Zorastrismo giudaismo

The Question of Religious Influence: The Case of Zoroastrianism, Judaism, and ChristianityAuthor(s): James BarrSource: Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. 53, No. 2 (Jun., 1985), pp. 201-235Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1464919Accessed: 20/04/2009 04:24

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Journal of the American Academy of Religion, LIII/2

THE QUESTION OF RELIGIOUS INFLUENCE: THE CASE OF ZOROASTRIANISM,

JUDAISM, AND CHRISTIANITY

JAMES BARR

It is customary to connect certain phenomena of the later Old Testa- ment and of postbiblical Judaism with Iranian influence. The development within Jewish religion of such matters as angels, dualism, eschatology, and the resurrection of the body is commonly attributed to the impact of Iran- ian religion. This would not be surprising, at least in theory; for the Jews lived about two centuries under the Pax Persica, and some of their most important books were written in that time.

It therefore is striking that, on the whole, biblical and Jewish studies have remained very much aloof from the study of Iranian language, literature, and religion. For most biblical scholars, the "Oriental background of the Old Testament" has meant the Semitic background, perhaps also the Egyptian and the Hittite, but much less the Iranian. The energetic effort invested in work on Akkadian and Ugaritic parallels stands in surprising contrast to the absence of similar attention to Persian materials. Part of the explanation for this circumstance lies in the attrac- tion of novelty. The Avesta was known in the West from the end of the eighteenth century, and it therefore provided materials for exploration long before Akkadian, and still longer before Ugaritic, evidence was known. As usual, some of the theories built upon Avestan evidence came to seem highly unlikely, and it was doubtless felt that the resources of this literature had been fully exploited. Much of Old Testament scholarship in the 1980s shows little greater consciousness of the Iranian sources than existed before the mid-nineteenth century.

One also must consider the problem of linguistic difficulty. For the student starting from Hebrew, the natural path of expansion is that opened up by Semitic linguistics, and the passage from Hebrew to Uga- ritic or even Akkadian is a fairly easy and natural one. But Hebrew has practically nothing in common with Avestan or Pahlavi, and Iranian and Indo-European linguistics are unfamiliar and difficult for the Hebraist.

There are, of course, scholars who have studied both Hebrew and

James Barr is Regius Professor of Hebrew at Oxford University.

Journal of the American Academy of Religion

Iranian materials together. Scandinavia in particular has a tradition that linked the two and related them to the history of religions; the names of Soderblom, Nyberg, and Widengren come particularly to mind. Among Iranianists who have made significant contributions to biblical study, one thinks of H. H. Schaeder and, more recently, M. J. Dresden.

Yet comparatively few Old Testament scholars seriously study Iranian materials. Books like I. Scheftelowitz, Die altpersische Religion und das Judentum, are now little read. That bible of the oriental environment, Pritchard's Ancient Near Eastern Texts, contains no Iranian materials. It does include one or two inscriptions of Cyrus and Xerxes, but, characteristically, these are translated from their Akkadian version, not from the Old Persian, and handled by Assyriologists. I know of no fresh examination of the question of Iranian influence by any major Old Testament scholar in recent years. Actually, more has been done by some New Testament scholars (Reicke: 1960). Moreover, a number of new studies of Zoroastrianism have appeared, some of which make reference to contacts with the Old Testament and Judaism. I think particularly of the work of Mary Boyce, whose scholarship is enhanced in profundity and in interest because her knowledge of Zoroastrianism derives not only from books but also from her living in the midst of the Zoroastrian community. The significance of these studies has still to be noticed by many biblical scholars. There is room, therefore, for a fresh look at the subject by an Old Testament scholar.1

The purpose of this paper is not to offer any precise answer to the question of the influence of Zoroastrianism on Judaism (and thereby Christianity). Rather, it aims to investigate the problems, and the kinds of evidence and argument, that are involved in studying the question at all. In particular, it seeks to address three issues. First, what sorts of comparative arguments are effective when it is not certain that the religions concerned have actually influenced one another? Second, to what degree is detailed linguistic evidence effective in solving these more general problems? Third, can we arrive at any statement of a kind of perception of another's religion that can help to explain the sort of interactions that may have taken place?

It may be useful at the outset to say something about the impact of theological and other ideological positions. On the whole, the question of Iranian influence upon Judaism appears less affected by ideology than do some other questions of the same kind. Many scholars of the "biblical theology" period, for example, were very anxious to make it clear that biblical thought was entirely distinct from, and owed nothing to, Greek

1 The lack of expert knowledge in Iranian matters will be sufficiently evident in what follows. I can only say that I have done what I could to gain some slight competence in the languages concerned and to take advantage of discussion with Iranian specialists where I could do so.

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Barr: Religious Influence

thought. The absence of Greek influence was for them almost a matter of principle. But these same scholars were often willing to admit Iranian influence upon Jewish and biblical eschatology. For them, Greek thought was closer and more real, and the idea of its influence upon the biblical tradition represented a sort of challenge and danger. Iranian influence, however, seemed more remote and less of a threat; it therefore could be freely discussed and, if necessary, acknowledged.2 In this respect the question of Iranian influence seems to be a more open one ideologically.

