Zara in Hebrew is seed. Yet it is used in different senses either through
metaphor or through the introduction of the same word with a new usage.
It means “progeny” as a metaphor of seed—so by a remarkable coincidence,
Darayavahu can be read in Hebrew meaning “seed (progeny) of Yehouah”, “seed of
the living god”. Indeed it is virtually the same as Israel (seed, progeny of El) except
that the general word for god, El, has been replaced by the specific Yehouah.
Curiously, zara denotes Yehouah’s establishing Israel in the land of Palestine in a
future day in an interpretation of Israel (Jezreel) as suggested above.
And they shall hear Jezreel. And I will sow (ZR) her unto me in the earth; and I will
have mercy upon her that had not obtained mercy; and I will say to them which were
not my people, Thou art my people; and they shall say, Thou art my God.
Those returning under Darius could have been encouraged to read Israel as code for
Darius, then it reads: “And they shall hear Darius…” And what is he doing? Adopting
a people who are not his own people!
Oddly enough, sowing is scattering seed. These people that have been sown in the
earth can just as easily be scattered. So it is also used in almost an opposite sense too,
making it ideal as a poetic word that can be positive or negative according to the
response of the people. Just the intention of the Persians. It is not surprising, then,
that it is popular in “late” (post-exilic) works such as Hosea, Isaiah, Psalms, Job and
Proverbs.
Having noted this it is perhaps hardly surprising that the same letters signify divine
help, rescue or even salvation. In Ugaritic, DR (ZR) means “rescue” or “save”,
appearing in personal names analogous to Joshua (Jesus), Hadididri (Hadad saves),
Asarya (Yehouah saves), Isra (Salvation). Similarly ZR in the bible is used with the
divine name (either El or Yah) to form Jewish proper names: Azarel, Azriel, Azariah
and Ezra, but the “salvation” is downgraded to “help” in most translations. Merely to
pray for “help” to a mighty god seems modest, unless it leads to salvation.
In the scriptures, the salvation is often from enemies in battle. Egypt will not “save”
Judah and the prophet condemns reliance on it (Isa 30:7; 31:3). Chronicles, books
usually put in the same school as Ezra and Nehemiah, is particularly emphatic of
divine saving help. The Psalms too. Divine help to save the nation of Israel is a
common theme in Isaiah (41:10, 13, 14; 44:2; 49:8; 59:7, 9)—through God’s aid,
Israel will overcome her foes. Psalms makes it clear that the help is salvific, not
merely assistance:
But the salvation of the righteous is of the Lord: he is their strength in the time of
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Ps 37:39-40
trouble. And the Lord shall help them, and deliver them: he shall deliver them from
the wicked, and save them, because they trust in him.
The parallels in these verses show that the help given is salvific. This was the
intention of the Persian kings when they “restored” the gods and temples of their
subjects. They wanted it to seem like a salvation and in their propaganda depicted it
in no uncertain way as such. If the people, though, were ungrateful, the tables would
turn.
It seems most unlikely that Darius would not have used the coincidence of the sound
of his name in his propaganda to the worshippers of Yehouah, that the Persians were
building up as loyal subjects in Palestine. Darius sent another batch of “returners”,
possibly writing the prophetic pseudepigraph Hosea and parts of Isaiah, both of
which mean “salvation”.
The Yehudim that returned came with the propaganda that Cyrus was restoring an
old god when he was creating a temple to Ahuramazda, dressed in local habit. But the
“returners” had to persuade the ordinary untaught and unskilled Israelites who were
not transported and retained their original beliefs that the change was what they
wanted. The locals in the Judaean hills did not recognize the new god and rejected
him and his followers. They opposed Zerubabel and his “returners”.
The construction of the temple designed by the Persian king, Cyrus, was delayed by
both political and physical means. These “Yehudim” that had not been exiled
eventually built their own temple on Mount Gerizim and dismissed Jerusalem from
their Pentateuch. They were the original Israelites but were dismissed as Samaritans
and the “Men of the Land” or Am ha-Eretz, by the worshippers of the new Yehouah.
Under the Greeks, further factionalism occurred, the pro-Greek faction placed in
power becoming the Sadducees supposedly following the line of the temple priests
named after the mythical Zadok (Greek, Sadduc) and rejecting Persian ideas, but the
pro-Persian faction called themselves Hasids, the Pious Ones, before splintering into
Pharisees (Persians) and Essenes (Saviours or Deliverers).
Eventually the Persian governor had to call the “returners” from exile to order for
plotting, and work on the temple was suspended, if it had ever started, after only two
years. Darius sternly ordered that the “returners” get to work on their task as decreed
by Cyrus. He appointed a High Priest to stimulate events and will have sent a fresh
batch of “returners” to motivate the others. The temple was supposedly finished in
the sixth year of Darius, 516 AD.
Darius the Great put his trust in the one good god of Zoroaster’s revelation.
Ammianus Marcellinus, from earlier unnamed sources, says that Darius replaced the
heads of the priesthood by seven more cautious holy men, after they had tried to
usurp the throne. The whole story is probably propaganda, and actually the Magi who
supported Darius in what was his own successful coup were rewarded. Either way, a
board or commission of seven Magi were the supreme religious authorities and
located in the Persian capital. They consecrated a Persian king when he succeeded to
the throne and suppressed heresy.
Xerxes, who succeeded his father in 486 BC, desecrated the great temple of Marduk
in Babylon, slaying a priest and carried off the huge statue of the god, which was said
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to be of solid gold. His purpose was political, to destroy the god who was traditionally
the protector of Babylon and would serve as the focus of a separatist movement and
revolt, but Xerxes had such confidence in Ahuramazda that he feared no reprisals
from Marduk.
Xerxes proves that the Persian kings were religious zealots not pussy cats as
Christians and Jews want us to believe from a reading of the bible. They rewarded
collaboration and punished defiance. Herodotus and Cicero report that Xerxes
destroyed the temples on the Acropolis. Many historians disbelieved it until the
discovery of an inscription at Persepolis in which Xerxes boasts of his conquest of
Greece, of his godliness in destroying the temples on the Acropolis in which the
Greeks had worshipped devils, and in commanding them to worship them no longer:
There was a place in which devils were formerly worshipped. There, by the help of
Ahura Mazda, I demolished that lair of the devils and I issued an edict, “You shall not
worship devils”. And in the very place in which devils had once been worshipped, I
piously and with Righteousness worshipped Ahura Mazda.
The Persians also destroyed the Greek temples at Branchidae, Naxos, Abae and other
places not reported. They spared Delphi because the priests there advised the Greeks
to yield to the Persians. In fact, the Greeks prevented Xerxes from conquering
Europe, if that had been his aim, but the theology of Darius and Xerxes seems not to
have altered to the time of Darius II (423-405 BC), the king who succeeded
Artaxerxes I (464-424 BC) after the short reigns of Xerxes II and Sogdianus (both
424 BC), intervened in the Peloponnesian War and died in 405 BC.
Artaxerxes succeeded his father aged 18 when his father was murdered in a palace
coup in 465 BC. In 458 BC, he abandoned Elamite as the language of the official
records and introduced Aramaic. Doubtless the traditional Elamite scribes had been
prepared for the change but more Persian scribes were being trained, initially in
priestcraft, then specialising as scribes. These were all hereditary professions.
Artaxerxes I put down another Egyptian revolt, even though the Egyptians were
helped by their Athenian Greek allies, hoping to secure a reliable supply of wheat.
The Greek fleet was soundly beaten, showing that their victory over Xerxes at Salamis
was not through any intrinsic superiority. Nevertheless, Athens was now just
reaching its peak under Perikles, and they forced important concessions from the
Persians. The region of Asia Minor west of the Halys was demilitarized, giving the
Greek Asian cities a lot of freedom and cultural exchange between Greece and Persia
actually improved. Herodotus travelled and wrote his histories and Democritus,
having met Babylonian scientists and mathematicians, worked out his atomic theory.
Between 445 and 397 BC, Artaxerxes was handing out Mesopotamian estates to
Persian princes after transporting their owners, native Babylonians, to distant parts.
At the same time, he was promoting the cult of the Magian priests at the expense of
the native divinity Bel-Marduk. Doubtless some of these Babylonians were deported
to Judea.
Under Artaxerxes, Megabyzes (Megabyxos, Bagabukhsha) was satrap of Abarnahara.
He was a descendant of one of Darius’s six nobles and was married to the sister of
Artaxerxes. He shielded the Athenians whom he had fought and defeated in Egypt,
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until he was ordered by the queen mother Amestris, to kill them. Feeling dishonoured
to have to break his word, he rebelled, twice defeating the king’s forces until they
came to a truce (c 450 BC).
Nehemiah and Ezra
THE REVEREND LAWRENCE HEYWORTH MILLS WROTE TO THE OXFORD CHRONICLE IN JUNE 1913:“No one
denies the solemn and critical facts of the identities in themselves considered: the Theology,
Angelogy, Demonology, Soteriology, Virgin Birth, Immortality, Resurrection, Judgement, Chiliasm
(Millennialism), Paradise, Heaven and Hell are rather more than less emphatically or repeatedly
expressed in the Avesta than they are in Exilic pre-Christian Pharisaism.”
Professor Mills says that even if there had been no historical contact between Judaism and Persian
religion, the closeness of these themes would demand their careful study by Christians and Jews
believing their own religions to have been revealed, because He must have revealed them
somewhere else too! He concludes:
“If the Divine Power saw fit to make use of the Persian religious system to educate his people… this
should only awaken reverential thanksgiving.”
In fact the Jews were subjects of the Persian kings for 200 years, and the Jewish scriptures declare
that a Persian priest called Ezra had to give the Jews a law!
The biblical missions of Nehemiah and Ezra backed by the Achaemenian imperial
government were to make the Canaanite population accept the idea of the universal
god under the local name “Yehouah”. In 444 BC, Artaxerxes sent Nehemiah to
Jerusalem, the walls of which were evidently in ruins still, instructed to bring the
people into the fold of worship of Yehouah, a universal god of heaven. Morton Smith
wrote:
He secured to the religion that double character—local as well as universal—which
was to endure…
Boyce immediately notes that “Zoroastrianism itself had long had this double
character”.
Artaxerxes’ condition to the “returners” to retain the support of Persia was absolute
loyalty, the condition placed upon all deportees. Nehemiah has a banquet for 150
rulers (Neh 5:17). Guests attending the Persian king’s banquets had to bathe and
dress in white, and this must have been the requirement for Nehemiah’s banquet.
This will have been the source of the Essenes’ rule of conduct at their meals,
notionally attended as they were by the messiah, the king.
Nehemiah was the “cupbearer” to Artaxerxes (Neh 2:1). Since Artaxerxes, as a devout
Zoroastrian, could not have touched let alone drunk from a ritually unclean cup,
Nehemiah must himself have been a Zoroastrian. Pollution in the Zoroastrian scheme
was the result of the Evil Spirit who caused “dust, stench, blight, disease, decay and
death”. Devout people were obliged to stay clear of these noxious things to protect
themselves as Ahuramazda’s good creation. The king particularly required this
protection, and we can be sure that his servants had a duty to keep him pure.
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The Zoroastrian priests had instituted a rigorous cleanliness code to protect the
devout. Indeed, cupbearer to the king would hardly have been a menial position and
Nehemiah must have been a Zoroastrian priest, not a mere servant. Nor would a
mere servant have been sent to a colony with such an important position and task.
Nehemiah introduced these same purity codes to the Jews, and devout ones live by
them still, though they do not understand the reason for them. The point here is that
Nehemiah could not have been a Jew himself, if he was the royal cupbearer, unless
the religion of the Jews was Mazdayasnism by another name.
Ezra, another servant of the Persian king who had been born and educated as a divine
reader in Babylon, was sent too to Yehud from Babylon, in 458 BC or 398 BC, from
the bible which says year seven of the king, but there were two kings called
Artaxerxes. Some think the number is corrupt and should be 37, making the year
428 BC, allowing for an apparently close association with Nehemiah. Or was it year
seven of Darius II (417 BC), the name of the king having been mistaken from an
association with Nehemiah?
Despite the temple supposedly having been built, it appears it had not—most of the
natives of the hill country did not want to change and were obstructing the foreign
cult being imported. The king (now Darius II not Artaxerxes) was concerned that the
hill country must be pacified as neighbours and potential allies of the rebellious
Egyptians.
He instructed Ezra to appoint magistrates and judges who would keep Judah in the
laws of its new god, Yehouah. Ezra had to “to teach in Israel statutes and ordinances”
(Ezra 7:10) and to see if the people of Judaea were “agreeable to the law of God”. Ezra
laid down the law to a people already bound by the supposedly 1000 year old law of
Moses! Had the Jews forgotten the law of Moses? Did they need to be taught
civilisation by the Persians? He was not teaching any religion that the people of
Judaea knew. It is a clear indication that the law of Moses was the law of Ezra.
In Nehemiah 8, Ezra read from the book of law which neither Hebrew speakers nor
Aramaic speakers could understand—the words had to be translated by priests. What
language was Ezra reading? Not Hebrew. What book of law was it? Widespread
religious conversion occurs according to Ezra 6:19-21 and Nehemiah 10:28-29. Why
would Jews need to convert to Judaism? What were they converting to? The answer
is Zoroastrianism and the book being read was probably a Persian lawbook like the
Vendidad written in Persian. According to a rabbinic legend, a gemara also attributes
to Ezra the change from Hebrew script to the square Aramaic script.
Ezra was the “scribe of the law of the God of Heaven”. For the Persians the god of
heaven was Ahuramazda, but the title is interpreted by believers to mean Yehouah
(and, of course, to the Persians God was universal). His duty was to write out god’s
law to a people who supposedly had an extensive law of their own god. Ezra 7:11-26
reads out a copy of the letter that the king Artaxerxes gave him explaining the
authority for his position. The letter emphasizes that people go only by their own free
will, a statement that implies that it is not normally the case. One is led to ask why
this case should be different.
And I, even I Artaxerxes the king, do make a decree to all the treasurers which are
How Persia Created Judaism: The Rise of Persia
38
beyond the river, that whatsoever Ezra the priest, the scribe of the law of the God of
heaven, shall require of you, it be done speedily, Unto an hundred talents of silver,
and to an hundred measures of wheat, and to an hundred baths of wine, and to an
hundred baths of oil, and salt without prescribing how much. Whatsoever is
commanded by the God of heaven, let it be diligently done for the house of the God
of heaven: for why should there be wrath against the realm of the king and his sons?
Also we certify you, that touching any of the priests and Levites, singers, porters,
Nethinims, or ministers of this house of God, it shall not be lawful to impose toll,
tribute, or custom, upon them. And thou, Ezra, after the wisdom of thy God, that is in
thine hand, set magistrates and judges, which may judge all the people that are
beyond the river, all such as know the laws of thy God; and teach ye them that know
them not. And whosoever will not do the law of thy God, and the law of the king, let
judgment be executed speedily upon him, whether it be unto death, or to banishment,
or to confiscation of goods, or to imprisonment.
The king addresses his order to “all the treasurers which are beyond the river”. Now
“beyond the river” is of course the Persian province Abarnahara, the whole of the
Levant beyond (to the West of) the Euphrates. Jews and Christians pretend it means
“beyond the Jordan”, but how many rich treasurers are there in Palestine alone? The
rest of it shows the king is purporting to placate the people, making sure there is no
wrath against the king—it has a political purpose. But who benefits financially—the
priests and temple officials who are exempt from taxes. Furthermore, Ezra was to
enforce the law on “all the people that are beyond the river”, and enforce it with
savage measures.
Ezra was told to teach people the law if they did not know it and he is considered to
have been the instituter of the “Priestly Code” (P) of the Pentateuch. Its indebtedness
to Zoroastrianism is plain but never observed upon. The “Holiness Code” of Leviticus
18 to 26 is a code of purity from pollution that again is evidently dependent on
Zoroastrianism, though apologists will pretend otherwise when they are obliged to
comment at all. Such a denial is “as preposterous as it is pointless”, to use West’s
phrase.
Ezra also added the creation in Genesis 1:1-2:4a, the sophisticated one. Genesis 1 is
strikingly Zoroastrian in two ways:
The active principle of creation is the spirit of God, just as Ahuramazda creates
through the Good or Holy Spirit.
1.
The creation in both was in seven stages, surely an astonishing coincidence,
though the descriptions of the creations are different.
2.
A puzzle is the absence in the Jewish scriptures of teachings of fate after death,
individual judgement, heaven and hell. Death brings Sheol. Amos 9 and Psalms 139
extend Yehouah’s rule to Sheol but only in Isaiah 26:19 is there hope of a future after
death, and that, as in Zoroastrianism, is resurrection not immortality as a spirit.
