excerpted from N. F. Gier, Theology Bluebook, Chapter 12
Zoroastrian
influences on late Judaism was pervasive, profound, and continues with us today.1
The traditional claim that the Jews learned monotheism from the Zoroastrians during the
Babylonian captivity can be disputed by the fact that by that time Zoroaster's strict
monotheism had been compromised by polytheistic practices. The famous inscriptions of
Darius, although mentioning the supreme God Ahura Mazda on almost every line, nonetheless
refer twice to other gods which are.2
It was not
so much monotheism that the exilic Jews learned from the Persians as it was universalism,
the belief that one God rules universally and will save not only the Jews but all those
who turn to God. This universalism does not
appear explicitly until Second Isaiah, which by all scholarly accounts except some
fundamentalists, was written during and after the Babylonian exile. The Babylonian captivity was a great blow to many
Jews, because they were taken out of Yahweh's divine jurisdiction. Early Hebrews believed that their prayers could
not be answered in a foreign land.
The central ideas of heaven and a fiery
hell appear to come directly from the Israelite contact with Iranian religion. Pre-exilic books are explicit in their notions the
afterlife: there is none to speak of. The
early Hebrew concept is that all of us are made from the dust and all of us return to the
dust. There is a shadowy existence in Sheol, but the beings there are so insignificant
that Yahweh does not know them. The evangelical writer John Pelt reminds us that the
inhabitants of Sheol are never called souls (nephesh).4
The claims about an advanced
eschatology in the psalms cannot be supported. The
judgment of the wicked in Ps. 1 may be due again to Persian influences, as most scholars
date the writing of this psalm after the exile. But
even if it is pre-exilic Dahood has established enough Ugaritic parallels to make
this a possibility there is no explicit mention of a Last Judgment or an end of the
world. The punishment of the wicked could
just as well be worldly as other-worldly. This
interpretation is certainly to be preferred given the general context of early Hebrew
thought.
The fiery judgment and immortality
mentioned in Ps. 21:9-10 has also been used to support the idea of an advanced eschatology
in the psalms. Mitchell Dahood helps
interpret these passages correctly. The
Canaanite parallels show that God makes the king, not any other human, immortal. Furthermore, those who are burned are the king's
foes, not all the wicked; and the burning furnace is probably the mouth of Yahweh and not
any burning Hell.5
Some say that the Hebrew ge-hinnom is fiery hell independent of Persian
influences. But all references to ge-hinnom refer explicitly to a definite geographic
place, the valley of Hinnom outside Jerusalem. The
only eschatological implications we can find are in Jer. 7:31ff, where Jeremiah predicts
that the Lord will destroy the place and it will be used for the disposal of dead bodies. This is obviously not the place of fiery torment
of the New Testament gehenna, which was
definitely influenced by Zoroastrian eschatology. Even
an evangelical scholar admits that gehenna a place of eternal torment is a late concept,
probably first century B.C.E.6
Saosyant, a savior born from
Zoroaster's seed, will come and the dead shall be resurrected, body and soul. As the final accounting is made, husband is set
against wife and brother against brother as the righteous and the damned are pointed out
by the divine judge Saosyant. Personal and
individual immortality is offered to the righteous; and, as a final fire melts away the
world and the damned, a kingdom of God is established for a thousand years.7
Satan as the adversary or Evil One does
not appear in the pre-exilic Hebrew books. In
Job, one of the very oldest books, Satan is one of the subordinate deities in God's
pantheon. Here Satan is God's agent, and God
gives him permission to persecute Job. The
Zoroastrian Angra Mainyu, the Evil One, the eternal enemy of God, is the prototype for
late Jewish and Christian ideas of Satan. One
scholar claims that the Jews acquired their aversion to homosexuality, not present in pre-exilic
times, to the Iranian definition of the devil as a Sodomite.8
In 1 Chron. 21:1 (a book
with heavy Persian influences), the Hebrew word satan
appears for the first time as a proper name without an article. Before the exile, Satan was not a separate entity
per se, but a divine function performed by the Yahweh's subordinate deities (sons of God)
or by Yahweh himself. For example, in Num. 22:22 Yahweh, in the guise of mal'ak Yahweh, is a satan for Balaam
and his ass.
The theory of religious influence from
Persia is based not only on the generation spent in exile but the 400 years following in
which the resurrected nation of Israel lived under strong Persian dominion and influence. The chronicler made his crucial correction to 2
Sam. 24:1 about 400 B.C.E. Persian influence
increases in the later Hebrew works like Daniel and especially the intertestamental books. Therefore Satan as a separate evil force in direct
opposition to God most likely came from the explicit Zoroastrian belief in such an entity. This concept is not consistent with pre-exilic
beliefs.
There is no question
that the concept of a separate evil principle was fully developed in the Zoroastrian Gathas (ca. 1,000 B.C.E.). The principal demon, called Druj (the Lie), is
mentioned 66 times in the Gathas. But the priestly Jews would also have been exposed
to the full Avestan scripture in which Angra Mainyu is mentioned repeatedly. His most prominent symbol is the serpent, so along
with the idea of the Lie, we have the prototype for the serpent/tempter, in
the priestly writers' garden of Genesis.10 There is no evidence that the Jews
in exile brought with them any idea of Satan as a separate evil principle.
In Zoroastrianism the
supreme God, Ahura Mazda, gives all humans free-will so that they may choose between good
and evil. As we have seen, the religion of
Zoroaster may have been the first to discover ethical individualism. The first Hebrew prophet to speak unequivocally in
terms of individual moral responsibility was Ezekiel, a prophet of the Babylonian exile. Up until that time Hebrew ethics had been guided
by the idea of the corporate personality that, e.g., the sins of the fathers are
visited upon the sons (Ex. 20:1-2).
In 1 Cor. 15:42-49 Paul definitely assumes a dual-creation theory which seems to follow the outlines of Philo and the Iranians. There is only one man (Christ) who is created in the image of God, i.e., according to the intellectual creation of Gen. 1:26 (à la Philo). All the rest of us are created in the image of the dust man, following the material creation of Adam from the dust in Gen. 2:7.
Endnotes
1. R. C. Zaehner is probably the
world's foremost Zoroastrian scholar and he gives the best summary of Zoroastrian
influences on Judaism in The Comparison of Religions
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1959), pp. 134-53.
2. This reference to other gods
could have just been for diplomacy's sake, just as Jephthah recognizing the authority of
the gods of the Ammonites and Moabites in Judges 11. But there is no question that
polytheism creeps back into later Zoroastrianism with references to other gods in the Vendidad (Fargard
19:23, 28, and 30).
3. Albright, op. cit., p. 362.
4. John Pelt, The Soul, the Pill, and the Fetus (New York: Dorrance, 1973), p. 18.
5. Dahood, Vol. 1, p. 133.
6. The New Bible Dictionary, p. 390. Although the author does
not say how late gehenna became fiery Hell, we assume that he is following standard
scholarship on this issue.
7. Yashts, pp. 220-2; 306-7; Bundahish in Sacred Books and Early Literature of the
East (New York, 1917), pp. 179-184.
8. Horn, Homo, p. 78.
9. G. von Rad, Theologisches Wörterbuch zum Neuen Testament, Vol.
2, p. 73.
10. See R. C. Zaehner, The Teachings of the Magi (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1976), p. 47.