Nevertheless, this is not always so, and the effect of ideological considerations upon our question can often be traced. Scheftelowitz has been criticized on the ground that he could not bring himself to admit, des- pite his long studies of the question, that Judaism, his own religion, really owed anything to any foreign religion.3 J. H. Moulton, better known among biblical scholars for his work on the Greek papyri and the vocabulary of the New Testament, had a complicated set of religious values, which much affected his handling of the Zoroastrian evidence.4 R. C. Zaehner (1970:1-39, especially 30-31) displayed in his later works

2 0. Cullmann is an obvious example. As I pointed out (1969:165n.), Cullmann strongly insisted on the complete contrast between the biblical view and "all religious and philosophical systems." Yet he found it possible and even natural to admit that Iranian religion agreed with biblical in seeing time "as a line."

3 According to Duchesne-Guillemin (1958:87), Scheftelowitz, if he finds the same fact on both sides, "refuses to deduce from it an Iranian origin even if it is attested much later on the Jewish side."

4 Duchesne-Guillemin (ibid.) says that Moulton found it difficult, as a Christian, to admit a large Iranian influence on his religion. It is doubtful, however, that Moulton is rightly assessed by him. As I understand it, Moulton's type of liberal Christianity (accom- panied by missionary zeal!) worked in a different way from what this suggests. Moulton had an extremely high opinion of Zoroastrianism and assigned it a sort of validity close to that of his own Christianity. Zoroastrianism properly understood, and taken at its best, had therefore a positive role in relation to Christianity similar to that which-on tradi- tional Christian understandings-the Old Testament had had. Nevertheless "Israel learnt a profounder lesson still" (Moulton, 1913:331). If Moulton was cautious in recognizing clear Zoroastrian influences upon Israel and thereby upon Christianity, therefore, this was not because he was unwilling to assign Iranian religion a position of comparability with his own religion. The contrary was the case. Moulton wanted to accord to Zoroastrianism a greater degree of comparability with Christianity than was historically justifiable through the influence of latish Iranian religion upon latish Judaism. He makes this clear in his disagreement with Bousset (ibid.: 321). If Iranian influence was to be explained through historical channels, it would mean practically that "Zarathushtra himself is to be struck out of the list of the prophets who contributed to the development of Israel's religion" (ibid.). Zoroaster's own work was for Moulton of primary significance; but it was not accessible through historical channels to Jews of the last four decades B.C., who knew Ira- nian religion only through the distorted forms produced by the Magi, the villains of Moul- ton's drama. Hence the relation of Zoroastrianism to Christianity for Moulton had to be a relation of essences rather than one of historical derivation. Moulton's case is a good example of the complications involved in relating the religion of the modern scholar to his understanding of ancient religious comparison.

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a deep hostility toward the Old Testament, which he contrasted with Christian values. Such a gradation of values could easily have induced him to assign to Iranian influence, rather than to inner development starting in the Old Testament, elements he judged to be of positive importance in later Christianity.

Theological and other ideological convictions, then, do have a certain influence on people's judgment of the probability of Iranian influence on Judaism and Christianity. Nevertheless, for many the question remains a fairly open one; they do not feel that their religious convictions will be compromised if Iranian influence is admitted, or if, on the contrary, it proves not to have been effective after all.

If these remarks may suffice as preamble, we may turn to the discussion of our question itself. The arguments for Iranian influence on the later Old Testament and on postbiblical Judaism proceed on two levels, one particular and one general. The particular argument depends on detailed pieces of evidence, such as the name of the demon Asmodeus in Tobit. We shall consider it later on. The general argument works from wide probabilities. On one side, it comes from the general feeling that a religion as great and noble as Zoroastrianism simply must have had an effect on Judaism and Christianity. Mary Boyce expresses it thus: "So it was out of a Judaism enriched by five centuries of contact with Zoroas- trianism that Christianity arose in the Parthian period, a new religion with roots thus in two ancient faiths, one Semitic, the other Iranian" (1979:99). Similarly, Zaehner (1961:57), writing about rewards and punishments, heaven and hell, says that "the similarities are so great and the historical context so neatly apposite that it would be carrying scepticism altogether too far to refuse to draw the obvious conclusion" that, in this area at least, Judaism and Christianity are dependent on Zoroastrianism. According to this viewpoint, the importance and the influence of Zoroas- trianism are so obvious that, on these quite general grounds, it is unrea- sonable scepticism to doubt that important elements in Judaism and Christianity had their ultimate origins in Iran.