Mary Boyce writes:
Since Zoroastrian apocalyptic finds its counterpart in Jewish and Christian
eschatology, not disjointedly but as part of the same fixed scheme which is to be
discerned in the Gathas, it is difficult not to concede to Zoroastrianism both priority
and influence.
How Persia Created Judaism: The Rise of Persia
39
Quite so but Boyce inconsistently thinks the Jewish purity laws are “wholly Jewish”.
The destruction of death (Isa 25:7-8) is a reflexion of the end of “limited time” in
Zoroastrianism, when the evil creation is destroyed and the Evil Spirit is imprisoned
forever. Judaism has Satan as an Evil Spirit, although he seems not to have an
existence independent of Yehouah, and Yehouah claims to create both good and evil
(Isa 45:7). Presumably Satan has his own inclination to create evil, independently of
Yehouah, otherwise it is hard to see how he is such a trouble. That makes Judaism
exactly equivalent to Zoroastrianism. What appear to be differences might be simply
because we have two sources, neither of which is complete and both of which have
had independent histories of compilation and redaction, so that they have evolved
differences, but their identity at the centre is still obvious. Our knowledge of Jewish
apocalyptic with the discovery and translation of the Dead Sea Scrolls shows that
Judaism was much more dualistic than the scriptures suggest.
Darius II Favours Jerusalem
The Jewish temple was “completed” (again!) between 445 BC and 417 BC, most
probably the latter date in the reign of Darius II. The Persian governors and priests in
Jerusalem thereby caused a schism in the worship of Yehouah in the Hill Country.
The native Israelites, the Samarians who, under Persian coercion it seems, had
accepted the law as the Torah, built their own temple on Mount Gerizim, and
Jerusalem is insignificant in their Pentateuch. At a later date when the temple was
established, the Persian tradition became the “orthodox” position of the Pharisees or
Persian faction—Pharisee, Parsee, Parsi—which survived the fall of Jerusalem in
70 AD as Rabbinism! The Sadducees were nothing to do with the original worship of
Yehouah or they would have been Samaritans. They were a Hellenized faction that
tried to reject Persian influences (“no resurrection, neither angel, nor spirit” Acts
23:8) in favour of more civilized Greek practices.
Darius was a Babylonian by culture. Achaemenian kings took foreign wives but it was
not common, the main wife was not usually foreign and others would have had to
have converted or at least observed the Zoroastrian purity laws. The son of a
Zoroastrian was regarded as fully Zoroastrian because it was the male seed that
counted, the belief being that women were merely fertile land for the man’s seed.
Jewish belief was the same, which is why only a man could “beget” and why childless
women in the scriptures are described as barren, like a barren field. The Achaemenid
kings were pious but practical men. Their foreign marriages were likely to have been
diplomatic, and not for the generality to copy. Darius was the son of a Babylonian
woman. Xerxes II was the heir but was murdered by Sogdianus, the son of one of
Artaxerxes’ Babylonian courtesans, and Sogdianus was in turn killed by Darius II,
another son of a Babylonian courtesan.
The royal line was no longer Persian but half Babylonian and influenced strongly by
their Babylonian mothers and upbringing. Babylonian customs now began to assert
themselves more strongly. So, the religion’s centre of gravity shifted to Babylon in the
fifth century. There the Magi would have come into direct contact with the cult of the
god Marduk, who might have been the model for the revival of Mithras, previously
seen as the equal of Shamash. Achaemenian emperors up to Artaxerxes II, were
solely devoted to Ahuramazda, never naming other deities, who were merely
anonymous “other gods”, in their inscriptions. The Zoroastrian holy men in Babylon
How Persia Created Judaism: The Rise of Persia
40
also found themselves in the world’s capital of astrology. It was a superstition which
at that time, and indeed for many centuries thereafter, could plausibly claim to be a
scientific observation of the heavens, and thence the world. Chaldaean astromancy
was taken up by the Magi.
By blood, Darius II was half Babylonian, but would not have been the heir of
Artaxerxes I unless his son Xerxes II had not been immediately killed. Darius killed
the assassin and took the throne. He continued the Achaemenid interest in restoring
religions, but he was particularly interested in preseving temple archives, doubtless a
job of some practical value. As in the case of the first Darius helping out in the
“Houses of Life” in Egypt, he could alter the transcriptions to suit Persian policy, and
could doubtless find the odd “missing” tablets. He “restored” the temple of Eanna in
Uruk and installed extensive archives. The records of the bank of Murashi cover half
a century up to about 400 BC. It shows how cosmopolitan Babylonia was. It was
policed by foreign garrisons stationed permanently in the country, so the Persian
kings were taking no chances even in what was the centre of their empire.
Darius favoured the Jerusalem priesthood. A revealing scrap of papyrus written from
Darius to Arsames, his long-serving Egyptian satrap in 419 BC, and found at
Elephantine, ordered that the Jews of Elephantine must keep the Feast of
Unleavened Bread for seven days. It is a surprising order for those brought up
believing myth is history. Why was it necessary? These traditions were supposed to
have been almost a millennium old even then. Apologists say the feast had been
forbidden so it was not an order to Jews but to the satrap himself. Why then was it
phrased as an order to the Jews that they must obey? The Jewish messanger was a
man called Hananiah, a Babylonian name (Eanna) and the name, by another of those
coincidences that litter biblical history, of the brother of Nehemiah. The Jews of Yeb
were of the older polytheistic faith of the Canaanites, and it looks very much as
though the priests of Jerusalem had the king’s support in bringing them into line with
the practice in Jerusalem imposed by Nehemiah and Ezra.
A sandstone stele from Aswan dated itself precisely to June 458 BC. It records that
the commander of the garrison at Syene had built a place of worship. Rather than an
enclosed temple it might have been an enclosed space open to the massy heavens. In
408 BC, the Jewish military governor at Elephantine, probably a grandson of the man
who built or restored a temple there, the command of the Syene garrison seems to
have been inherited, colluded with the priests of Khnum to cut off the water supply
from the Jewish garrison, then they destroyed the temple to Yahu. The satrap was
absent at the time. Subsequently, the priests wrote to the Jerusalem priesthood and
to the governor of Judah, Bagoas, for help in rebuilding the temple. It seems it never
was given.
The whole events look suspicious. Arsames absents himself and a Persian military
governor immediately helps to destroy a Jewish temple with the aid of Egyptian
priests, even though Jews are loyal allies of the Persians, and this has been a Persian
outpost manned by Jewish soldiers for a century. The truth must be that this older
temple at Syene, being polytheistic, was an embarrassment to Persians and Jews and
had to be ended. It is always presented as caused by the jealousy of the Egyptian
priests, or their annoyance that the Jews would have been sacrificing sheep when the
ram was the sacred animal of Khnum. Yet it was done with the help of the local
Persian governor, and under a fancied policy of religious toleration in general and
How Persia Created Judaism: The Rise of Persia
41
admiration for the Jews. It proves that there was no religious toleration in general.
Religion was a policy option, and the kings had opted to support one temple to
Yehouah—at Jerusalem.
All of it shows that the Persian kings were not naïvely interested in restoring alien
cultures out of some exaggerated sense of altruism to defeated people. It was a
conscious foreign policy to get political control of subject people who had every
reason to be resentful. It was to preserve the Persian peace, the Iranian sense of
universal order.
Garbini notes that the Demotic Chronicle of Egypt, a papyrus dated in the third
century BC but speaking of the sixth and fifth centuries BC, takes the same attitude of
the judgement of God on Egypt as the Deuteronomic History does on the Jews. It
seems unlikely that a Jewish history should have inspired an Egyptian one, but not
that Persian propaganda should have been used in Egypt as well as elsewhere. If this
papyrus is accurately dated to the third century then it could be an edition of an
earlier Persian work. The Persians will have done in Egypt what they did in Yehud, a
finding with possibly profound consequences for Egyptology.
In his Egyptian inscriptions, Darius emphasizes “maat”, the Egyptian concept closest
to “Asha”. Cyrus was the Messiah, the son of God, to the Jews, and Egyptian
inscriptions declared that for Atum, Darius was “his son, his steward”, and that, “his
person should be remembered beside his father, Atum”. Atum-Ra became the perfect
equivalent of Ahuramazda, a hidden god behind the sun, who created the cosmos to
be governed by “maat”. The sun rising each morning drove away the powers of
darkness, symbolic of order driving away chaos. Rebellion is chaos, a product of the
Evil Spirit, while order is good, an attribute of God.
A lesser parallel with what the Persians did in Jerusalem might have come to light in
Asia Minor. A monument was found in 1973 declaring that the citizens of Orna had
agreed to set up a cult of the god of Caunos, a nearby town. The god was to be called
“the Lord the God of Caunos”, and seemed to be a local Apollo. They had sponsored a
“house” for the god and specified sacrifices and endowments. Persians did not build
“houses” for their gods because they felt they had the cosmos as their home, but they
were happy to build temples for foreigners because they would then assemble there
and provide the opportunity to hear the law. The monument specifies divine
punishments for violating “this law” included being carried off to the “Abyss”.
Plainly this was not a Zoroastrian god, but had been granted certain Zoroastrian
features, including an Iranian title of unknown meaning but used of Mithras. Mithras
was guardian of the first watch of the day, sunrise, and Persian places of worship
came to be called “Gates of Mithras”, an expression used by the Urartians.
Zoroastrian worship always had to be done before noon, and this habit perhaps
predisposed non-Iranians particularly to see Mithras as the visible face of
Ahuramazda. It seems to be an early example of Apollo-Mithras syncretism, which
was popular in the region a hundred years later and for many centuries thereafter.
It is curious too that the god is called the god “of Caunos” in some places and the god
“of Orna” in others. Apparently a unifying formula, it is reminiscent of Yehouah being
the god of Israel and of Judah. The scroll scholar, A Dupont-Sommer, said it showed
the Persians had an office of state for overseeing and regularizing the religious affairs
How Persia Created Judaism: The Rise of Persia
42
of subject people:
Not to impose on them Iranian divinities and cults but to ensure good order and
security in a domain which in ancient societies was politically so important and often
vexed.
Dupont-Sommer is sidelined nowadays mainly because Christians do not like his
ideas about the Essenes and Christianity in interpreting the scrolls, but this insight
shows him to be a perceptive man. The Persians had to approve the High Priest of
any cult, and we can be sure he was not appointed purely for his piety. These were
political appointments, and the practice of religion was a political act. The Reverend
Professor Lawrence Mills detected a ministry or religious affairs, and Professor Boyce
sees a chancellery department to deal with Zoroastrian foundations from at least the
fourth century BC. It is difficult to see them as separate institutions.
The traditional view is that Cyrus and successive Persian kings of the sixth and fifth
centuries BC were being religiously liberal in allowing the Jews to reconstruct their
temple and its religion after they had been kindly returned from their exile in
Babylon. But the religion of Yehouah, whose worshippers were called Jews, was
remodelled thoroughly by the Persian world conquerors.
Their real aim was to spread the religion of Mazdayasnaism, or Ahuramazda worship,
to consolidate their empire. Historians of the Persians often seem over eager to insist
that the Persian kings had no wish to impose the religion of Ahuramazda on to
subject people. The reason can only be to avoid any suggestion that Judaism might
have been revealed by the Persian kings and not by Yehouah in person. They argue
Persian kings would “restore” gods but not impose them. Why then did they destroy
some gods?—though admittedly they called them daevas or devils, not gods. Note
here the proper distinction held by Zoroastrians between devils and gods.
As Creator of good things, Ahuramazda was the creator of good gods—the gods
considered good of foreign nations. Bad gods were, of course, created by the Evil
Spirit. This is why the Persians cannot be assumed to have had a favourable or even
neutral stance to foreign gods. In fact, the judgement was purely practical. When
people opposed the forward march of the Persians their gods were of the Evil
Creation. If they welcomed them, they were of the Good Creation.
The Persian kings would destroy when their opponents had offered strong resistance.
Alexander had the same policy. The destruction of a people who resisted included
destruction of their gods. But sanctuaries were destroyed in Babylon in 482 BC, long
after Cyrus had conquered it bloodlessly. Xerxes declares on an inscription that he
had destroyed a sanctuary of false gods and worshipped Ahuramazda instead. It
shows that Persian kings had no sacred regard for the religions of subject people
when they had reason to categorize their gods as devils.
It seems that the Persians had decided that god of the Jews was of the Good Creation
and so could be treated with favoritism. The Jews therefore were permitted to make
the universal religion in their own image, guided by Persian officials because it had to
be a religion made up of the essential truths handed down to Zoroaster by
Ahuramazda, albeit presented in a way adapted to the local god.
How Persia Created Judaism: The Rise of Persia
43
In the history of later Persia, the Jews were honoured under the Arsacids, the Jewish
Exilarch being fourth in rank after tha king. Under the Sassanids, however, they came
to be treated as Zoroastrian heretics. Both responses suggest an acceptance by
Persians of a close relationship between Judaism and Zoroastrianism.
Jewish and Christian apologists are desperate to assert there is no direct evidence the
Jewish religion is dependent on the Persian religion. They mean they have no
statement that clearly declares it as such and, if they found one, they would ignore it
as a forgery or an error. Scholars such as Gaster and Söderblum deny any Persian
influence but they do not venture any alternative, or seek to explain why these ideas
arrived in Judaism only after colonists “returned” from Persia.
The plain fact is that when Persian kings “restored” gods, the restoration was not to
what they were—for which purpose most did not need any restoration. They were
foisting their own god and Zoroastrian values on to defeated people but in the name
of the local god, and to soften the pain, they offered them money and resources for
new temples.
Persians offered the priesthoods in Babylon, Egypt, Elam, Sardis, Ionia and Judah
support for the restoration of their religions. Cambyses (525-522 BC) had made
attempts to reduce the financial incomes of the influential Egyptian temples, but
Darius I (521-486 BC) took a meretricious interest in Egyptian culture, making sure
of his reputation with the Egyptians for kind treatment, like Cyrus with the
Babylonians and Jews. Darius had accompanied Cambyses to Egypt and lived there
for some years. As shah, in 517 BC, he commissioned the construction of temples
including the temple in the el-Kharga oasis. It succeeded so well, he was recognized
in Egypt as a noble law-giver! The Egyptian official, Udjahorresne says the temple of
Neith at Sais, of which he was a priest was restored. An inscription in the Vatican says
he was summoned to Susa to support the Persians by nominating reliable educated
Egyptian administrators, many of whom will have been priests, as the educated class.
After the Persian defeat at Marathon in 490 BC, the Egyptians rebelled in 486 BC, the
beginning of a period of Egyptian unrest. Xerxes put the initial revolt down with great
severity when he came to the throne (485 BC). He made his son, Achaemenes, Satrap,
but he fomented more unrest with his cruelty. When Xerxes was assasinated
(465 BC), the Egyptians revolted again, led by the son of Psammetichus III, prince
Inaros, who became a legendary figure. The rebels were defeated and Inaros executed
in 454 BC. Nehemiah was sent to restore the temple of Jerusalem about this time.
Few documents exist from this period, but the rest of the reign of Artaxerxes I
(465-424 BC) was tranquil. Another uprising greeted Darius II (423-405 BC), and
trouble brewed throughout his reign even though he tried, through building projects,
to win over the Egyptians. It was this Darius, not Darius the Great, who is most likely
the rebuilder or builder of the Jerusalem temple (417? BC).
Amyrtaios of Sais freed the delta in 404 BC. He was succeeded in 399 BC by
Nepherites I of Mendes (399-393 BC) together with Psammuthis (393 BC) and
Achoris (Hakor, 393-380 BC) who fortified Egypt against the Persian campaigns
385-383 BC. The Persians were defeated by Nectanebo I (380-362 BC) in 373 BC.
Teos (Djedhor, 362-360 BC) followed briefly, then Nectanebo II (360-343 BC) staved
off Artaxerxes III Ochus in 350 BC, but the Persian won in 343 BC setting up the
How Persia Created Judaism: The Rise of Persia
44
Second Persian period that lasted until Alexander III of Macedonia, the Great.
The Persians were happy to accept various goddesses as the equal of Anahita. Cyrus
the Younger worshipped in a temple of Artemis whom he must have considered to be
Anahita. Anahita became popular in Cappadocia and Armenia and the Romans
destroyed temples to Anahita in Armenia centuries later. Persians accepted Apollo as
the equivalent of Mithras. Apparently, “the god Mithras” in Aramaic script is a pun
on “all the gods” offering a possible explanation of why Mithras came to be so
important and the equal of Ahuramazda in many places. The temple to the god
Mithras was the temple to all the gods. Mithras was widely worshipped in Persia
notably in Anatolia, being attested in Lydia, Phrygia, Cilicia and Taurus, Pontus and
Commagene, but sites as far away as Bactria and even outside of Persia across the
Black Sea in Crimea have been found.
Iranians were happy too to accept Marduk or Zeus as the local name for Ahuramazda,
especially as Zeus Theos and Zeus Magistos. Persians would not have wanted to
create dissension by having two local gods seen as the equal of Ahuramazda. If there
were two candidates then one had to go. That is probably why El disappeared
whereas Yehouah survived in Palestine. Ahuramazda was worshipped extensively in
Lydia after the Persian conquest under the name Zeus. Alexander’s successors and
the Romans would doubtless have re-Hellenized these temples of Zeus worship, but
conceivably those who did not like the Hellenized version adopted Judaism. Asia
Minor had a large population of Jews in Roman times.
In western Asia Minor records of “Persian” temples cease from the third century AD
when they were suppressed by Christian edict, but still in the 6th century Khosrou I
Anushirvan negotiated with a Byzantine emperor to have fire temples rebuilt in his
domains, most probably in Cappadocia. The existence has been traced of Persian
Sibyllists oracles, probably the first non-Greeks to adopt the genre of Sibylline
oracles, through which they conveyed Persian prophecies and expectations. In time
such oracles grew generally into longer poems, through which doctrine could be
conveyed. It thus appears to have been through Persians of the western diaspora that
Zoroastrianism made a powerful contribution to religion and thought in the
Hellenistic world.
Herodotus evidently had no knowledge of Yehouah and His remarkable chosen
people, the Jews, or their ancient temple in Jerusalem when he wrote his histories
about 450 BC, though even then the temple was supposedly 500 years old! He did
know of circumcision in the region, but this was a custom of the Egyptians and will
only reflect Egyptian influence on Palestine through colonization. His history ended
before Nehemiah, the Persian Eunuch, arrived as governor of Judah in 445 BC or
Ezra, the priest, arrived in 428 BC, 397 BC or 417 BC (the date, year 7 of Artaxerxes
might be of Artaxerxes II, or year 37 of Artaxerxes I has been corrupted, or, most
probably, year 7 of Darius II was meant (417 BC)). It was only with Ezra that
Judaism, with its famous law, was really founded, and the Jerusalem temple got any
authority, even if other returners had already established the temple—and that is
questionable.
The sign of Persian influence appears in Jeremiah. Rab-Mag was the chief of the
Magi. The books of the Old Testament like 2 Chronicles, Ezra and Deutero-Isaiah
betray a strong influence of Persia. Thus they even use the reigns of Persian kings as
How Persia Created Judaism: The Rise of Persia
45
Ezra 1:1-3
the basis of their chronology. Waterhouse (J W Waterhouse, Zoroastrianism,
London, undated) says some passages “appear as much Persian as Hebraic”. The
origins of Greek philosophy, which also emerged in the time of the Persians, must
also be considered likely to have something to do with Zoroastrian ideas.
The Persian king Cyrus was seen by the Jews as a Saviour. He ordered the rebuilding
of the Jerusalem Temple, as we know from inscriptions as well as the Old Testament
and was much admired by the prophet, Isaiah. The end of 2 Chronicles has exactly
the same verses as the beginning of Ezra:
Now in the first year of Cyrus king of Persia, that the word of the Lord by the mouth of
Jeremiah might be fulfilled, the Lord stirred up the spirit of Cyrus king of Persia, that
he made a proclamation throughout all his kingdom, and put it also in writing, saying,
Thus saith Cyrus king of Persia, The Lord God of heaven hath given me all the
kingdoms of the earth; and he hath charged me to build him an house at Jerusalem,
which is in Judah. Who is there among you of all his people? his God be with him,
and let him go up to Jerusalem, which is in Judah, and build the house of the Lord
God of Israel, he is the God which is in Jerusalem.
Cyrus in this citation does not simply say that Yehouah charged him to build him a
house at Jerusalem, but the “God of Heaven”, none other than Ahuramazda,
identified as Yehouah (Lord), but he then calls him (or the author of Ezra does)
Yehouah (Lord) “God of Israel”. After the exile the “God of Israel”, Yehouah, has the
title, the “God of Heaven” declaring him to be Ahuramazda. The Cyrus Vase found on
a hill in Babylon confirms Cyrus in the same role in Babylon in its inscription:
The Great Lord Marduk regarded favourably the salvation, that is, the saviour of his
people, his victorious work, and his righteous heart, going towards his city Babylon as
a friend and companion at his side.
Scholars have tried to pretend that the reference to Marduk rather than Ahuramazda
is a careless error, but, if so, it was extremely careless since these inscriptions were
stamped on to thousands of clay objects with a cylinder seal. The vase inscription
says Cyrus took Babylon without bloodshed and thus was Marduk pleased!
Marduk the Great Lord made the honourable hearts of the people of Babylon incline
to me because I was daily mindful of his worship… May all the gods whom I have
brought into their cities pray daily before Bel and Nabu for long life for me… and
speak to my Lord Marduk for Cyrus the king who fears thee and Cambyses his son.
As far as the Babylonians were concerned, and evidently Cyrus concurred, Marduk
was Ahuramazda. Zoroastrianism was monotheistic. Ahuramazda was the only god,
but there was nothing that proclaimed that Ahuramazda was god’s only name. Cyrus
was happy to adapt all the “Great Lords” of his empire into the one Great Lord. All
the king was doing in setting up a temple in Jerusalem was making Yehouah into
Ahuramazda as well.
The Persian and Jewish gods are described in identical terms. In Isaiah it is:
I have made the earth, and created man upon it: I, even my hands, have stretched
How Persia Created Judaism: The Rise of Persia
46
Isa 45:12
Darius, Behistun
Isa 45:7
Ex 20:3
out the heavens.
The inscription of Darius at Behistun has:
A great god is Ahuramazda, who made the earth and the heaven yonder, and made
man.
What is more, the scriptures agree with the Persian kings like Cyrus that the “Lord
God of heaven hath given me all the kingdoms of the earth” because the Persian
inscriptions state it clearly:
As Ahuramazda created this earth, he gave it over to me.
In Isaiah 45, the author is at pains to be clear that the god is explicitly Yehouah, the
God of Israel, but that would not have fazed Cyrus or Darius who would nevertheless
have seen God as Ahuramazda but, providing that his laws are obeyed, would not
have been particular about what the locals called him. More important is Yehouah’s
affirmation that, unlike Ahuramazda, he was the god of both light and dark, good and
evil—probably the touch of a Maccabæan redactor’s pen:
I form the light and create the darkness, I make peace and create evil.
After a lot more trouble, the plan began to work excellently under the Persians, but
then broke down under the Greeks. The worshippers of Yehouah had become so
convinced by the god set up by the Persians that they would not condone the gods of
the Greeks, and the Maccabees—goaded by the Egyptians and Romans—insisted that
the Jewish God was a jealous, vengeful and bloodthirsty God of fear to stir the Jews
to rebellious protest against their Greeks enemies.
Judaism and Zoroastrianism
Zoroastrianism was the source of Jewish monotheism, brought from “exile” on the
“return” (Isa 43:10-13; Jer 10:1-16). Even Christian scholars note that the concept of
Ahuramazda is closer to that of the Jewish God than that of any other eastern
religion. The old Israelites of the Palestinian hill country were not monotheists.
Before it was remodelled by the Persians, Judaism was polytheistic. The Jewish god
was a tribal god—one of many Semitic tribal gods, generally called Lord, which in
Semitic languages is Baal or Bel. A tribal god, of necessity, implies polytheism since
there are other tribes. The idea of the covenant with one tribe, the Israelites, implies
polytheism. In it God commands:
Thou shalt have no other gods before me,
admitting there were other gods. When the sages wrote down the holy books, they
introduced ideas from Zoroastrianism. Spentas became angels and divas became
demons (devils). Their tribal god became a universal God but one which still favoured
his Chosen People.
How Persia Created Judaism: The Rise of Persia
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In Judaism, Deutero-Isaiah contains the first monotheistic declarations in the Bible,
the first expression of universalism which has no antecedent in it, approaching the
monotheism and universalism of Zoroaster just when the Persian King Cyrus appears
as an apparent saviour for the Jews! A universal God must be monotheistic because
only he is worshipped. A local god is only one of many. The Persians introduced the
idea of a perfect, loving, universal god—Ahuramazda by any other name—whose
earthly presence and saviour was the king of kings, the king of the Persian Empire.
Thucydides (460-399 BC, War 4:50), quoting the words of the Persian, Artaphernes,
who was captured taking a message from the Persian king to Sparta, confirms the
idea of the king as saviour:
The best of our many good customs is that we revere the king and worship him as
the image of God, God who saves everything.
Over 100 Persian words appear in the Judaeo-Christian bible. One of the last words
uttered by Jesus on the cross was Persian (Lk 23:43). After the Persian conquest,
Jerusalem became a Persian city in many respects. The threefold division of Persian
society is reflected in Israel—priests, princes and Israelites.
It is an obvious and pressing fact that much exilic matter is present in many places in
our present so-called pre-exilic texts. We might indeed be imperatively forced to
doubt the uninfluenced existence of any pre-exilic texts at all.
L H Mills
The distinction between clean and unclean animals in Leviticus and Ezekiel was from
the Vendidad, which explains it. The purification rituals are identical in the
Pentateuch and the—older—Vendidad. Ezra also introduced the new Festival of
Booths in the seventh month, the Zoroastrian holiday of Ayathrem, and must have
invented the scriptural myth to justify it. In about 400 BC, the Old Testament was
put in written form when Jerusalem was still under the power of the Persians.
Waterhouse truly writes:
There are so many things shared between the theologies of Persia and Israel that
they cannot be assigned to general community of ideas.
Imprecise understanding of the laws being transmitted, their adaption to local
circumstances and subsequent evolution under the Greeks and the Maccabees will
allow for the differences between the Zoroastrian law and the Jewish law, but many
remarkable similarities that remain testify to their common origin, and that cannot
have been Jewish.
Zoroaster had subjected the Iranian tribal gods to the one Most High God,
Ahuramazda. Ezra, at the behest of the Persian king, did the same in Yehud. Around
400 BC, with Jerusalem under the power of the Persians, Ezra and Nehemiah
invented the Jewish scriptures. They wrote out Jewish mythology, incorporating a
multitude of laws intended to make the Jewish gods into a single monotheistic god
akin to Ahuramazda, and the Jews into a civilized people. Where any Persian
concepts appear in the Jewish scriptures at a time before the captivity, they have
been written anachronistically into the account by the post-exilic priesthood.
How Persia Created Judaism: The Rise of Persia
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The Persian religion was as monotheistic as the Jewish religion it created—it wasn’t!
Judaism was never monotheistic and still is not, just as Zoroastrianism, however it
might have been conceived by the Prophet, never ever was monotheistic. The
Persians passed on the identical idea that they had about Ahuramazda—that he was
the Most High God. The old gods were declared to be demons—but demons are gods,
if gods are supernatural entities. And if there were demons as wicked spirits, there
had to be angels as good spirits helping the good god. They had different levels of
powers.
“Ahu” means life and forms part of the word Ahura which seems to equate with
“living”, an obvious association with the sun (surya, asura, ahura), especially for
people from cold climates. Here is another link with Yehouah, also said to mean
“living”, from its supposed similarity to the first person singular of “to be”. Thus both
Yehouah and Ahuramazda were understood as “living gods”. The title of Yehouah as
the “Ancient of Days” equates with “Zrvani akarane”, “eternal time”, the Persian god
Zurvan.
Both the Jewish and the Zoroastrian gods were ultimately supreme, though
temporarily were not. Ahuramazda had to battle with the Evil Spirit, Ahriman,
throughout material history, and Yehouah had to battle with Satan, but Satan, at a
later stage became a servant of God, appointed by Him as His prosecutor, so as to
make Yehouah unrivalled. Satan is not equal in power to Yehouah, yet the supreme
god cannot destroy the lesser one. This is effectively the relation between
Ahuramazda and Angra Mainyu. The serpent in Genesis is considered to be Satan.
Snakes in Zoroastrianism are of the Evil Creation and, according to the Vendidad, it
is the first of the Evil Creation and so represents the face of evil in the material world!
The Zoroastrian scheme is more complete because it offers an explanation of the two
spirits, but Yehouism does not. Mazdayasnaism has many lesser spirits just as
Yehouism has its angels, but the Evil Spirit in Zoroastrianism is equal to Ahuramazda
in all respects except foresight.
The attempt to solve the problem of evil in Judaism and Christianity with the fall
from grace is no answer. In Zoroastrianism, Asmodeus (Aesmadaeva) is an angry
spirit (Y 28:7) that led to the fall of man (Y 30:3) by offering humanity the worst
mind. Some are tempted, but those of good mind will defeat the demons in the end.
Yehouism has Satan as a fallen angel, but angels are supposed only to be lesser
spirits, so there is no explanation of why Yehouah does not simply finish him off.
Moreover, Yehouah, like Ahuramazda had foresight, so knew that they would fall
from grace when he made them, just as he knew Adam and Eve would. Yet he went
ahead and created entities that he knew would fall into evil. That is just the same as
creating evil, because there was no need to do it once he had foreseen it.
Judaism and Christianity want a single absolute God, but the legends they acquired
in the Persian period are of two equal gods, and they consequently get into
theological tangles, that Zoroastrianism does not have. Indeed, to all intents and
purposes, many Christian sects today believe in an original Evil Spirit equal to God,
at least on the earthly plane.
Ahuramazda was the author only of good, whereas Yehouah has to be the author of
both good and ill (Isa 45:7), the angels but also the demons, that have such power in
How Persia Created Judaism: The Rise of Persia
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Y 53:9
Y 31:3
the New Testament. Did the Jews believe that the evil spirits, Satan and the Baals,
railed against in the scriptures, were actually created by Yehouah? Much of the
scriptures show that they were equal gods to Yehouah and the favourite name of God
in the bible is not simply Yehouah but Yehouah of the Gods! YHWH Elohim. In
places in the bible “elohim” stands alone and is translated as “the gods”.
Furthermore, the prophets consider the Baals as real gods, not simply idols.
Any attempt to produce evil from somewhere outside of the control of Yehouah
makes the Jews and Christians just as dualist as the Iranians. No one does, though
Satan is often characterized as the “god of the world” while Yehouah is the “god of
heaven”, especially by Christians, whose Gnosticism still shines through, as if they
were equal gods with different realms. This is just a distortion of the Zoroastrian
belief that the material world has been corrupted by the Evil Creation. But in
Zoroastrianism, it was fundamentally still the creation of the Good God, not the Evil
One. The Evil Spirit could only contend with the Good God on the material plane in
Mazdaism, but in Yehouism the fight was continued on the heavenly or cosmic plane.
Again the Zoroastrian cosmogony is more complete.
Ahuramazda is the Creator (Y 29:4), is omniscient (Y 31:13-14), is the lawgiver (Y
1:11), is a teacher (Y 31:5, 32:13), will establish a kingdom (Y 28:4) and is for the poor
(Y 34:3):
O Mazda, Thine is the kingdom, and by it thous bestowest the highest of blessings on
the right-living poor.
He is the friend, protector and strengthener and is unchangeable (Y 31:7), is the
Judge (Y 43:4) and the day of Judgement (Y 43:5-6). He invites Zoroaster to
proselytize:
With the tongue of thy mouth dost thou speak, that I might make all the living
believers.
Herodotus says the Persians valued, almost above all, the fathering of children
perhaps because the Persian nobility were a limited body of people. This would
explain the biblical command to multiply, the reason being the same—that the
“returners” were not populous, and the temple needed bodies to attend it and feed
the priesthood who would collect the tribute. Along with it went a practical disdain of
homosexuality, putting Persians and Jews at the opposite pole from Greeks and,
under Christianity, rendering for two thousand years a natural aspect of sexuality as a
sin.
Herodotus also tells us that the Medes and Persians did not make images of their
gods or temples or altars. He is comparing the Persians with the Greeks who had a
great fondness for elegant statues of gods and goddesses in equally elegant temples.
Certain Achaemenid buildings are thought to have been fire temples, and open air
altars with recesses apparently for the fires have been found, but the supposed
temples remain doubtful. Herodotus adds that the Persians and Medes worshipped in
the open air in high places or at the top of mountains and so addressed Ahuramazda
in heaven directly, thus needing no temples, icons or statues.