However, the general argument also commonly depends on another factor, the confidence that the development known in the later Old Tes- tament and in Judaism is not intelligible except on the basis of external influences. In other words, it implies that the internal dynamics of Israelite-Judaic religion could not possibly alone have led to the phenomena we find in the later sources. A good example of this is the influ- ential and widely esteemed article of K. G. Kuhn, "Die Sektenschrift und die iranische Religion."5 Of it Martin Hengel (1974: I, 230) writes, "The Iranian derivation of this conception [i.e., that of two spirits, the

5 Cf. similarly Dupont-Sommer.

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evil spirit and the spirit of truth] has been demonstrated since the funda- mental studies of K. G. Kuhn."6

Kuhn works in a simple way. He lines up the marked similarities between Iranian texts and the Dead Sea Scrolls and then argues that the conceptions shared by the two could not possibly have developed out of the earlier Old Testament religion. He indicates the differences and thus, as he sees it, shows how these conceptions, borrowed from Iran, were developed in a peculiarly Jewish way. But his claim that the conceptions could not possibly derive from a purely Jewish origin is, of course, easily subject to challenge. All that is required is a hypothesis that could account for the same facts on an inner-Jewish basis. Such an argument would not have to prove that its hypothesis is right; it would need only to show that there is a reasonable hypothesis that can provide an explanation through internal Jewish development. Such a hypothesis would make it impossible to claim that the phenomena can only be the result of Iranian influence.7

6 But Hengel goes on at once to note the prevalence of similar "dualistic" traditions in the Hellenistic world; and this in principle opens up the possibility that the Qumran ideas derive from other channels than direct contact with Iran.

7 The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls has had an ambiguous effect on the entire discussion of our question. On the one hand it has, in the minds of some scholars-Kuhn, Dupont-Sommer, Gaster-greatly confirmed the idea of Iranian influence on Judaism and thereby the validity of the comparative approach based upon it. The same time, however, saw an increase in the degree of doubt about such influence and caution in the assessment of evidence alleged to exemplify it. Among Iranian specialists, Widengren and Zaehner appear to take the evidence as clear confirmation of active influence; Frye (1962), by contrast, is very negative on precisely this question. He points out that precise textual analogies, like the pair "children of light and children of darkness," are lacking; that the occurrence of Iranian loanwords proves nothing about religious influences; and he ends up with the question, "May not the unorthodox Jewish beliefs of the Essenes be traceable to the soil of Palestine, to the Judaism of that period with the apocryphal books, and above all to the Zeitgeist?" Similarly, Colpe had asserted that the Iranian and the Jewish evidence in both cases rested upon a spontaneous process of hypostatization, so that there was no transference from one circle of religion and tradition to another. Among less well- known scholars, if D. Winston affirms that Persian literary sources had already made their mark on 2 Isaiah and on Daniel, that "a spate(!) of Iranian doctrines found their way into the apocrypha" (187), and that the Qumran material is definitely of Iranian origin, even though "the Iranian impact seems to have been along the periphery of Judaism only" (210: surely a contradiction, if it was as pervasive as he himself maintains!), R. G. Jones at about that same time was arguing mainly in favor of caution and and against what he called a priori acceptance of external influence. Duchesne-Guillemin (1958:93) makes the further point that, if the Dead Sea documents derive from Iranian religion, it is strange that they should reflect so clearly the very early Zoroastrianism of the Gathas, considering the great changes that Iranian religion had undergone since then-a point similar to Moulton's sentiments mentioned above. "The survival of a pure Gathic doctrine up to the time of the Manual [of Discipline] would be something of an enigma, knowing what changes had intervened in Iranian religion since the days of the prophet." Kuhn, however, had sought to defend himself against this argument on the grounds that the Gathas were

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It seems, in fact, that the tendency to offer inner-Jewish explanations is increasing, so that developments in Jewish apocalyptic are understood as, shall we say, reactivations of ancient Canaanite myth rather than as products of late and Iranian influence. Thus Paul Hanson writes, "The basic schema of apocalyptic eschatology has evolved in Israel and the whole development is perfectly comprehensible within the history of Israel's own community and cult. Hasty recourse to late Persian influence is therefore unnecessary and unjustifiable" (60).

This may be right or wrong in itself, but obviously the merely general argument that Iranian influence must be invoked is insufficient. At this point the general argument necessarily becomes dependent on the particular argument, that is, on the provision of some detailed evidence to show that Iranian influence really did take place.

To put it in another way, the general argument that Iranian influence must have taken place needs to be supplemented by information about mechanism and motivation. What was the mechanism through which Iranian religious influence worked upon the Jews? And what was the motivation that led Jews to suppose that Iranian religion and its categories had something positive to offer them? At least some sort of hypothesis about mechanism and motivation is required if the bare bones of the argument for Iranian influence are to be filled out with flesh. Conversely, it seems that in these comparative discussions the character of Iranian religion has often been presented selectively, in a way that emphasizes the elements that people deem most relevant for Jewish (or Christian) religion. But such a procedure does not well explain why these elements were selected from the totality of the Iranian religious world-picture and why other elements within that religious totality were neglected and ignored. It is possible that Old Testament studies may offer some suggestions in these regards, and to these we now turn.