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Assyrian records show that no images were captured when Medes were defeated in
battle or when Median towns surrendered. Persians made bas-reliefs rather than
statues on their royal palaces sometimes of kings, their subjects and mythical animals
but apparently not of gods. The typical winged fravashi image of Ahuramazda as
found on the Behistun monument seems to belie Herodotus, but the monument was
not, of course, a temple, and the Persians seem to have simply adopted the
convention of the Assyrians for showing heavenly approval of their kings and the
spirit of God as a witness to national inscriptions. This winged disc or figure seems
not to have been for knee bending purposes.
Thus even the absence of the god Yehouah in representation is an inheritance from
the Persians, though the scriptural descriptions of the temple suggest the Jews did
have a representation or representations of their god in the Holy of Holies of the
Jerusalem temple—it seems to have looked like the symbol of Ahuramazda on
monuments!
Eschatology
Kings and Chronicles are considered pre-Persian, but the term “Cities of the Medes”
appears twice in Kings. These books are about the succession of worthy and
unworthy kings of Israel and Judah, but amid their lives and deaths appear no
surmises about their ultimate destination—in heaven or hell. God is depicted as
contending with a generally unreliable people who persistently fall into worshipping
gods called Baals and Asherahs that are really devils. The Ten Commandments
contains no mention of a Last Judgement.
The religion of the ancient Canaanites knew of no Last Judgement.
The future existence of souls after death was as dim in the pre-exilic bible as it was in
the older Greek classics—in fact this latter, the Greek immortality, seems to show
rather the more of animation.
L H Mills
In the bible, before the fall of Jerusalem, the concept of death was Sheol, a dark and
dismal place with no memory of God. There is no clear mention of any hope of
immortality before parts of second Isaiah that are obviously late. In the oldest
Zoroastrian writings, the Gathas, dating to about 1000 BC, heaven—the Best
Life—was already a reward for righteous living. After the Persian conquest the
concepts of heaven and hell emerged in Judaism and the Jews had a doctrine of
resurrection and judgement for all. The “dry bones” of Ezekiel recalls the Persian
custom of leaving the dead to be picked by birds in towers, so that they do not defile
the earth, after which they could be resurrected. Yasht 19:80f speaks of immortality
beyond the end of time, and, the later, Pahlavi books agree on a general resurrection
of the body as well as the soul at the End.
Zoroastrianism is the main document of our eschatology, a fact which should be
taken everywhere for granted, as the slightest examination would confirm it.
L H Mills
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The whole system of the Most High God, the angels, immortality, resurrection,
judgement, heaven, hell and a saviour all appear in the Persian period when colonists
in successive waves went to Palestine from places in Persia. There is no sign of such a
sophisticated system before the Babylonian conquest, so it just arose with no native
antecedents, or it had non-native antecedents.
From start to finish we have everywhere in Zoroastrianism, the main points of our
eschatology. There was no other lore of the period of the oldest Avesta which so
expressed the doctrines almost in modern terms.
L H Mills
2 Kings 22:8 and 22:13 purport to say that the book of the law was found in the reign
of Josiah (622 BC) and that before then the Israelites, kings and priests had had no
knowledge of the law. Even accepting it as it stands no traces of any previous law
books of the Israelites could have remained, even if there had been some, so the
Jewish religion could not have started until then, only 100 years before the Persians
sent in colonists. It disproves the existence of literacy, and thereby disproves the
existence of any grand temple. The temple would have had scribes to copy the holy
books!
In fact, the book of the law was written by Persian colonists and retrojected into the
reign of Josiah to give it some history, covering up the reality that it had been written
by the “returners”.
Ahuramazda has a Holy Spirit that sometimes seems to be him and at other times
seems to be independent. This is identical to the Holy Spirit of Yehouah that has the
same characteristics. It is not the only spirit of Ahuramazda however—there are six
others, making seven in all. Yehouah has seven archangels. In the Book of Tobit the
seven spirits appear at Ragha, the Zoroastrian Holy City, and one of them is called
Raphael, the Jewish archangel! Tobit also has the name of an Avestan demon,
Asmodeus. Zechariah 4:10 speaks of “these seven” that are the eyes of the Lord, and
earlier had been the imagery of seven lampstands that appears again in Revelation.
There again also are the seven spirits of God.
Mithras appears in the Talmud as Mittron (Metatron). This angel is not mentioned as
such in the scripture but is seen as the “Angel of the Presence”, a role that Mithras
seemed to have in Persian religion, possibly accounting for Mithras replacing
Ahuramazda in the Persian religion that came west. The “Angel of the Presence” is
God himself appearing in a form that can be looked upon by humans beings without
terminal sunburn. He is also “one whose name is like that of his master”. “Who is like
God?” is the meaning of the name Michael. It confirms what might have seemed plain
anyway, that Michael is Mithras (Mica in Old Persian).
In Zoroastrianism, a spotless virgin conceives from the preserved semen of Zoroaster
when she bathes in the lake where it has been preserved, and remains a virgin
because she is not penetrated. She thus becomes the virgin mother of the last
Saoshyant or saviour. This is according to the Bundahish which is late, but the
elements of it can be seen in parts of the Avesta (Y 13:142, 19:92, 13:62) so, although
alteration cannot be counted out, some similar legends existed in the earlier period.
The Jewish Messiah became a Saviour similar to the Iranian Saoshyant, in the shape
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Y 19:83
of a future King of Israel who would save his people from oppression. Apologists try
to make out that the Jewish idea of a Saviour did not come from Persia but came
from their anguish of exile in Babylon and the covenant relationship they had with
Yehouah that promised them his protection if they remain righteous. Yet the whole
argument is manifestly anachronistic.
The writers of Matthew want to imply, through the introduction of the visiting Magi,
that Jesus is the Saoshyant of the Zoroastrians, as well as the Christians. The
Saoshyant:
…shall make the world progress unto perfection, and when it shall be never dying,
nor decaying, never rotting, ever living ever useful, having power to fulfil all wishes,
when the dead shall arise and immortal life shall come…
Compare this with Isaiah 26:19:
Thy dead men shall live, together with my dead body shall they arise. Awake and
sing, ye that dwell in dust: for thy dew is as the dew of herbs, and the earth shall cast
out the dead.
The Persians, like the post-exilic Jews, believed the soul remained with the body for
three days—a dead person was not really dead until the fourth day when the soul had
departed. This explains why Jesus was to rise on the third day. It also shows that the
raising of Lazarus was an afterthought. The greatness of the miracle of raising
Lazarus in the fourth gospel is that he had been dead for four days. His soul had
departed and he was beyond recall. One would have thought that Jesus would have
saved this exceptional miracle for himself.
Purity
In their religious habits, as described by Herodotus, the Persians were especially
concerned with purity.
G M Cook
Here we have the origins of the Jewish purity laws. The cleanliness laws regarding
animals given by Ezra to the Jews are recorded in Leviticus and Ezekiel where they
are not explained. They are explained in the Vendidad. Purification rituals are
identical in the Pentateuch and the older Vendidad. Von Gall in Brasileia tou Theou,
1926, catalogues the Jewish laws taken from the Persians.
The Jews would not burn their dead, supposedly because it was a desecration of the
dead, but really because their teachers, the Persians, did not want to desecrate the
flame. The Jewish priests could not even approach a grave, the defilement of death is
so strong, and had to be buried in the front row of a cemetary so that their relatives
did not have to pass other graves to visit those of their family. If the Jews considered
dead bodies as so thoroughly unclean, why should they have been bothered about
desecrating them by cremation? In common sense, such a vile pollution ought to be
purified by fire, since fire was regarded as the ultimate purifier. What we have is an
imperfect rationalization from the Persian refusal to contaminate fire.
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A C Bouquet
The dead bodies of Jews were put into a sepulchre to decay, and later the bones were
collected into ossuaries. The sepulcre or tomb served the same purpose as the Silent
Towers of the Persians in which they left their dead to be picked by birds, so as not to
contaminate any of the elements. In both cases, the soft parts of the dead body were
allowed to disperse and the bones collected later. Both also treated the corpse with
waxes or unguents but did not go so far as to embalm them, like the Egyptians.
The Persians would not burn sacrifices to Ahuramazda—that too desecrating the
sacred flame. Zoroaster seems to have forbidden sacrifices anyway, but they never
seem to have been successfully stopped. But pollution of the sacred living flame was
not allowed. Sacrifices were not burnt but boiled in the open air to offer a sweet scent
to God. Sure enough, offering a sweet savour to god rather than sacrificing also
appears in the Jewish scriptures, and was followed by the Essenes into gospel times
suggesting that sacrificing was a post-Persian adaptation, or perhaps a reversion to
the ancient practice of the priests of Baal, from post-Alexandrine Greek influences.
Ministering to the sacred flame also seems to have gone in post-Persian times. Strabo
describes the Magians of Cappadocia, where they were popular, ministrating to the
sacred flame with bunches of herbs in their hands and with their mouths covered so
as not to pollute it. The Magi had an important position in society but were not of the
highest class and were not represented on Persian royal reliefs. Once the Persian
ruling elite had been destroyed by Alexander, the Magians became more important in
some of the former occupied lands of the Persians.
The Magians known to the Greeks and referred to by Herodotus, Plato, Strabo, and
Plutarch, were not orthodox followers of the Persian prophet. They were the priests of
certain religious colonies established in the west of Iran during the age of the
Achaemenids, from Mesopotamia to the Aegean, and existing there up to the
Christian epoch.
Herodotus, writing about 450 BC, called the Magoi a “tribe” of the Medes, and Strabo
called them a “tribe” of the Persians. Is it mere coincidence that the Levites are a
“tribe” of the Israelites and end up as a Jewish priestly caste?—Jewish Magi! A tribe
is a group pof people linked by blood—a clan—and both the Jewish and the
Zoroastrian priesthoods were inherited. Both habitually wore white, whereas Iranian
warriors wore purples, reds and other bright colours.
Few scholars would deny that the Jews had many of the central features of their
religion from Zoroastrianism. They obtained from Zoroastrianism their beliefs in:
uncleanness and pollution;
angels and demons and their hierarchies—angelology and demonology;
the soul’s immortality;
the Last Judgment and the doctrine of the millennium;
rewards and punishments after death;
the heavenly book in which human actions are inscribed;
eschatology and resurrection;
the final purification of the earth;
a future state of a kingdom of God on earth;
heaven;
hell.
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The idea of a covenant with god was imposed on the “returners” from exile, who had
to impose it on the native people of the Palestine hills. The Persians are repeatedly
shown on their sculptures making covenants with Mazda or Marduk. Persian held
covenant relationships to be binding as an aspect of truth and had Asha and Mithras
to guard them. Both saviour and covenant came from the Persians, the saviour was
Cyrus and the covenant was with Ahuramazda, the God of Heaven, renamed Yehouah
for the Jews, whose representative on earth was the Persian king.
It is irrefutable that Judaism is a corruption of Zoroastrianism, and it ought to be
widely taught as Professor Lawrence Mills repeatedly said a hundred years ago. That
no attempt has been made by the Jewish and Christian religions, by teachers or by
scholars, they are proved to be dishonest, and one can only conclude that they are
intent on perpetuating the lies that their religions are original. If they are correct that
there is one supreme God of goodness, they might be surprised to find he does not
have the name they expect, and puts a greater value on truth than they do.
A Law for the Priests
Heavy taxation by the Persians impoverished the people of even rich countries like
Babylonia. Herodotus, before about 480 BC, says the Babylonians were rendered so
poor they had to prostitute their daughters. So, having a system of control of the
population through the privileged class of priests was essential. The Babylonian
priests brought astronomy to its peak under Persian rule, showing that they had
plenty of money and time for arcane studies. The Jerusalem variety of holy spongers
were equally privileged.
The law, for all its supposed basis in God’s justice, served as the mechanism by which
the priests squeezed every last shekel out of the poor. The priests were entitled to:
every sin and trespass offering (Neh 18:9);
parts of other offerings (Lev 7:30-34);
the first fruits of the
corn harvest,
the grape harvest,
the fig harvest,
the pomegranate harvest,
the olive harvest, and
the honey harvest (Dt 26:1);
in addition, “all the best of the oil and all the best of the vintage and corn” to make
up between a sixtieth and a fortieth (Num 18:12);
of the remainder, a tenth had to be set aside for the lesser but more numerous
temple functionaries called Levites, and the temples had to give a tenth of this to
the priests (Num 18:20;
besides these, every twentieth loaf baked (Num 15:17);
every firstborn calf or its value in cash (Num 18:15);
a family’s first born son had to be “redeemed” at a month old by payment of 5
shekels (at least £50-100, about double in dollars) (Num 18:16)
of any animal killed for a family’s own consumption, “the shoulder, the two cheeks
and the maw” (Dt 18:3);
a proportion of the wool sheared from a sheep;
How Persia Created Judaism: The Rise of Persia
55
Ecc 7:31
any ox, ass, maidservant or manservant devoted to god (Num 18:14);
any restitution made for an injustice went to the priest when the person wronged
could not recieve it (Num 5:5);
Just as in its daughter religion, Christianity, the tithes for the Jewish priests were
extorted mainly by psychological power held by the priests through people’s fear of
divine wrath. As it says in Ecclesiaticus:
Fear the Lord and honour the priest, and give him his portion, as it is commanded
thee: the firstfruits, and the trespass offering, and the gift of the shoulders, and the
sacrifice of sanctification, and the firstfruits of the holy things.
In the early days of the reformation, the people refused to co-operate because they
rejected the Persian reforms, and Nehemiah and Malachi record them being taken to
task (Mal 3:9; Neh 13:10). A few generations down the line when the reforms had
taken root, prompt payment of the tithes was an important sign of piety! Attendance
at church and rattling the platter or collection boxes with coinage plays the same role
in Christianity. The apocryphal book of Judith tells us that the people were loathe to
deny the priests their sanctified portions even during drought and famine (Jud 11:13)
Ezra’s major reform was the prohibition of “foreign” wives. The ethnic people of
Judah were thoroughly mixed, and it was the policy of successive emperors to mix the
populations even more. In legend, Solomon had been the son of a Hittite woman,
Bathsheba. Both ethnic and religious mixed marriages had been the common practice
among the small population of mixed people of the hill country, so why should Ezra
have been uncommonly bothered about an age old habit?
For the people there were no racial rules but worship of Yehouah was the deciding
factor concerning whether anyone was a Jew. “Jews” or “Yehudim” means
worshippers of Yehouah. For “foreign” read non-Jewish and you realize Ezra’s
complaint is that they are not worshippers of Yehouah. Ezra was not concerned about
the racial purity of the people of Jerusalem but about their religious purity and the
purity of the ruling caste of priests, the Jewish Magi. Marriages outside of
Zoroastrianism violated Zoroastrian law (Denkard 3:80), so he purged from the
priesthood any who could not prove that they were descended from purely Jewish
families.
The Zoroastrians had the same distaste for the temptations of women as the Jews, to
whom they gave it. A legitimate marriage in the Zoroastrian religion had to be
between two Zoroastrians, performed by properly ordained Zoroastrian priests, and
according to the Zoroastrian Ashirwad ceremony. The law given to the Jews was the
same. To try to set up a pure religion, wives of the worshippers of Yehouah who
worshipped some other god were banished.
For a Zoroastrian, illicit intercourse with a woman of a different religion was a
dreadful sin, so heinous that the committer would not be resurrected at the End Time
whatever good works they did in atonement. Consequently, men rarely did it. In the
rare cases where they did, however, there was no excommunication—they would be
punished in God’s Judgement. They were simply required not to pollute consecrated
sites like fire temples.
How Persia Created Judaism: The Rise of Persia
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If the woman became pregnant, several more sins might have been committed by the
man. If she was menstrual, expiation of the sin by the man required extensive ritual
cleansing. The Jews were taught the same neuroses about the uncleanness of
menstruating females. If she was not menstruating, and not impregnated, the man
still had to atone, because he had sinned by wasting semen—another sin that appears
in the Jewish scriptures—onanism.
No law is specified for a Zoroastrian woman’s physical relationship with a
non-Zoroastrian male, probably because, if the woman remained in the Zoroastrian
community, the child would naturally be brought up as a Zoroastrian by his mother
and her family, and would not if she left to stay with the Pagan man.
The Later Persian Kings
By the death of Darius II in 404 BC, the administrative structures erected by Darius
the Great had been neglected. The satraps were out of control. They were local
monarchs. When Darius II’s son, Artaxerxes II (404-358 BC), came to the throne the
empire was in turmoil. Bithynia, Caria, Lydia, Lycia, Pisidia, Pamphilia, Cilicia, all
asserted their independence in Asia Minor and so did Cyprus, Syria and Phœnicia.
The Egyptians rebelled again under the Pharaoh Amyrteus and established home rule
as the twenty eighth dynasty for sixty years. Now independent, the Egyptians
destroyed the Persian military colony of Jews at Yeb and the Persian military colony
of Arabs at Tell el Maskhuta, symbols to them of Persian occupation. Aramaic papyri
discovered at Yeb prove that the colony was pro-Persian, one document being a copy
of the inscription on the monument of Darius at Behistun.
Among the papyri were letters to Bagohi (governor of Yehud), and to Delaiah and
Selamiah, sons of Sanballat, governor of Samaria (mentioned in Ezra-Nehemiah)
which testify to the continuing existence of an unorthodox Jewish temple to the end
of the fifth centuty. The temple serviced the garrison of Jewish soldiers pernmanently
stationed there. At this point, Ezra will have replaced Nehemiah in the true order of
events. What seems to have been another colony in the eastern delta of Qedarite
Arabs (Tell el Maskhuta) has revealed a silver bowl inscribed to “Qainu bar Gashmu
king of Qedar”. This Qainu seems to be son of “Geshem the Arabian” who was among
those who opposed the plans for Jerusalem in the Jewish scriptures.
The pharaoh Nepherities I (399-393 BC) is the last king mentioned in the
Elephantine letters, giving a close idea of when the Jewish colony was dispersed. To
judge from an inscribed stone in Palestine, he even took back the coastal plain of
Philistia, taking advantage of the civil war between the sons of Darius. The next
pharaoh, Acoris, went further and, allied with the Cypriots, took control of Phœnicia.
The Persian empire began to crumble as soon as the Jewish temple state was set up,
but the Persians were not quite finished, yet.
Abrocammus, a new satrap of Abarnahara, with two others, Pharnabazus and
Tithraustes, expelled the Egyptians from Abarnahara and restored the satrapy to
Persia by 380 BC. The empire was teetering, however, and the instability was
reflected in the fortunes of Palestine, which again succumbed to Egyptian incursions.
Meanwhile the satraps also revolted. The Pharaoh, Nectanebo II (359-341 BC) was a
thorn in the side of the Persians, fighting off the invasion of Artaxerxes III Ochus in
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57
Berosus
351 BC, then fomenting the rebellion in Phœnicia of king Tennes. Artaxerxes III
Ochus (358-338 BC), however, was ruthless enough to to subjugate Egypt again, and
he restored order in the empire. Artaxerxes reconquered Phœnicia in 345 BC, and
sent the army under the rule of Bagoas, the satrap of Abarnahara, into Egypt which
he conquered in 343 BC. Mazeus (Mazdi) was made satrap of Abarnahara, and held it
until Alexander defeated the Persians. According to Josephus (Against Apion), the
Jews rebelled in this time, presumably with the Phœnicians, and many were
punished by expulsion to Hyrcania by the Caspian Sea, which was, or became, a
center of Judaism.
Isocrates appealed to the Greeks to stop squabbling and unite against the Persians. It
was Philip of Macedon who heard this call. The Macedonians were not ethnically
Greeks but had adopted Greek culture and were not exhausted by centuries of
internal strife as the Greeks were. The Empire was looking strong under
Artaxerxes III and the Athenians sought a separate peace though Philip wanted to
stall. Safety necessitated that the Athenians be secured by conquest and so he and his
son, Alexander, finished Athens off in 338 BC. The Persians under Artaxerxes, the
king of the Anabasis, brought the Greeks to heel with the peace treaty of 387 BC,
called “the King’s Peace”, dictated to them in Sardis, the satrapal capital in the West.
Artaxexes the Great King deems it just that the cities of Asia Minor and Cyprus and a
few other islands belong to him, that other Greek cities… be autonomous… Whoever
does not accept this peace, I shall make war upon him… with ships and with money.
The Greek cities accepted it! Alexander of Macedon, who was brought up as a Greek
but was not one, took revenge for the Greek ethnos 55 years later, destroying the
Achaemenian Empire, saving Europe from humiliation, and earning the sobriquet,
“Great”, for his services to European honour!
According to Berossos, the third century BC priest and historian of Babylon, the
Persians began to worship statues in defiance of Zoroaster’s explicit command that
God was to be represented only by the flames of a sacred fire.
After a long period of time, they began to worship statues in human form, this
practice having been introduced by Artaxerxes, son of Darius… who was first to set
up statues of Aphrodite Anaitis, at Babylon, Susa, Ecbatana, Persepolis, Bactria,
Damascus and Sardis, thus suggesting to those communities the duty of worshipping
them.
Artaxerxes was a reforming king, approving four changes to Zoroastrianism,
permanently altering its nature. As the changes survived, they were evidently popular
among the people and the Magi:
1. the Zoroastrian calendar, still used in Moslem Persia
2. the Zurvanite heresy, popular until the end of the Sasanian Empire
3. the temple cult of divine images, popular until the end of the Parthian Empire
4. the temple cult of fire, continuing until today among the Parsis.
In his promotion of divine images, Artaxerxes II no longer reserved his praise for
Ahuramazda, but worshipped a Trinity—Ahuramazda, Anahita (the Virgin,
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“Undefiled” or “Immaculate”), and Mithras. Plutarch paints Artaxerxes as a timid
man. Parysatis, his mother, the Babylonian wife of Darius, dominated her son, and
her favouring traditional Babylonian religious expression is usually considered
responsible for the changes of Artaxerxes. At Persepolis he inscribed:
I built this palace by the wills of Ahura Mazda, Anahita and Mithra. May Ahura
Mazda, Mithra and Anahita protect me from the Lie.
Artaxerxes II had put a Trinity of gods in charge. He promulgated the cult of the
goddess, Anahita, and the empire was united from Sardis to Bactria under the cult of
a Great Father and a Mother Goddess, who, together with Mithras, formed the trinity
of father, mother and son. Traces persisted in Asia Minor until the time of Paul and
helped Christianity to take root there so quickly. Roman sources give the source of
western Mithraism as Cilicia in the south of Asia Minor, where Paul was traditionally
born and brought up.
Anahita was the goddess of waters, and water was an element not to be defiled for
Persians. Anahita will have retained her virginity by bathing in pure water, the
message of the myth being that mortals should not defile a goddess. In a Greek myth,
mentioned by Pausanias, Juno renewed her virginity by bathing in a magical
fountain. Anahita was paradoxically identified with a Babylonian goddess and
became Anaitis, a goddess who needed the restorative power of pure water, but was
immensely popular. Aelian mentions a goddess who restored her virginity after every
coitus by bathing in a fountain located between the upper Tigris and Euphrates,
where Zoroastrians considered were some of their holy places. She must have been
Anahita.
Oleg Basirov notes that the classical writers Heraclitus of Ephesus (c 500 BC),
Herodotus (c 490-445 BC), Cicero (54-44 BC), and Strabo (63 BC-19 AD) all agreed
that the early Persian kings were aniconic in their worship, and had no built temples.
Heraclitus admired this stance, ridiculing men who prayed to statues. Herodotus
admired them for the same reasons. Cicero says
Persians considered representation of sacred statues in human form a wicked
custom,
and that Xerxes thought the Athenians sacrilegious…
…to keep the gods, who dwell in the whole universe, shut up within walls
To counter the images being introduced, the orthodox Zoroastrians seem to have
introduced or re-introduced the fire temples. The Magi obviously realized that
aniconism was unpopular, or the people were unable to worship satisfactorily without
some focus. Fire was a divine element that could provide the focus without actually
being an image. It had come from Asha Vahishta—effectively piety or
righteousness—and the old Iranian fire god, Atar, and had long been venerated as
sacred by the Iranians, even being acceptable to the prophet. Zoroastrian qualities
seem fluid, constantly flowing from one to another, and here is a spiritual element,
flowing out of an abstract quality, and a physical element via an ancient god, which
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looks like a form of truth or arta again! Fire thus becomes the force of arta, order,
truth, honesty, righteousness, literally the cosmic moral standard which regulates the
good creation. No magus was likely to dissent, since the cultivation of permanent
fires gave them additional work, and the whole distinguishing feature of the fire of a
fire temple is that it is everlasting!
Inscribed above the mausoleum of Darius the Great, and copied by other shahs, the
king is shown bowing before a fire burning on an alter. It is a scene which became
symbolic of Persian culture common to Persian inscriptions, coins and seals. It shows
the deep respect the Achaemenids had for for fire as a symbol of their spirituality.
Deep fire holders have been found in Persia. The fires were kept blazing permanently,
except when a king died, when they were doused, and, according to Diodorus, new
ones were ignited for the new shah. Scholars like Boyce have concluded that the new
emphasis on fire temples, in the time of Artaxerxes II, were an orthodox backlash in
opposition to the blasphemy of the Queen Mother and her sons.
As Artaxerxes’ brother, Cyrus, certainly promoted Anahita in the west, it begins to
look as if the brothers were following their mother, Parysatis’s, lead in worshipping
the goddess, presumably with the approval, if not the open support, of Darius. If this
is so, Darius might well have been ready to let Yehouah, the Ahuramazda-like god
being imposed on the Yehudim, retain his age old consort, Asherah. If so, she was
erased later. The king’s son, Artaxerxes III, rejected Anahita and worshipped only
Ahuramazda and Mithras. An ambiguity in the cuneiform script of an inscription of
Artaxerxes III at Persepolis would make it possible to argue that he regarded Father
and Son as one person, suggesting that the attributes of Ahuramazda were being
transferred to Mithras, and suggesting another identity of Zoroastrianism and
Christianity.
Regarding the Zurvanite heresy—the theme of a God of Time was fashionable in the
Mediterranean in the last few centuries before the birth of Christ. Modern
Zoroastrians, according to Rashna Ghadially on CAIS, think Zurvan was at first the
God of Time in Phœnician tradition around the seventh and sixth centuries BC, and
was brought into the Persian realm of religious thought around the reign of
Artazerxes II in 400 BC. It equates Zurvan with Chronos whom many think was El,
and Iao (Yehouah), a god of the year, who became a Gnostic god. Some scholars, such
as S F G Brandon, think earlier Aryan invaders of the ANE, such as the Mitanni, had a
God of Time, so the influence could have been from the Aryan tribes to the Semitic
Canaanites.
A God of the Year is quite logically the father of two seasonal sons (and suns), the sun
of the summer and the sun of the winter, one good and one evil, which is which
depending on location. This dualism is characteristic of Persian religion, but some
think it was introduced by the Zurvanism of the time of Artaxerxes. Brandon seems
more correct. It seems to have been older in origin. It is a good explanation of the
origin of dualism, and Zoroastrian dualism extends right back into the Gathas. It
does not mean, of course, that there could not have been a resurgence of Zurvanism
at this time.
The two principles were not equal, arta and druj, and therein was the problem. What
seemed to differ was the emphasis. Ahuramazda with arta would prevail, but needed
the commitment of everyone good to eschew the Lie, so Zoroaster emphasized the
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need of people to do good deeds, whereas the Zurvanite approach placed the
emphasis on destiny. If Ahuramazda would prevail, then it was destiny and human
endeavour was incidental. Each human must also have been destined to be good or a
liar. It no longer seemed to offer any proper moral options. No doubt it was not so
simple. The Essenes had the best of both worlds, and that might have been the
Zurvanite approach. Essenes believed people were destined all right, but even destiny
could be tipped at the edges by human will. A devil could not be made into a saint,
but by yielding a little of his devilishness helped the victory of the Good. These
marginal differences made all the difference in the End.
During the Sassanian era, Zurvanism flourished and Zurvan was accepted even by
priests as a supreme God, though Ahuramazda remained the good God, and the chief
God in religious practice.
The Zoroastrian Calendar—Feasts and Dates
The Achaemenians originally had numbers instead of names for the days of the
month. Artaxerxes II (405-359 BC) dedicated each day and month to a divine spirit
(Y 16:3-6), and appointed a year of twelve months with thirty days each. Each month
had four weeks, the first two of seven days and the last two of eight days. Saturday
was “Shanbeh”, the same word as “Sabbath”. Four days were devoted to Dadvah
(Creator) Ahuramazda, acknowledging Zurvan—the god of time or the year,
considered to have four parts (perhaps the four quarterly festivals). Later, the first of
the four days was named after Ohrmuzd, and the other three after him as Creator,
Dai (Pahlavi for Dadvah). The three “Dai” days are distinguished by adding to each
the name of the following day, eg “Daibe Adar”.
The twelve months also received dedications, which coincide with those of twelve of
the days. The month names are first attested in Pahlavi (Middle-Persian). Names of
the months in New-Persian are:
1. Farvardin
2. Ardibehest
3. Khordad
4. Tir
5. Amordad
6. Shahrivar
7. Mehr
8. Aban
9. Azar
10. Dai
11. Bahman
12. Esfand
The year begins at the vernal equinox (Hamaspathmaidhaya, “Middle of Equal
Paths”) on 1 Farvardin, about 21 March, the summer solstice is on 1 Tir, about
22 June, the autumnal equinox is on 1 Mehr, about 23 September, and the winter
solstice is on 1 Dai, about 22 December.
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Names of the days:
Avestan Pahlavi (Mid-Persian) New-Persian English
Dadvah Ahura Mazda Ohrmuzd Urmazd Creator Lord Mazda
Vohu Manah Vahman Bahman Good Thought
Asha Vahista Ardvahisht Ordibehesht Best Truth
Khshaetra Vairya Shahrevar Sharivar Desirable Dominion
Spenta Aramaiti Spendarmad Spandarmaz Holy Devotion
Haurvatat Hordad Khordad Wholeness
Amertat Amurdad Amordad Immortality
Dadvah Ahura Mazda Daipad Adar Daibe Azar Creator
Atar Adar Azar Fire
Apo Aban Aban Waters
Hvar Khshaeta Khvarshed Khur/Khir Sun
Mah Mah Mah Moon
Tishtrya Tir Tir Rain Star
Gaush Urvan Gosh Gush Bull Soul, Existence
Dadvah Ahura Mazda DaiPad Mihr Daibe Mehr Creator
Mithra Mihr Mehr Contract
Sraosha Srosh Sorush Hearkening
Rashnu Rashn Rashn Justice
Fravashyo Fravardin Farvardin Progress force
Verthraghna Vrahram Vrahram Victory
Raman Ram Ram Peace
Vata Vad Bad Wind
Dadvah Ahura Mazda Daipad Din Daibe Din Creator
Daena Din Din Inside Vision
Ashi Ard Ard (Ashi) Truth
Arshtat Ashtat Eshtad Justice
Asman Asman Asman Sky
Zam Zamyad Zamyad Earth
Mantra Spenda Mahraspand Mantraspand Holy Word
Anagranam Raochangha Angran Anaram Eternal Light
The Old Avestan calendar became the religious calendar of the followers of Zoroaster
everywhere, including the communities in the south and west. The Pagan Aryans
seem to have divided the year (yar) into two seasons, a summer season from the
spring equinox to the autumn equinox, and the winter from autumn to spring. The
same practice is found in India, testifying to its Aryan origin. The Vedic system,
consisted of two equal parts, two ayanas, either divided at the solstices (“uttarayana”
and “daksinayana”), or divided at the equinoxes (“devayana” and “pitryana”). In
Iran, two festivals marked the beginning (“maidyoshahem”) and the middle of the
year (“maidyarem”). Yasht 8:36 speaks of the whole of life watching after the end of
the year for the heliacal rise (mid-July) of Tishtrya (Sirius, heralding the rainy
season). And elsewhere in the Avesta, the season beginning at the “maidyarem” is
described as “the cold bringer”, so it spans winter. “Maidyarem” would therefore be
the autumn equinox, and the year began in spring (cf K R Cama). Tir, when Tishtrya
rose, was the fourth month (June-July) and Ahuramazda the seventh (SeptemberOctober), the beginning of the second half year (mid-year).
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Today, the seventh month is Mihr which is a name of Mithras, suggesting that
Ahuramazda is Mithras! But even calling it Ahuramazda shows it was a name given to
it in the period of the acceptance of Zoroastrianism. It cannot have been its original
name. Seeing Ahuramazda as Mithravaruna, the compound noun uniting the two half
year seasons into a single god of the year would logically account for the month
Ahuramazda being at the mid-year, where the two half years join. It also means
Ahuramazda is a multiple god, like the Hebrew Elohim, which means “gods”, and the
Christian Trinity! The first day of each month was also called Ahuramazda,
suggesting he was like Janus, the opener and closer, looking forward and back. That
might imply that the Zoroastrian year originally began at the autumn equinox. Then,
the vernal beginning was a later harmonisation with Babylonian practice. Even every
week began with a day named after Ahuramazda, so every week began with a Lord’s
day.