We begin with the example of a biblical passage that might, at least in theory, benefit from explanation against an Iranian background. I refer to the story of creation as told in Genesis 1. Iranian religion, as will be suggested again below, appears to have a strongly cosmological character. Could aspects of Genesis 1 be understood as reflecting this background? Mary Boyce (1979:52; 1982:43-47) suggests that the idea of creation in the Old Testament arose through contact with Iran.8 The

the only text concerning which there was agreement in dating (310, n. 1). 8 The second volume of her History became available to the writer only after the argu-

ment of this paper was complete, and it was possible to take account of it only in the notes and in minor modifications. She supposes (46f.) that a Zoroastrian "agent" of Cyrus may well have travelled to Babylon to converse with Second Isaiah about these religious matters, which were of political importance to Cyrus in his campaigns. In this she follows in part Morton Smith. The main point of Morton Smith's article, indeed, is not the dem- onstration of Iranian religious influence as such, but the use by 2 Isaiah of Persian literary

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liberal acts of Cyrus meant that the Jews afterwards entertained warm feelings for the Persians, and "this made them more receptive to Zoroas- trian influences." The evidence is in Deutero-Isaiah: Cyrus was hailed as "Messiah"-certainly a highly abnormal procedure in Jewish religious practice-and, she goes on, "the same prophet celebrates Yahweh for the first time in Jewish literature as Creator, as Ahura Mazda had been cele- brated by Zoroaster." As soon, therefore, as the Jews came into contact with Iranian religion, this new encounter served as a catalyst for the doctrine of creation.

Professor Boyce does not discuss Genesis 1, but it is an obvious con- tinuation of her ideas to do so.9 It is at least arguable that Genesis 1 represents a later stage of thought about creation and a response to the questions raised in Isaiah 40-66 (Barr, 1968-69, 1974?). I do not doubt that the main origins of the ideas of Genesis 1 lie in Mesopotamia on the one hand and in indigenous Jewish problems and discussions on the other. Nevertheless, there are aspects of this important and impressive passage that are not fully explained on these bases. For example, is there any Mesopotamian precedent for the tightly schematized and numeri- cally controlled account of creation in Genesis 1? If the account came from the Persian period, certain aspects of it could have been framed in response to Iranian cosmological ideas. In standard Zoroastrian conceptions, Ahura Mazda through Spenta Mainyu (Augmentative Spirit) brings into being the six "entities": 1. Vohu Manah (Good Mind), 2. Asa Vahista ([best] Truth), 3. Xsathra (Dominion), 4. Armaiti (Devotion), 5. Haurvatat (Wholeness), 6. Ameretat (Immortality). These, the Amesa Spentas, have respective connections with the series of creations, namely, (1) cattle, (2) fire, (3) metals, (4) earth, (5) water, (6) plants (Boyce, 1979:21-24). There may be, behind the scheme, a seventh; Gershevitch considers that Ahura Mazda himself had his own special creation, that of man, who comes at the beginning of the series (11-12). Thus we have a clear numerical grouping around the figures six or seven. This could have suggested the clear numerical classification of creation in Genesis. If this were so, then the Israelite account could have responded to the Iranian plurality of creations, each under its separate entity, by organizing all under one finite and complete creation by the one God.

Moreover, consider the conspicuous absence of angels from Gen- esis 1. In this carefully organized chapter, there is only God and the created world. The existence of what we call angels seems to be there on the margin and to be assumed; but angels do not create anything, and their own creation is not related. Could this be a negative reaction

forms. Nevertheless, by implication his article also supports the idea that the cosmological interest of 2 Isaiah comes from Persian sources. In that case the motivation comes through the rhetorical effects caused by political needs.

9 But see now, briefly, Boyce (1982:192).

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against the idea that each stage of creation was presided over by a particular mediate superhuman entity?

Finally, why is there emphasis, so evident in Genesis 1, on the fact that the creation was good-an element for which, so far as I know, no close Mesopotamian parallel has been found, and which is so strongly emphasized nowhere else in the Old Testament-and why is there strong interest in the difference between the "kinds" of animals? In the Zoroas- trian conception, not all things are good; some are good, some are mix- tures of good and bad, some are really bad. Among animals, some, like the dog, are ahuric and belong to the realm of the good. Indeed, to this day in Zoroastrianism the dog receives not just the leavings of human food, but the best of the food before the humans get any.10 On the other hand there are the daevic animals, which belong to the side of darkness, the so-called xrafstra (Boyce, 1979:44). Something analogous was known to the Greeks already through Herodotus (with Plutarch it is "water rats"):11 the more one kills of such animals, the better, for the physical destruction of such animals literally reduces the total power of evil in the world. Could this furnish a reason why Genesis 1 shows an interest in the "creeping things," which, though "unclean" for Jews to eat, are expressly stated to be "good" creations of God?

Thus it is not difficult for the imaginative interpreter to think of ways in which creation passages in the Old Testament could be illumi- nated if they were seen against an Iranian background. If this were to be accepted, however, it would not necessarily mean that Jewish religion "took over" large elements from Iranian; rather, it would suggest that Iranian religion acted as a catalyst and caused the Jewish religion to define itself by contrast as much as by imitation. Such an interpretation would follow Professor Boyce in agreeing that the presence of Iranian religion affected the formulation of developed Jewish literature about creation, but without suggesting that there was no Jewish idea of creation before that time.

10 On this, see the vivid portrayal of Boyce (1977:139-46 and passim, along with Plate Ib). 11 Herodotus i. 140 reads: "The magi with their own hands kill everything except for

dog and man, and make great rivalry therein, killing alike ants, snakes, and other creeping things and flying things." Cf. Boyce (1979:76). Moulton characteristically considers this to be an aspect purely belonging the the Magian deformation of the religion: "It is purely Magian, alien alike from genuine Persian religion and from Zarathushtra's Reform" (398). Plutarch, De Iside et Osiride 46 (Griffiths, ed.: 192), expresses much the same idea, but clearly related to Zoroastrian dualism: "They believe that among plants too some belong to the good god and others to the evil daemon, and that among animals some, such as dogs, birds, and land hedgehogs, belong to the good god, whereas water rats belong to the bad deity, and for this reason they regard as happy whoever kills a great number of them." For the killing of such creatures, notably of frogs, in more modern times, see Boyce (1977: 179).

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As an imaginative exercise, such an interpretation may be quite stimulating. Before we go farther with it, however, we should stop and face a body of Old Testament evidence that points in the opposite direc- tion. Whatever may be the case with the creation story, we have to consider the striking indifference of other parts of the Old Testament to the religion of Iran.12

The rise of the Persian Empire brought into the Middle East a religion that in structure and type was entirely different from the religions, of basically Semitic peoples, with which the Hebrews were reasonably familiar. But it is very difficult to find in the Bible any recognition of the fact. What is noticed, and clearly referred to, is the change of power that affected the position and destiny of the Jews. Belshazzar was slain and Darius the Mede took the kingdom; Cyrus came to say that Jeru- salem would be rebuilt and the temple re-founded. Clearly the rise of Persia proved fortunate for the Jews, and for this reason it is noted that the blessing and favor of the God of Israel rests upon the Iranian monarchs.13

But this does not mean that the Old Testament is interested in their religion. Indeed, it manifestly is not. Nowhere does the reader of the Old Testament learn that these monarchs are worshippers of Ahura Mazda and derive their power from him. Nehemiah was the cupbearer of Arta- xerxes I and presumably in a position to know, in the colloquial phrase, what made him "tick," but he gives no indication of the king's religion. What was Nehemiah's reaction to the emblem of Ahura Mazda promi- nently displayed on the palace walls of Persepolis (Zaehner, 1961: plate 2)? What did he make of the king's inscription: "All that was built by me was built by the favor of Ahura Mazda. Me may Ahura Mazda together with the gods protect, and my kingdom, and what has been built by me...." (Kent: 153, A'Pa = 148,XPb, 26-30)? Moreover, the Zoroas- trian calendar appears to commence in 441 B.C., three years or so after Nehemiah's conversation with the king, but again Nehemiah's memoirs leave no hint of such a development.14 And what would Nehemiah, presumably a monotheistic Jew, have said had he seen the following inscription of Artaxerxes II at Susa, where he himself had served: "By the favor of Ahura Mazda, Anaitis and Mithras this palace I built. May Ahura Mazda, Anaitis and Mithras protect me from all evil, and that which I have built may they not shatter nor harm" (Kent: 154)?

12 This aspect seems to have received much less attention in scholarship. 13 Dandamaev (1976:233) says that the biblical writers exaggerate the goodwill of the

Persian monarchs towards the Jewish religion, wishing to encourage their own people by telling them that the great kings of Media and Persia had recognized their God and given protection to those who believed in him. 14 On the calendar see Duchesne-Guillemin (1962:120-25) and Boyce (1979:70-74,

92-93; 1982:243-50).

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If Nehemiah knew about this sort of development, or about the religious structure that undergirded it, he said nothing about it. In the Bible the Persian emperors speak in terms not of the actual name of their own god, Ahura Mazda, and still less of the other gods,15 but of "the most High God" or "the God of Heaven," terms readily assimilable to Jewish religion. It was open to Jews to understand this as if it referred to the one true God, the God of Israel. This was no mere fiction of biblical style, for the Ele- phantine letters show that it was actual and normal in correspondence. For example, the letter 302, addressed to Bigvai, reads "The Health of your lordship may the God of Heaven seek after exceedingly at all times" (Cow- ley: 111, 113)). This usage concealed rather than disclosed the actual personality and structure of the emperor's own religion.

What impressed the biblical writers about the Persian empire was not the religion that it believed and practiced but its court ceremonial and its means of power. Cyrus writing his decree for the rebuilding of the temple, Darius digging it out of the archives and confirming it (Ezra 6), Nehemiah taking wine to the king and being frightened when asked why he was sad, Darius wanting to support Daniel but unable to do so because he had been tricked into making his decision unalterable, Ahasuerus with his 127 provinces and his court rules, that a woman had to have a beauty treatment of great complexity, that petitioners must be instantly put to death unless the king stretches out his sceptre to them- all these are the sort of thing that interested the biblical writers when they wrote about the Persian empire. Its actual religious structures, as we know them from Iranian sources, are left largely unnoticed. Daniel talks in the same civil way to Nebuchadnezzar and to Darius, and there is no recognition or comment that Darius' religion is a world apart from that of ancient Babylonia. Of course, all these stories of good relations with foreign potentates were stylistically modeled on that one great pattern, Joseph's relations with Pharaoh in Genesis. The fact remains that the Daniel traditions, which doubtless go back to memories of Persian times, show no vivid interest in the religious peculiarity of the Iranian world. The main impact made by life in the Persian empire is that it provided colorful pictures of how things were at the imperial court, from the viewpoint of power and ceremony.