The feast of Baga, originally a pre-Zoroastrian and old Aryan feast consecrated to the
sun god, was a great and popular festival in ancient Iran. It was connected with the
worship of the oldest Aryan deities, called by the compound Bagamithra, who were
noted as far back as the fourteenth century BC. Baga was identified in the Rig Veda
as Varuna, the twin of Mithras, so Bagamithra means the two gods, but the Iranians
came to see Mithras as the Baga, as if Bagamithra stood for Mithras with the title
Baga. The festival’s place in the calendar must have been the month dedicated to
Baga, and later to Mithras. It was called “Bagayadi” or “Bagayadish” and
corresponded to the Babylonian month Tishritu, the patron of which was Shamash
the Babylonian sun god, who according to Stuart Jones, is identified with Mithras on
a tablet in the library of Assurbanipal. This month might have been that of the earlier
Iranian New Year festival, when the year began at the autumnal equinox. So,
“Bagayadi”, the same month as the later “Mithrakana” and the modern “mihragan”
or “mihrjan”, was the feast of Baga, originally the autumnal equinox. The feast of
Baga seems to have been celebrated for five days, and five days were intercalated at
mid-year to make the year fully 365 days. Herodotus’s story of five days’ uproar after
the Magi of Smerdis were killed, suggests it was at this feast.
In Babylon, long before under Hammurabi, the beginning of the civil year was
transferred from Tishritu to Nisan, from autumn to spring. The first month of the
Babylonian year, Nisan, could start between 24 March and 23 April, according to van
der Spek and Mandermakers. So, the Babylonian year began at the vernal equinox
when the Iranian year had its New Year at the autumnal equinox. But a calendar of
the Babylonian type was adopted early by the south-western section of the Iranian
people, who were influenced by the civilizations of Elam and Assyria-Babylon. At
some stage, the Achaemenian kings fully adopted the Babylonian calendar, with its
luni-solar year, and Babylonian month names, except perhaps in the beginning of the
year. A compilation by Thompson, called Reports of the Magicians and Astrologers
of Nineveh and Babylon, has a passage where two different dates, Nisan and Tishri,
spring and autumn, are mentioned as the beginning of the year. When the Persians
ruled in Babylon, there was confusion between the two systems, the compromise
being the acceptance by the Persians of a religious and a civil year, as in the
Babylonian and Jewish calendars.
Artaxerxes II supervised the introduction of a new calendar, suggesting that he was
consciously involved in religious innovation. The old calendar already had some
intercalary days, but the original Persian names for the months had been changed to
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Babylonian ones. The Babylonian calendar had been introduced into Egypt by Darius,
and it seems that the modified calendar of Artaxerxes was based on the Babylonian
one. The reform of the calendar was to adopt a regular solar year of twelve thirty day
months, with five intercalated days, to change the names of the days and months to
Zoroastrian ones, and possibly to fix some of the feast days. The calendar of the
Essenes seems to reflect it.
The Babylonian calendar had 360 days of twelve months of 30 days. Contemporary
Babylonian texts speak of months of thirty days, and even of a year of 6 60 day
“months” in Babylon, perhaps an attempt at rationalisation to match their counting
system. But Babylonian business documents kept months of standardised thirty days,
though the religious calendar seems to have been a luni-solar one. It is no accident
that the number of days in a year equalled the number of degrees in a heavenly cycle.
The shortfall from the full 365 days was made up by intercalation of the odd days.
The Persian calendar was the same because Artaxerxes was reported to have had 360
concubines, one for each day of the year. Presumably his wives were intercalated!
In this scheme, the months and even the days on the month had names taken from
yazatas. The tenth month, December to January, was the month of Ahuramazda (as
Creator, “Dadvah” or “Dai”), but Mithras had the seventh month (September to
October) when he had the great autumn festival. The spring festival was the
important New Year festival for Zoroastrians, beginning on “No Roz” (Norouz), New
Day in Persian. The Babylonian calendar began in Nisanu (Jewish, Nisan—March to
April) at the corn harvest and required an “akitu” or ritual placing of the images of
the gods from the temples to the outside of the city boundaries. It was therefore a
festival full of pageantry lasting a week. The Persians seem to have copied the whole
festival, although for them on the plateau it was at sowing time not harvest time, and
they made it their New Year festival. The six seasonal feasts of the Pagan Iranian
calendar were rededicated to the Amesha Spentas.
So, the Persians took the ceremonial of their annual renewal festival from the
Babylonians, though Old Iranian religion had celebrated the birth of Mithras (Mitra,
Mihr, Mica). The Babylonians believed that order that came out of chaos with the
defeat of the monster of chaos, Tiamat, by Marduk. Marduk was identified with
Mithras. Disorder and chaos ruled at the beginning of the festival, then over its
twelve days, representing the twelve months of the year, considered also to stand for
twelve periods of long time (millennia), order was restored via bonfires, lights and a
succession of rituals, processions and religious dramas. On one of the days chaos is
mimicked by a reversal of the normal positions of people in society. Masters became
servants, and servants masters. Mithraists took this celebration into Rome after the
wars with Macedonia, where it merged with and modified the Saturnalia, the festival
of an old rural fertility god. Here began the long-lived tradition of the Lord of Misrule
with the coronation of a mock king. Lamps were lit to make the spirits of darkness
flee.
The strange story in the book of Esther, was probably written in its present form
about 100 BC, as most of the present Old Testament was. The Persian monarch,
Ahasuerus (Xerxes), drops the queen, Vashti, and marries Esther, a Jewish woman.
This alone is highly important. Neither Zoroastrianism nor Judaism permitted mixed
marriages. The king must have regarded a Jewish woman as a Zoroastrian for the
marriage to be legal! The implication here therefore is that Judaism and
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Mazdayasnaism were considered the same religion by the Persian prince and by the
Jewish author. The closeness of the relationship between Israel and Persia is
indicated by the Semitic words in the later, Pahlavic parts of the Avesta. No such
intrusions are found in the Yashts and the Vendidad and obviously therefore not in
the Gathas.
Esther’s cousin and foster-father, Mordecai (Marduk), warns the Persian monarch
that people are plotting against him. A Persian Grand Vizier, Haman, who opposes
Mordecai, convinces the monarch to decree death against Mordecai and other Jews
in his empire, selected by lot, on a certain date. Esther, intervenes, and the Grand
Vizier is instead hanged (crucified?—crucifixion was the Persian punishment) and
Mordecai is appointed Grand Vizier. Instead of being killed themselves, the Jews slay
seventy-five thousand of their enemies.
The legend justifies a Jewish feast, the Feast of Lots, held at the Persian New Year,
celebrating the Jewish escape and the massacre of their enemies. Yehouah has no
role in the story, and the characters are all historically fictitious except for the king.
Esther is the goddess Ishtar (Anahita). Mordecai means Marduk (Merodach), who we
saw is Ahuramazda and therefore also Yehouah. Haman oddly enough is the king
again in another guise (perhaps standing for the king of the old year) because the
royal family name Achaemenides in Greek is Hakhamanish in Persian. The story is
said to be based on a Persian tale about the shrewdness of Harem queens.
The description in the story of the parade through the streets in royal robes, and of
mock combat, features in the Persian New Year celebrations, when the old year lost in
mock combat to the New Year and was hanged or crucified. The Jews took this New
Year celebration, like the rest of their religion, from the Persians and then had to find
a reason for it—much as Christians found reasons for celebrating Pagan festivals as
Christian holidays. The Persian and Jewish New years were at the spring equinox
—Easter (Esther) to us!
The older autumn festival was again dedicated to Mithras, the Babylonian festival to
Shamash being held in October. At “Mithrakana” or “Mihragan”, kings distributed
winter clothes. A festival was dedicated to Tiri in June when the festival of Tammuz
was bewailed, because it was the start of the Babylonian dry season when plants died
off in the heat. The link of Ishtar with both Tammuz and Nabu allowed the Iranians
to see Tiri as Tammuz. At Tiragan people bathed in rivers. These were not among the
Holy festivals Zoroaster prescribed. At the Adar-jashns they lit fires in their houses,
and, at Sada, they lit mid-winter bonfires, to nourish the sun and initiate his
strengthening. A grand bonfire was particularly placed near a stream to warm its
waters in anticipation of spring.
“Sada” preserves the meaning of the festival, for it is “the hundredth”, the hundredth
day from the end of the Zoroastrian winter—which had contracted from a full half
year to only five months, from the beginning of Aban (October-November) to the end
of Esfand (February-March). This uneven division of the holy year seemed to have
given mystical significance to the numbers seven and five. Here too is a hint of the
division of the year into pentacosts (fifties), winter neatly dividing into three of them.
Summer did not divide so neatly, four pentacosts with a remainder of ten. The extra
days might have been combined with the five intercalated days to give the New Year
holy festival which needed twelve days to represent the twelve epochal millenia of
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Mishnah
Zoroastrian cosmic time.
The feast of “hamaspathmaidyem” was in the last days of Esfand, the end of the year.
It was connected with a religious ceremony, perhaps including a remembrance of the
dead. Originally at the end of the month Azar (November-December) and
immediately before the month Dai (December-January), was a festival of the souls
(fravashis) of the departed. It corresponds precisely with our All Souls and All
Hallows eves. It must have been the original New Year feast at the end of the summer
at the autumn equinox, but was transferred in its importance to the beginning of
summer at the spring equinox.
So, the Iranians had notable feasts in the spring and the autumn. The spring festival
welcomed back the growth of herbage, and the autumn one was the Mithrakana, a
harvest festival for the end of the current season and a fertility festival for the coming
spring dedicated to Mithras. A sacrifice of a bull to Apollo was made at the Athenian
Bouphonia. It will be the practical source of the bull-slaying images in Roman
Mithraism, though the myth accounting for it drew on the heavenly Perseus astride
the bull Taurus. However, since all domestic animals return to the Ox-soul, any could
be used for sacrifice depending on the circumstances. With a different intention, it
seems a bull was sacrificed to Anahita too, but here to promote human fertility. In
Sasanian times, Mithrakana was the one time when the king could get drunk. Having
settled, it seems the Persians had two new years, one in the spring and one in the
autumn, but they celebrated other festivals including the solstices. The Jews had
different years too:
One the first day of Nisan is the beginning of the year for kings and festivals. On the
first day of Elul is the beginning of the tithing of cattle. On the first day of Tishri for the
beginning of years, and for the sabbatic years and the jubilee years, for the plants
and the vegetables. On the first day of Shabat is the beginning of tree-fruit.
So the Jews had four new years, but the religious one in spring was the most
important one in a theocracy, and Rosh ha-Shanah in the autumn preserved the old
harvest festival, as the occasion when creation is judged by God.
Herodotus says Persians had no temples, altars or statues of gods, and by Greek
standards, that was true. In Achaemenian times, Persian processions were led by an
empty chariot drawn by white horses. It was for Ahuramazda. A similar habit is
recorded in Urartu, but in Assyria, the chariot carried an image of the god, Ashur or
Ishtar. Zoroastrian worship was al fresco—all altars in Persia being, usually in pairs,
in open country—but, under the first Achaemenids, temples had appeared in Persia
to preserve the sacred flame. Xenophon describes the procession, led by sun chariots,
that took the sacrificial animals to the paired altars where they were sacrificed before
the king.
The Iranians always used the winged disc which originated in Egypt as a symbol of
Horus in the third millennium BC so Herodotus was only relatively correct about this,
and from the time of Artaxerxes, statues of Anahita became popular. The many sun
names like Surya, Asura, Ahura, Aura, Huar, Hvar, Khor, Hor, Ra and words for gold
(Aureus, Or), derived from its bright sun-like colour, betray a common origin and
perhaps the winged disc accompanied it. Note that many of these words came to
mean a “lord”, and the word “hero”, and names like Hercules will have the same
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origin, not to mention words like “har” meaning “high” or a “hill”.
The solar disc spread through the near east in the second millenium when Egypt was
its most imperial. Standing for the pharaoh who was the sun god incarnate, it came to
represent royalty and thence power. In Assyria a figure appears in the disc carrying a
bow or a ring in one hand while saluting with the other. The Persians took the motif
from the Assyrians. Yasht 19 explains the significance of Xvaranah, an Old Iranian
divinity, represented as a raptor, who was adapted to stand for the fravashi of the
king or, some think, Ahuramazda himself. It therefore hovered over the king in
symbolic scenes on inscriptions. Bronze objects from Urartu had this symbol in a
form thought close to that of Darius’s monument at Behistun, the earliest Persian
example. The word Hormuz (Ormuz, from Ahuramazda) still exists in use for the
straits in the Persian Gulf, an island and a town.
Alexander and the Persian Heritage
Bagoas poisoned Ochus in 338 BC, then after the short reign of Arses (338-337 BC),
Darius III Kodomanes (Codomannus) (335-330 BC) became the last of the Persian
shahs whom Alexander defeated in 333 BC, when he fled and was killed in 330 BC.
While he was seiging Tyre, Alexander had to suppress a revolt in Samaria. Josephus
says the Samarian religion was reformed by someone called Manasseh at this time.
Despite the antagonism between the Jews and the Samarians, Nehemiah informs us
that the noble priestly houses of Judah had many bonds of friendship with the
Samarian noble houses. According to 2 Kings 17, they had a religion of Yehouah but
of other gods also. It sounds closer to the original religion of the Israelites.
In fact, the author of 2 Kings tells us that the Assyrians had carried off the
inhabitants of Israel and replaced them by deportees from the north of Abarnahara,
who brought in their own gods and so did not “fear the Lord”. The Assyrian king sent
a priest of Yehouah to instruct the deportees in the religion of the land.
The puzzling aspect of it all is that these people were supposedly not Israelites, so
why should they have been bound by Yehouah’s covenant with the Israelites? The
truth is, of course, that not all the Israelites had been transported out by the
Assyrians. Indeed, the story suggests that the Assyrian king was doing what Cyrus
and Nabonidus did later—he sent a priest to train the natives in the proper worship of
the “god of the land”. Here we might have the origin of the earliest stories of “return”
in the bible—the “return” of Abraham and his family who came from just that part of
the Assyrian empire.
They seemed to take only partial notice of their instructor, if we are to believe the
scriptural account, for they continued to worship their own gods as well as Yehouah,
doubtless, the gods of the fathers! As in Judah, it worked only partially, and the
Assyrians did not keep power long enough to enforce it.
The Persians doubtless aimed to transform worship to the Lord of Heaven in Israel as
well as Judah, but the Samarians accepted it more readily having been primed by the
work of the Assyrians. If the Samarians more readily accepted the Torah and
abandoned the old polytheism, there was no need for all the Persian propaganda that
had to be published as prophetic pseudepigraphs to show the Am ha Eretz the error
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of their ways. Thus none of this got into the Samaritan bible.
Nehemiah 13:28 has it that the son of the Jewish High Priest, Joiada, married the
daughter of Sanballet, the Samarian governor, and so Nehemiah expelled him. Some
commentators think that this young man reformed the Samarian religion,
introducing the Pentateuch and temple worship on Mount Gerizim, and so equates
with the Manasseh of Josephus, though the dates are a century out. The Sanballat of
Nehemiah is confirmed by letters from the temple at Elephantine dated 407 BC in
which two sons are mentioned, each having a name ending in Iah, indicating that
Sanballat worshipped Yehouah. This early date makes Josephus wrong, but Sanballat
might have been a title so, there were probably successive ones.
The Samarians murdered the Macedonian governor. Samaria was destroyed by
Alexander in retaliation, and Alexander made Samaria into a military colony
occuppied by Macedonian veterans. The Jews were delighted.
Persia and Greece were rivals to influence the world, Persia by a political empire and
commerce and Greece by a cultural empire and commerce. Only political empires
stop at boundaries so the Greek sphere and the Persian sphere always overlapped
considerably, geographically in Asia Minor, but Greek traders, artisans, and soldiers
and generals as mercenaries, moved around the Persian Empire. The Persian rulers
were far sighted and sponsored Babylonian science. Naburimanni, an astronomer at
the time of Darius, calculated tables of lunar eclipses that were more accurate than
those of Ptolemy or even Copernicus.