This is not to say that the religious atmosphere had no effect at all, for it may well have generated some legends and motifs of the tales. Take, for instance, the idea that the laws of the Medes and Persians were "unchangeable." There seems to be no evidence that their laws were any more free from amendment and adjustment than those of any other

15 Anaitis or Anahita and Mithras may be construed as older Indo-European deities who had been thrust into the background by the original Zoroastrian monotheistic impulse, but who were now coming back into recognition within the religion.

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people. The motif may be a legend rather than a reflection of the reali- ties of life in Iran. It might be a relic of older Indo-Iranian myth, for the God Varuna, one of the greatest of the Veda, was dhrtavrata 'whose laws are established'; his ordinances are constantly said to be fixed (Ger- shevitch: 6; Boyce, 1979:23). A feature of mythology may thus have been transferred to the actual Persian constitution by the Hebrew storyteller or the tradition before him; for him it hardly mattered whether or not it was an accurate account of Persian life. In any case, Darius in Daniel 6 was dealing not with a law, but with an administrative ruling only just made by himself. The point was that ill-wishers inveigled the innocent monarch into a position from which, even when his policy produced unintended results, absolutely no reversal could be considered. Such a legend may have a religious background, but it tells us nothing about the actual religion of Darius's time.16

To this consideration of literary content in the Old Testament we may add the more detailed evidence of loanwords from Persian. These occur in both Hebrew and Aramaic, but within the Bible there are probably more in the Aramaic sections, depending on how one counts them. Naturally, even if a word of Persian origin appears in Hebrew, this does not necessarily mean actual contact of Jews with Iranians; for many Persian words may have been adopted first into Aramaic and then from there into Hebrew. In adopting them, Jews may not have known anything of their origin or their context and meaning within Iranian society.17 Even without this caution, it seems that Persian loanwords in Hebrew and Jewish Aramaic of this earlier period are seldom terms of the Iranian religious world and seldom show signs of acquaintance with the major ideological systems of the Iranian people. Thus, there is no loanword, so far as I know, from ahura 'lord', or from drug 'lie', or from

16 If it should be true that the relation of the four world-empires to a scheme of four different metals (Daniel 2) came from a Persian source, I would tend to class it also in this way. The scheme was a literary figure, hardly an actual element in Persian religion. In any case, it seems still uncertain in what way the author of Daniel came upon this figure. In an impressive article, Momigliano (1980: especially 161) judges that the scheme of metals, as applied to a series of reigns or historical periods, may be Persian, but that the scheme of four world-empires is Greek, and that there is no Persian precedent for the attachment of the metals to world-empires as distinct from Persian internal events. The connection was more probably the original idea of the author of Daniel. Also see Flusser, and Collins. Collins takes the Persian parallels as good illustrations for the Daniel material but seems to imply that Iran is not the basic source of the imagery. 17 Frye seems to have a different emphasis in his article in the Eilers Festschrift

(1967:78) where he says that "the adoption of loanwords shows that ideas and concepts are often borrowed along with the words" and his article on Qumran (1962:26) where he says that "Iranian words in the Dead Sea Scrolls would not be extraordinary and then would prove nothing about religious influence." The latter point of view is on the whole followed here, except where there is a special reason to the contrary.

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arta, asa 'truth', or from magu 'Magian',18 or from fravasi 'guardian spirit'. The element arta- is found in names like Artaxerxes, 'artahsasta, which occurs in the Bible, but there is no evidence that anyone knew what the arta- element represented. It is quite likely that Hebrew din at Esther 1:13, kol yodece dat wi-din, is from Avestan daena 'religion' and therefore distinct from the Semitic din 'judge, judgment'.19 But even if so, it is an isolated example, and the actual meaning of the word continued to be 'judgment' in Hebrew; the Syriac cases with the sense 'religion' are much later. As for dit itself, this is certainly a Persian loanword in Hebrew and later became the dominant Jewish word for 'religion'. In this it corresponds to Arabic din, but in the Bible it does not mean 'reli-

gion' but 'law, decree', even 'practice', and so in the "laws" of the Medes and Persians; this was, of course, the actual Persian meaning. So it was not borrowed with a specifically religious meaning.

In later times, by contrast, borrowings directly dependent on Zoroas- trian religion appear in Aramaic/Syriac. A striking example is the Syriac daywa 'devil', daywana 'demoniac', found in the Gospels, for example, Matthew 4:24. This comes from post-Christian times and is readily explicable as such; the Syriac-speaking church sought for a term for the demons and demoniacs of the Gospels and found one that was intelligible in their milieu.

Thus the evidence of loanwords, for what it is worth, seems to show no strong evidence of Jewish awareness of the Iranian religious structures. Conversely, loanwords do demonstrate the point already made on the basis of literary content, namely that Jews knew a lot about the administrative workings and court procedures of the empire. Thus we have words for 'satrap', for 'magistrate' (detabraya [Daniel 3:2], from data- 'law' and bar- 'bear'), for heralds and for assorted astrologers and the like; there are also phrases for legal sanctions and punishments, like having one's limbs removed (Daniel 2:5) or having one's house made a dunghill (Daniel 2:5). Tirshatha, a title used in the Nehemiah cycle, is another administrative title or mark of respect ('venerable, reverend' or the like); although the Iranian basis for it does not seem very clear, it can

18 The term rab-mag of Jeremiah 39:3, 13 is certainly not Iranian, and is related to Akkadian rab-mugi (von Soden: 667b), as is obvious from the fact that the reference is to Babylonian functionaries. It was in fact used, nevertheless, by Moulton as evidence of the presence of Magi (187f., 230, 430). 19 So G. R. Driver (1955:90, n. 2). The suggestion is one of Driver's best, and is doubtless

followed by The New English Bible with its "all who were versed in law and religion." The idea was doubtless suggested by Syriac din 'religion', dinig, 'ascetic', both from this Iranian root, and cited already in Brockelman (151b), as acknowledged by Driver, and perhaps also by still earlier discussions, such as Scheftelowitz (1901: 82ff.), which discusses diniye' at Ezra 4:9, and implies the same Iranian root for it.

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hardly be anything else.20 Some other words are rather general terms: raz 'secret' in the Aramaic of Daniel,21 zan 'sort, kind' (Psalms 144:12, 2 Chronicles 16:14?), pitgam 'word' (Qohelet 8:11, Esther 1:20), nahsir 'pursuit, persecution, battle', or the like (1QM 1.9).22 All this suggests that linguistically, at least, Persian contact with Jews was slow to take effect and in the long run rather slight.

It is interesting to think again of Nehemiah in this connection. Pre- sumably he could speak Old Persian,23 since he could hardly have car- ried on his conversation with Artaxerxes without it. But there are few Persian words in Nehemiah's own memoirs. Perhaps he is the first to use pardes 'park' in Hebrew; and he was not using the word generally but speaking of an actual Persian pairidaeza, the king's enclosed forest (Nehemiah 2:8; the word occurs also in Canticles and Qohelet, once each). The technical terms used by Nehemiah tend to be Akkadian rather than Persian. Tirshatha is used of him, but not by him in his first- person memoir. On the whole Nehemiah's speech and writing is rather pure Hebrew.

So far, then, these arguments suggest that, at least in the first century

20 The word is usually explained as related to a form that would in Avestan be tarsta-, passive participle of the root 'fear', cognate with Sanskrit tras-, and hence the meaning would be 'reverend, venerable' or the like; so, for instance, Scheftelowitz (1901: 93), who has been generally followed by lexicographers, though his actual argumentation is far from convincing: the putative Iranian form is not at all similar to the Hebrew, and the analogous Sanskrit trasta means 'frightened', not 'reverend' (Macdonell: 112). But until something better is suggested, Scheftelowitz's suggestion may have to be allowed to stand. 21 Frye (1967:79) raises questions about the meaning of raz, which he translates as 'Mys-

terium'. He says that the original sense in Avestan is 'loneliness, remoteness, hiddenness', that the transition to 'mystery' is still unexplained, and that the real meaning of the word in the Scrolls is still unclear. Since 'secret' is the Pahlavi meaning (Mackenzie: 71, 132), however, one may question whether this doubt is justified. Widengren (1960:55) says it goes back to a non-Persian form. 22 Frye (ibid.) discusses this word and appears to hold that, even if adopted from Ira-

nian, it is no sign of profound influence of the thought of Iran upon the Qumran community. He seems to favor Rabin's suggestion (132) that the word is of Hittite origin, saying that the sense thus arrived at, 'terror, panic', fits better than the Iranian sense 'hunt, hunt- ing'. Nevertheless, the Hittite derivation seems a very remote and unlikely suggestion. The term seems clearly Iranian, and perhaps only a development of sense at Qumran has to be supposed. Other Jewish sources use it with the sense 'hunt', e.g., Targum Onkelos to Genesis 25:27, here in the form nahsirakan or nahsirkan (so pointed in the Targum) 'hunter'. See, against Carmignac (363), who doubted the existence of this word, de Menasce (213-14) and Yadin (260). Syriac has, for instance, nhsyrtn' 'hunter' (Peshitta Genesis 10:9), cf. the Syriac senses in general (Brockelmann; 424). The most interesting study is by Asmussen. He thinks that the word indicates an ecstatic and almost orgiastic devotion to the hunt, quite unlike the biblical tradition of thought on the subject, and that for this reason the term was adopted into Hebrew; it was evidence of a "Hellenistic- Parthian influence" in Palestine. 23 It is often said that Aramaic was the lingua franca of the Persian Empire, but this can

hardly mean that the emperors themselves spoke it in their own palace.

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or so of Persian rule, Jews who were in contact with Iran paid rather little attention, favorable or unfavorable, to the religion of the dominant nation. If they knew the peculiar characteristics of that religion, they kept them to themselves and said nothing about them. The picture is not much different in the Elephantine community. These Jews had come to Egypt with Cambyses in 525 and had been there as soldiers of the Per- sian power for about one hundred and twenty years when the letters were written; and they had to deal with Persian governors with names like Bagohi and Waidrang. But, though religious problems arose in several ways, there seems to be little influence of Iranian religion on Jews: the difficult problems for religious interpretation in the names containing elements like Bethel, Herem, 'Anat, and the like are problems within Semitic and Canaanite religion.