Furthermore, Kidinnu, another astronomer in the fourth century BC, two centuries
before Hipparchus, discovered the precession of the equinoxes and calculated the
length of the year accurate to 7 minutes 16 seconds. The discovery of the precession
of the equinoxes gave authority to the Persian view of the universal god as a sun
beyond the sun—a god beyond the heavens that moved the heavens themselves! This
became the basis of Platonic philosophy and the beliefs of the Mithraists.
After Alexander, the Persian religion was left with no political base, so information
from earlier sources is especially valuable in knowing the nature of Zoroastrianism
originally. Unfortunately, Magian ceremonies were held without anyone not of the
faith permitted to observe, not at first for any reason of secrecy, but for purity
reasons. Non-believers were impure, or at least likely to be impure. Greeks reporters
were therefore dependent on what the Magi told them or translated for them from
their sacred books. The Magi were keen on proselytizing, but they were subject to a
government ministry which directed religious affairs, and this ministry will have had
its own political agenda, doubtless with the syncretistic aims of making it easier for
collaborating foreigners to associate with the True Belief.
The most important effect the Persians have had on the world is from their policy of
creating new local cults on the model given by Zoroaster but based on an old existing
cult. They set up the cult of Yehouah in the temple in Jerusalem based on the
universal god, Ahuramazda. Their aim was to present the emperor, known as the
“king of kings”, as the representative approved of the Universal God on earth. The
Universal God was therefore the “king of the king of kings”. Yehouah has this very
title (the Alenu Prayer), a title that we can hardly expect even liberal Persian kings to
tolerate unless they were happy that Yehouah was Ahuramazda! The Jewish
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scriptures are copper plated evidence of the success of this Persian policy. Cyrus is
incessantly praised.
The Rev G F McClear, sometime warden of St Augustine’s, Canterbury, writes in his
New Testament History:
As subjects of the Persian kings, the Jews were eminent for their loyalty and good
faith. While Egypt, Cyprus, Phoenicia, and other dependencies of the Persian crown,
were frequently in rebellion, the Jews remained steadfast in their allegiance to the
“Great King”, and increased rapidly alike in wealth and numbers.
This fidelity to the Persians even led Jaddua the High Priest to defy Alexander for a
time. As Alexander approached, having seiged and razed Tyre, the priest was lucky
enough to have a dream telling him to greet Alexander! He garlanded the city and
went forth in his priestly finery to welcome the conqueror. Alexander was as shrewd
as Cyrus, however, and fell prostrate before the priest in adoration at the holy name
inscribed on his tiara (a Persian head dress), and declared he had seen it all in a
vision. In fact, he must have been fully aware of the loyalty of the Jews and of the
reasons for their loyalty. He offered to bestowe on the Jews any privilege they might
select. McClear concludes:
They requested that the free enjoyment of their lives and liberties might be secured to
them, as also to their brethren in Media and Babylonia…
Alexander agreed, but note that there were enough Jews not only in Babylonia but
also at the heart of the Persian empire, in Media, to merit a special mention. These
were the three lands whose gods, albeit of different names, the Persians certainly
considered as “the God of Heaven”.
From these political manoeuvres came Judaism, Christianity and Islam, all the
important patriarchal religions. The Persians and Greeks rather than the Jews and
the Greeks were the founders of the western world.
Alexander’s burning and vandalism of Persepolis has always been considered
inexplicable. He had read his history and Alexander aimed to do what Cyrus and
Darius had done. He was always generous to enemies who yielded readily or caused
him little trouble. He burnt Tyre for forcing him into a long seige but otherwise
burning cities was out of character. The Persians had surrendered readily after their
major defeat at Issus in 333 BC and Alexander’s campaign in the west.
Darius III repeatedly offered terms to Alexander, increasingly generous terms,
virtually amounting to surrender, but Alexander refused. He overcame token
resistance at Gaugamela and the Persians folded. He entered Persepolis and dallied
there for four months, offering to train 3000 Persian princes in the techniques of the
Greeks, before destroying the city. It seems so odd to some historians that they say it
must have been an accident caused by drunken carousing, of which Alexander was
fond. Was it a deliberate act of vandalism because the Greek scholars that Alexander
took with him found the essence of Greek scholarship already in the sacred writings
of the Persians, showing the Greeks as well as the Jews were indebted to their
enemies?
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In the east, Iran lost Arachosia and Gandhara under Seleucus I to the Indian
Mauryan empire. These lands of ancient Iranian settlement, had been re-colonized in
Achaemenid times. Inscriptions there from the third century BC were written in good
Persian chancellery Aramaic. They also could speak Northwestern Prakrit, and these
eastern Iranians will have passed Zoroastrianism into India where it inspired
Mahayana Buddhism
In the second-third centuries AD, Bardesanes wrote of “the descendants of Persians
who lived out of Persia” as being still numerous and maintaining their traditional
customs in Egypt, Phrygia, and Galatia. Zoroastrian sanctuaries still existed in Asia
Minor, the oldest being at Zela in Pontic Cappadocia, founded in the sixth century BC
by Cyrus the Great or his generals. As the Iranians worshipped in high places, the
sanctuary was on a hill, banked up higher and encircled by a wall. Later this was one
of the temples to Anahita, frequently attested in Asia Minor, and which show the
Persian influence there. In the fourth century AD, many villages in Cappadocia were
still populated by Iranians.
Traces of them in Egypt are mainly names only, but a mithraion—presumably a
Zoroastrian sanctuary—is mentioned from the third century BC in Fayoum, and
“Basilios the Persian” practiced in his community some form of Zoroastrianism in the
fourth century AD. Temples let expatriate Iranian communities keep their identity by
offering them centers for religious and social life. They also attracted pilgrims for
their annual feast-days, bringing together Iranians from elsewhere. Persian Sibyllist
oracles were also known, conveying Persian prophecies and expectations.
Christians suppressed Persian temples in western Asia Minor when they gained
power after the third century AD, but Khusrau I Anushirvan negotiated with a
Byzantine emperor, as late as the sixth century, to have fire temples rebuilt, probably
in Cappadocia.
Temple and Diaspora
The Persians seemed to have meant the Hebrew people to have been all of the nations
of Abarnahara. The temple was set up in the Palestinian hill country but was meant to
be for the whole satrapy. The plan never had the time to take hold before Alexander
conquered the Persians—less than a century. The religion had caught hold, especially
in the temple state which it financed, but it never had time to unite the various people
of Abarnahara into an ethnos. The Jewish priesthood were left in charge of an
immensely valuable asset, the temple and therefore the religion, and the wider ethnos
of the Hebrews was identified with the Jews of Yehud. Paradoxically, all of those who
worshipped Yehouah were now Jews (Yehudim) whether they had ever been
associated with Yehud or not. Many had not. So, already at the start of the Hellenistic
era, Jews were widespread in Abarnahara and even beyond.
The Persians had encouraged all of those Canaanites and Babylonians who were
devoted to Ea, Yah, and Yehu to accept the primacy of the temple state, and had
provided a history which explained why they should—the diaspora of Samaria—and
why their religion had needed restoration—it had become corrupted through being
separated from its cult centre. Thus worshippers of Yehouah everywhere were
persuaded they had been led in apostasy and adopted the Persian line that they
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should join the “remnant” who had remained pure. In Babylonia and even in Iran,
many people worshipped Ea and thus became Jews. Even at its outset, Judaism had a
diaspora! Before long Phoenician Jews carried the religion into Carthage in north
Africa and to large merchant cities in the Mediterranean like Rome.
Judaism was a worldwide phenomenon in a remarkably short time, but it was the
Egyptian Ptolemies who stimulated the extension of the scriptures from the relatively
short and simple legends left by the Persians when they offered to translate them into
Greek to add them to the Alexandrine Library in the third century BC. Much of it was
freshly written or extended by redactors working to a Ptolemaic, pro-Greek,
anti-Seleucid Babylonian agenda, claiming that the Greek archives allowed them to
vastly expand the sketchy notion of Moses, the Jews at first had.
In the second century BC, the Maccabees re-nationalised what had been intended as
a universal religion by the Persians. They claimed, as usual, to be puritans trying to
keep the religion free of the Hellenization that was supposed to have been forced on
them. Needless to say, they were not, but continued the Hellenization, though the
nationalization of the cult must have dismayed the more catholic Jews now spread
out over the world and thoroughly Hellenized out of necessity. Their dismay became
the basis of a newly universalistic Judaism. It was Christianity.
The justification of religious reform is often presented as the need to get back to a
more original purer religion. The Persians pretended that their own utterly new set of
laws called “The Law”, or now Deuteronomy, had been found and implemented by
Josiah 200 years before. It was not true, but was written up in the propaganda
history that they were preparing to give the new colony an identity. The Persian
colonists were restoring the reforms that Josiah had already introduced but the
apostates who had remained in the land, the Am ha Eretz, had undermined. Could
any faithful worshipper of Yehouah contradict this?
Certain epigraphic changes dated to the time of Josiah are taken as evidence of the
reality of Josiah’s reforms such as the preference for “yhw” in the south instead of the
northern form “yw”. Unfortunately, the dating of everything in the Palestinian hills
has been botched by the Albright school who refused to accept that anything
happened after the exile. They dated everything as pre-exilic, leaving huge gaps in the
strata and epigraphy after the supposed “Return”. Many inscriptions like these
therefore have to be dated afresh and many will be found to be post-exilic, in the
Persian period, when they were thought to have been pre-exilic and attributed to
people like Josiah. So, the form “yhw” might be evidence of Persian not earlier Jewish
reform.
Anyone who believes the biblical history must wince at Yehouah’s awful injustice to
Josiah. He followed instructions to reform the apostate religion, did it successfully,
then God sent the Jews into captivity anyway because it apparently was not enough to
make up for the apostasy of Manasseh.
Significant archaeological changes usually accompany a conquest or major regime
change, they rarely occur with no strong cultural reason accompanying them. While,
it is not impossible that Josiah effected a significant reform, it looks unlikely with the
record of deviant rulers in both Israel and Judah, and when a clear reason for
archaeological changes immediately follows when the Persians send colonists to take
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over. Indeed, the archaeological boundary that ought to be obvious is when the
“Returners” return! Even in the biblical scheme of things that ought to be the obvious
archaeological break point.
In any case, Josiah never succeeded in centralising the cult in Jerusalem, though it
was supposed to have been an important aim, yet that is precisely what the Persians
did, albeit not in the times of Cyrus and Darius I as the tendentious biblical history
makes out, but in the time of Darius II, who in fact is the biblical Darius, not Darius
the Great. An ostracon found at Arad refers to a local “temple of Yehouah”. Curiously,
an honest and iconoclastic investigator, like Garbini, who willingly accepts that the
crux of Jewish history was the “Return”, can sneer at those (“though of course there
are not many of them”) who argue that only the Persian institution of Judaism makes
historical sense out of the confusion caused by the spurious history in the bible.
Massoume Price in The Iranian confirms that Zoroastrianism made a place for
certain foreign gods as helpers of Ahuramazda. The ruling principle was the
advancement of reliable communities and the punishment of disloyal ones. Persian
kings were ruthless with rebellions, including ones by the Persian satraps and
members of the royal household. Groups which rebelled were punished irrespective
of race or religion. The Jews were usually loyal and so were prosperous.
Other temple communities were set up besides the Jewish one—Cyprus, Cilicia, Lycia
and other places in Asia Minor had their own temple states. Even such remote tribes
as the Arabs, Colchians, Ethiopians and Sakai had. The Achaemenian administration
allowed them all to keep their religions with apparently little interference but had a
chancellery minister of religions, and it is inconceivable that he did not aim to
regularize worship to suit imperial policy. The case of Egypt is revealing how discreet
the Persians were. Egypt was under Persian domination from 525 BC to about
405 BC, and then from 343 BC to 332 BC. The Egyptians rebelled several times, and
Egyptologists think the shahs from Xerxes were disillusioned by Egypt, and paid it
little attention. Egyptian civilization was assumed to have continued essentially
unaffected by the Persian conquest, and the lack of Persian material evidence in
Egypt was taken to corroborate the idea.
A remarkable find in the Western Desert in Egypt shows that the Persians had a
policy of regional development. South of the Khargeh Oasis, in the region of Dush,
Michel Wittmann excavated an entire buried village at Ayn Manâwîr, assiduously
publishing reports every year. Its water came from more than ten qanats (Persian
underground canals) discovered there. Perhaps it was intended as a temple state, the
temple of Hibis having been built there by Darius, and an undiscovered temple of
Osiris was also unearthed. In the temple of Osiris were found hundreds of precisely
dated archival ostraca written in demotic. Archaeological and written sources were
found together, allowing the texts to date the pottery exactly. The documents
themselves are private contracts, drawn up among Egyptians. Not a single Iranian or
Persian personal name has yet been found in them, though they are dated by the
regnal years of Xerxes, Artaxerxes and Darius, probably Darius II. Thus, the
documentation of Ayn Manâwîr covers the entire fifth century BC, which is now
particularly well documented. Moreover, for the first time, specialists can certainly
date qanats to the Achaemenid period. Previously, qanats were known from the
Hellenistic historian Polybius, who writes about Iran:
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Histories, 10:28:2f
In this region of which I speak, there is no water visible on the surface, but even in
the desert there are a number of underground channels communicating with wells
unknown to those not acquainted with the country… At the time when the Persians
were the rulers of Asia they gave to those who conveyed a supply of water to places
previously unirrigated the right of cultivating the land for five generations… people
incurred great expense and trouble making underground channels reaching a long
distance.
Polybius explicitly credits the shah’s governments with a plan of stimulating regional
development. For investing money and labour in bringing the land under cultivation,
local communities had free use of it for five generations. Unlike the Babylonian
administrators, the Persians were keenly interested in what went on in the empire,
but they were astonishingly discreet about it.
Ayn Manâwîr is a village that was created by the Persians, and using a technology
that only they had, the qanat, but were happy to share. Surveys show that other
nearby sites also had water supplied by the same method at that time. Together with
the temple built by Darius, the archaeology suggests a grand plan of regional
development. It is reminiscent of the Persian planning of the temple state of Yehud.
Ultimately the purpose was trust, control, and improved economics, to make for good
governance and a flow of taxes into the regional treasuries, the very aims of the
temple states.
Persians occupied the highest positions in each temple state, giving them control of
the cultural, legal and administrative traditions of the conquered nations. Nominally,
these ethnic and religious minorities followed their own legal code in personal
matters such as marriage and family law. The conquered people were given land
allotments in exchange for taxes and military service. Among these settlers were all
groups such as Babylonians, Aramaeans, Jews, Indians and Sakai. In Susa itself,
besides the local population and the Persians, there were large numbers of
Babylonians, Egyptians, Jews and Greeks.
After the conquest of the Achaemenian empire by Alexander, the Seleucid Greeks and
Parthians followed the same policies. All the main cities had Persian, Aramaean,
Babylonian, Greek, Christian and Jewish temples. The Jewish chronicles mention the
Parthian period as one of the best in their history. Jews enjoyed a long period of
peace and had close contacts with the government. Centers of Jewish life in the
Parthian empire were in Mesopotamia at Nisibis and Nehardea. A representative
called the “exilarch” represented the Jewish minority at court and also carried out
functions of a political-administrative nature. Jews took an active part in organizing
the silk trade, supported by the kings and started a community in China.
Philo and Flavius Josephus documented the earlier relations between Jews and
Parthians. The Jews took part in the rebellions against Trajan in Mesopotamia
(116 AD), adding to their unpopularity in the Roman world after the Jewish War of
66-70 AD, and shortly, in 132-135 AD, they were to rebel under Bar Kosiba and finish
up evicted from Jerusalem, taking many Jewish refugees into the Parthian empire.
In the reign of the Sassanid dynasty from 205 AD until the conquest of the Muslims
in 651 AD, oppression of rival religions to Zoroastrianism began. Kidir, the chief
Mobad (priest) under King Bahram II (276-293 AD), promoted Zoroastrianism in the
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T R Glover
empire and persecuted other religions. He declared:
The false doctrines of Ahriman and of the idols suffered great blows and lost
credibility. The Jews (Yahud), Buddhists (Shaman), Hindus (Brahman), Nazarenes
(Nasara), Christians (Kristiyan), Baptists (Makdag) and Manichaeans (Zandik) were
smashed in the empire, their idols destroyed, and the habitations of the idols
annihilated and turned into abodes and seats of the gods.
All of these were religions that had been regarded as Juddin, acceptable, in earlier
times, and had syncretized enormously with Zoroastrianism.
It is a curious revelation that a large number of Jews, in spite of the freedom given by
Cyrus, refused then to return to Palestine, as they refuse today, and Jewish scholars
tell us that those who remained in Babylonia looked on themselves as the pick of the
Jewry. The 87th psalm when it is unravelled, is a protest that the Lord counts a man
born at Babylon as much a Jew as a child of Jerusalem. Jewish learning flourished
there, and one of the rabbis lays it down that to live in Babylon is the same as to live
in the Holy Land.
Judaism was the religion of the Juddin, a syncretic religion for cooperative people set
up by the Persians. Yehud was set up as the center of it, and their presence elsewhere
was explained by the Babylonian captivity. Few of them wanted to return to a place
they had never known, but they accepted Yehud as their origin, the Temple
priesthood as their leaders, and the myths planted by the Persians as their own. By
the time of the Sassanids, they had forgotten or abandoned the earlier policy of
syncretism in the fear that the children were overwhelming the parent.
Persia and the Essenes
Zoroastrian parallels with the Qumran documents are huge. The Damascus
Document condemns those who enter the New Covenant but then leave to join the
Liar. The Habakkuk Commentary enlarges on the theme of the Liar, telling of
trouble within the community when the Liar secedes from the order and comes into
conflict with the Teacher of Righteousness. In 2 Corinthians 11:31, Paul is insistent
that he “does not lie” apparently answering an unpleasant criticism of him. The
choice of language in these instances stems from Zoroaster.
The Qumran Community was an apocalyptic sect. They were expecting the end of the
world just like Zoroaster. The Jewish messianic ideal of a Deliverer came from Persia.
The Enoch Literature is Persian of about the fourth century BC. Apocalypticism
seems to owe everything to Persia and the flavour of Persian religion on Judaism
stems largely from the apocalyptic writers. The Qumran library proves that
Apocalypticism was a considerable movement in Judaism not merely a fringe
interest. Christian theologians used to believe that the anticipation of God’s kingdom
to come was uniquely Jesus’s message. Now we see it was hundreds of years old, had
come out of Persia with Cyrus’s “returners” and had been perpetuated by the Essenes.
A dualistic doctrine was almost unknown to the Jews. Jacques Duchesne-Guillemin
notes, in the Encyclopaedia Iranica, that the doctrine of two spirits was only
sporadically attested in Jewish literature. In Judaism, the spirits under God’s
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command were not always good. God sent an evil spirit between Abimelech and the
citizens of Shechem, and Saul was troubled by an evil spirit after the “spirit of God”,
and presumably therefore good, departed from him.
The Qumran documents speak of Good and Evil, Light and Dark, the Way of
Darkness and the Way of Light, the Spirit of Darkness and the Spirit of Light, The
Children of Darkness and the Children of Light, Truth is Light, Falsehood is
Darkness. The Teacher of Righteousness is opposed by Belial, the Demon of Evil. The
Way of Good leads to salvation, the Way of Evil leads to torment. Of the four gospels,
John reflects this terminology most accurately showing its Essene links. Good and the
evil spirits are opposed to each other, in apocryphal, Christian, and rabbinical work.
In the apocryphal Gospel of Judas (second century AD), three spirits appear!—the
spirits of truth and error that serve men, and “in their midst is the spirit of
intelligence, able to turn wherever he chooses”. In Hermas, the holy spirit and the
evil spirit dwell together in man. But, the Manual of Discipline (Community Rule) of
the Dead Sea Scrolls has a short account of the two spirits. The fact that God created
all things is followed by:
He created man to have dominion over the world and made for him two spirits, that
he might walk by them until the appointed time of his visitation. They are the spirits of
truth and error. In the abode of light are the origins of truth, and from the source of
darkness are the origins of error. In the hand of the prince of lights is dominion over
all sons of righteousness. In the ways of light they walk. And in the hand of the angel
of darkness is all dominion over the sons of error. And in the ways of darkness they
walk. And by the angel of darkness is the straying of all the sons of righteousness,
and all their sin and their iniquities and their guilt, and the transgressions of their
works in his dominion… But God in the mysteries of his understanding and in his
glorious wisdom has ordained a period for the rule of error, and in the appointed time
of punishment he will destroy it forever. And then shall come out forever the truth of
the world.
These words call to mind the Zoroastrian doctrine of the two spirits, as embodied in
the ethical and eschatological dualism of the Gathas. But the Qumran works are not
slavishly gathic in origin. Thus the good and evil spirits are identified with with light
and darkness respectively, a later doctrine. The critical difference is that, in the
Gathas, Zoroastrian doctrine specifies free choice, but the Qumran sectarians seemed
to believe in predestination. Now the thesis presented on these pages is that Judaism
was a religion imposed on the people of Canaan by the Persians, to oblige them to be
obedient to the Shahanshah. Obedience cannot involve choice, so the imposed
religion could not be the same as the Zoroastrian religion of the Persians themselves,
which did. Thus one vital difference between the religion of the masters and the
religion they imposed on their subjects was this very matter of free choice. The
subjects had none. They were obliged to accept what God had prescribed for them,
and to disobey it was eternal death and torture. It seems that the Gospel of Judas was
making an attempt to reintroduce the ideal of choice with its the notion of the third
spirit of intelligence.
Duchesne-Guillemin explains that the identity of the spirits with light and darkness is
an invention of Zurvanism, usually considered to be a later development of
Mazdayasnaism. The Zurvanists held that the two spirits, Ohrmuzd (light) and
Ahriman (dark), were created by a supreme God of time, Zurvan. Zurvanism
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prevailed in Iranian religions in the first century BC when the Essenes were active.
Along with this change, predestination replaced free choice. Josephus wrote:
The sect of the Essenes holds that Destiny is master of all things and that nothing
happens to men but what has been decreed by it.
The Dead Sea Scrolls generally confirms this, clearly regarding life as a lottery:
According to each man’s inheritance in truth he does right, and so he hates error, but
according to his possession in the lot of error he does wickedly in it, and so he
abhors truth.
Thou has cast for man an eternal lot.
But they seemed to try to square the circle by making choice possible too in that by
choosing righteousness, men could overcome the destiny written for them.
Duchesne-Guillemin goes on to say that the Middle Persian word “menog” has
meanings strikingly similar to the meanings of the Hebrew word “ruach”, used in the
sectarian documents for:
1. the two spirits,
2. the two opposing forces in man,
3. various other human characteristics or abilities.
Apparently citing R C Zaehner’s Zurvan, a Zoroastrian Dilemma, DuchesneGuillemin writes:
The complex of notions associated with the idea of “menog” forms part of a coherent
system in Iran, and stands in complementary opposition to the term “getig”, while in
Judaism the development… never comes to form anything like a coherent system.
Ahuramazda had forethought whereas Ahriman had none, the only distinction
between them. Ohrmuzd knew the destiny of the world but his opposite did not. A
description of God in the scrolls is El de’oth, the God of knowledge, suggestive of the
origins of Gnosticism. A fifth century Armenian creation myth has Zurvan addressing
Ahriman with the words:
I have made Ohrmuzd reign above thee.
Some such justification must have been used to make Ahuramazda into the God of
the spirit (menog) while Ahriman remained the god of the material world (getig),
thus cementing the base of Gnosis.
At Qumran, the present age is dominated by the evil spirit:
So shall they do year by year all the days of the dominion of Belial… And [the world]
has wallowed in the ways of wickedness in the dominion of error until the appointed
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L H Mills, Zoroaster, Philo, the Achaemenids and Israel, Oxford 1903
time of judgment which has been decreed.
There is also a single allusion to belief in physical resurrection, a Zoroastrian
doctrine, in the Qumran scrolls, in hymn 17:
For the sake of Thy glory Thou hast purified man of sin… that… he may partake of
the lot of Thy Holy Ones. Bodies gnawed by worms may be raised from the dust to
the counsel [of Thy truth]… that he may stand before Thee with the everlasting host.
Philo is thought to have been close to the Essenes and their brothers and sisters, the
Therapeutae. Yet, Philo’s religious allegories are considered to have been influenced
by the Gathas, with which they have significant similarities. The six Dunameis of
Philo, sort of angelic rays of god linking him with the world, are the Amesha Spentas.
They fill the world with God’s presence and keep it in harmony. He calls them the six
Cities of Refuge, which links the concept with the romance of Joseph and Aseneth,
Aseneth being interpreted as meaning “City of Refuge” after her return from apostasy
to the Jewish god.
Philo was influenced by Persia just as the Essenes were, though western scholars in
their usual arrogance have tried to make out that the Persians were influenced by
Philo! Mills was more honest:
Philo drank in his Iranian lore from pages of his exilic Bible, or from the Bible books
which were as yet detached, and which not only recorded Iranian edicts from Persian
kings, but which themselves were half made up of Jewish-Persian history.
When God says: “Let us make man”, (Gen 1:26) Philo rationalizes the “us” as God
addressing his Dunameis. Philo made the creative instrument of god, the Logos, as an
aspect of the Father, but there were other Logoi who had roles akin to those of the
Amesha Spentas. Plato had the same idea, god leaving the creation to a craftsman,
the Demiurgos. There is not the least reason why these ideas should not have derived
from Persian religion.
The Essenes used a solar calendar of twelve months of 30 days. The Persians used a
similar calendar, the difference only being that the remaining five days were all
collected together in the manner of the Egyptians rather than the Essenes. The year
started at different dates for different purposes, just as the Jews had a religious year
and a commercial year starting at different times in the year. The Persian reformed
calendar is thought to have been introduced in 441 BC (or 481 BC). So, Ezra or
Nehemiah could have brought it as part of their reforms to Yehud.
The Persians considered leprosy a severe punishment for falsehood, for “lying against
the sun”—breaking a promise. The Essenes might have used the same terminology,
regarding the Jerusalem priesthood as breaking their promises given to God, and
therefore being called lepers.
Christianity adopted these doctrines from the pro-Persian factions—baptism,
communion (the haoma ceremony), guardian angels, the heavenly journey of the
soul, worship on Sunday, the celebration of Mithras’ birthday on December 25th,
celibate priests that mediate between man and God, the Trinity, Zvarnah—the idea
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that emanations from the sun are collected in the head and radiate in the form of
nimbus and rays, and asha-arta, “the true prayer”. Centuries later in Greece this
became Logos or “true sentence” and like in Persia it was associated with fire.
Mithraism is widely considered to be a syncretistic religion, that is, a combination of
Persian, Babylonian and Greek influences. However, the Greek influence seems to be
limited to the identification in Greece of Mithras with the Greek god Perseus. The
Babylonian influence is said to have been astrology, but the Persians were also
interested in astrology. Zoroastrians worshipped at altars on hills and had a whole
class of professional Magi or priests who had lots of time on their hands to do
astrological research.
Rather than a syncretistic religion, it would be more proper to call Mithraism a
Zoroastrian subcult or heresy. The center of the Mithraic cult was in Tarsus in Cilicia,
Southeast Turkey. This is whence Paul, the founder of the Christian church, came as a
young man. By one of the perpetual coincidences of Christianity, the popular festival
of the Mysteries of Mithras were celebrated at the spring equinox.
The New Testament was written, 300 years after the Persian empire was founded, yet
it is remarkably Persian in some of its crucial terms.
“King of Kings” and “Lord of Lords” were Persian titles for their Shahanshah
—literally, King of Kings
Paul insisted that the women of Corinth should wear a veil in church, but he called
it an “exousia” or an “authority”. This was the name of the veil worn by Persian
women to show they were under the authority of their father or husband.
The agent of the Persian king was the “man sent” by him—his “apostle!” Only the
man sent directly from the court of the Shah at Susa could override the authority
of the satrap. In this sense Ezra was certainly an apostle.
John’s gospel calls an official, refered to as a centurion in Luke and a Chiliarch
(colonel) in Matthew, a Basilikos, or a “Royal”, a Persian rank.
Paul’s insight on the road to Damascus was that instead of treating Jesus as a false
saviour, he could be identified as the true saviour if combined with the new idea of
“the second coming”. That would cure the embarrassing fact that nothing had come
of Jesus’s time on earth. The rest was simple, Paul identified Jesus with Mithras and
taught a modified Mithraism. That got Paul branded as a heretic by the Jerusalem
church and James the brother of Jesus. Mithraic ideas were so generally attractive
that they eventually won out.
In 2 Corinthians 11:12-15, Paul criticizes the archapostles as disguising themselves as
“Servants of Righteousness” and uses the sentence “Satan disguises himself as an
Angel of Light” both betraying Qumran and therefore Persian influence and
apparently deliberately used against the upholders of the Community tradition.
If Ahuramazda originally created two spirits, rather than simply being one of them
created by Zurvan, he is responsible for evil in the world. He cannot be a purely good
god, though the later development of the religion identified Ahuramazda with the
Good Spirit. Christians like to think that their Father god, in heaven is purely good
too, but they do not read their bibles. Amos asks:
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Dt 4:24; 9:3
Heb 12:29
Ezek 8:16
Acts 10:9
Shall evil befall a city and Yehouah hath not done it?
The author of 1 Kings says it is Yehouah’s will to send a lying spirit into the mouths of
400 prophets.
Christians like to say that Zoroastrianism is dualist unlike their own monotheism, yet
there is not the least difference in practice between them, and to invent doctrinal
differences is pure sophistry. Judaism and Christianity postulate a good god opposed
by an evil god but ultimately the good will triumph. All forms of Zoroastrianism are
the same. However the good and evil came about is irrelevant. The fact that good will
triumph is the encouragement to people to be good and finish up on the winning
side, otherwise the three systems are entirely dualist in practice and everyone, as
Zoroaster says, has an equal choice between choosing good or choosing evil.
Zoroaster accepted fire as the symbol of the divine, as the ultimate purifying agent.
Jews and Christians can have no objection to this symbolism. Deuteronomy declares:
For the Lord thy God is a consuming fire, even a jealous God.
And to remind Christians Hebrews repeats it:
For our God is a consuming fire.
Moreover, if Mithras, seen as the Holy spirit and also the sun, took on the attributes
of Ahuramazda as a god beyond the sun, then the Jews must accept that at the time of
Ezekiel and later still, if the Essenes are to be considered, themselves worshipped the
sun:
He brought me into the inner court of the Lord’s house, and, behold, at the door of
the temple of the Lord, between the porch and the altar, were about five and twenty
men, with their backs toward the temple of the Lord, and their faces toward the east;
and they worshipped the sun toward the east.
Christians have no need to feel superior because their most famous apostle
essentially did the same:
Peter went up upon the housetop to pray about the sixth hour.
The time given is noon, so Peter is praying at the highest station of the sun, a
meaningful time for him to pray as it was to the Essenes, but otherwise an odd place
and time to pray. And it was so hot it gave him hallucinations. Elsewhere (Acts 3:1),
the “hour of prayer” is the ninth hour. It seems likely that the Essenes marked each of
the stations of the sun with hymns and prayers.
When, in his letters, Paul speaks of the third heaven:
I knew a man in Christ above fourteen years ago, (whether in the body, I cannot tell;
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2 Cor 12:2
or whether out of the body, I cannot tell: God knoweth;) such an one caught up to the
third heaven,
he is suggesting that there were different levels to the cosmos below the highest
heaven. The Persians thought that there were seven levels or zones to the world, the
seventh being the highest, whence our expression that bliss is being in seventh
heaven.
If Christianity was revealed, it is time Christians found out properly when it was and
who by.
-oOoDr Michael David Magee
Michael D Magee was born in Hunslet, an industrial suburb of Leeds, Yorkshire, in
1941. He attended Cockburn High School in South Leeds. He won a studentship to
the Royal Military College of Science, Shrivenham, where he graduated with an
honours degree in natural science in 1963. He went on to obtain a PhD degree from
the University of Aston in Birmingham in 1967 and a teaching qualification, a PGCE,
from Huddersfield before it was a university.
He carried out research at the Universities of Aston and Bradford, and at the Wool
Industries Research Association, taught in a Further Education College in Devon for
seven years and for ten years was an advisor to the UK government at the National
Economic Development Office in London.
He has written three books, and, mainly in collaboration with Professor S Walker, a
dozen scientific papers on the structure and interactions of small molecules
investigated using microwave radiation. Working for the government he has written
or edited some forty publications on microeconomic issues, and very many discussion
papers and reports for the Sector Working Parties (SWPs) and Economic
Development Committees (EDCs)—Wool Textiles, Man Made Fibres, Footwear and
Electronics—of which he was secretary at various times in the 1980s.
He was brought up by Christian parents but was never indoctrinated into one dogma
and was able from an early age to make his own judgements about the Christian
religion.
http://askwhy.co.uk/index.php
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