There is nevertheless certainly contact with Iranian religion. We have a broken piece in Elephantine 37.6 (Cowley: 133) which comments that a certain man, appointed over a province, is a mzdyzn, a word identical with the Persian mazdayasna 'worshipper of [Ahura] Mazda'.24 A break in the letter unfortunately leaves us ignorant what more was said about him, though the impression given is not favorable and rather suggests that, because he was a Mazda-worshipper, the governor could not be relied on to support Jewish interests and property. The evidence is compatible with the supposition that in general Jews liked best to know very little of the religion of the imperial authorities and to keep only very limited contact with it.

At this point we may introduce the evidence of the book of Tobit, both one particular piece of evidence and the general purport of the book as a whole. A citation from T. W. Manson may be a good starting point:

The clearest evidence of Persian influence on Jewish theology, apart from the general similarity of the two systems, is the use of the name Asmodeus for the chief of the demons. This name is borrowed directly from the Persian 'Aeshma Daeva, the demon of violence and wrath in the later Avesta'. (154)

In Manson's case, this argument serves to demonstrate that the organization of many evil spirits into a spiritual kingdom of evil is mainly due to the influence of ideas taken from Iranian religion. The "general similarity of the two systems" is a major point that will be considered later. First, however, we may concentrate on the detailed argument from the name Asmodeus.

The philological problems are complicated, and not every detail can be treated here. In particular, it should not be assumed that all Iranian

24 For more recent comment, which, however, does not speculate about the religious judgements involved, see Porten (55).

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specialists affirm the Iranian derivation of the name Asmodeus; on the contrary, a number of them remark on uncertainties in it.25

The actual name of the Iranian demon is Aesma, and the element daeva 'demon' is another word. The supposition that the name in Tobit derives from this requires that the two words should be taken together, the d of daeva providing the d of Asmodeus. But, though Aesma is a daeva, it appears that in early Iranian sources he is usually called only Aesma, not Aesma daeva; the Pahlavi form of the name is, similarly, esm.26 The customary theory depends, therefore, on taking as one name two words, one of which is a name in the original and the other a description; but these two words in Iranian sources apparently do not normally occur together in this way. This is not an insuperable difficulty, but it makes the identity of the two terms less obvious than might at first be supposed.27

There is some phonological difficulty in tracing back the form Asmo- deus (the Greek forms are BA Ao-AoSavs; S Aro-obaios; Tobit 3:8, 17) to an Iranian original Aesma. One would have expected the Hebrew/Aramaic form to have a first vowel e or i. If din is really 'religion' and derived from dapna in Esther, this would well illustrate the expectation of an i vowel here, while the -e- of pardes likewise comes from this diphthong (Persian pairidaeza). The initial a vowel is therefore puzzling.28

The uncertainties of the Iranian derivation have to be compared with the possibilities of a Semitic derivation. Asmodeus in Tobit must be the same demon who in Targum and Talmud is 'asmeday malka de-sede 'Ashmeday king of the demons'. He is associated particularly with King Solomon, whom he attacks and causes to be removed from his throne because of his overweening behavior. It was during this time of disgrace that Solomon wrote the book of Ecclesiastes, a good and rational explanation of how that happened. Therefore, if the name as found in Tobit is

25 For instance, Duchesne-Guillemin (1963:84) says it is difficult to explain the name in any other way, but admits that "la correspondance phonetique n'est pas rigoureuse, mais cela est courant dans les emprunts." Widengren (1957:215) accepts the equation. Frye (1962:266) says that Asmodeus is "an example of a direct, tangible influence from texts" and adds that "an Iranian etymology is the most satisfying explanation"-hardly an enthusiastic support. 26 "It is noteworthy that in the Avesta, as we have it, the actual collocation AeSma daeva

does not occur, though it does in the Bundahish, which is based on a mass of lost Avestan matter"-so Moulton (251). 27 In any case, one can assuredly exclude the position taken by A. Wikgren (1962:661b),

who declares the word to be Persian because the latter part comes from daeva, but then leaves it vague what the rest of the word might be, whether from Iranian Aesma or from the Semitic root s-m-d. There is absolutely no ground for the Iranian explanation unless the two words are taken as one collocation. 28 These considerations are no doubt what was intended by Duchesne-Guillemin

(1963:84) in his caution about the phonetic correspondence.

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derived from Persian, then the Talmudic/Targumic name must be derived from it too. But the latter form also invites consideration of the Semitic root s-m-d 'destroy', and all the more so since a demon with the name Shimadon appears in the Midrash, Genesis Rabbah 36. Shimadon is explicable as deriving from s-m-d 'destroy' but hardly as deriving from the Iranian Aesma. The name Asmodeus could be explained as a name built upon a verbal noun form belonging to the hiphil (aphel); the -ay ending might be as in names like Borqay. There is a difference between the o of the Greek form and the shewa of the Aramaic, but that difference is there on any explanation.29

If the provenance of this name is somewhat uncertain, one might next ask if names given to demons in Jewish literature appear commonly to be Iranian in origin.30 Such names will not necessarily be either Semitic or Iranian; in principle they could be Mesopotamian or even Egyptian. If many Jewish names of demons appeared to be Iranian, this would confirm the Iranian explanation of Asmodeus. But I do not find, from limited soundings made, that Iranian provenance is probable for other such names. In the Babylonian Talmud, Pesahim 111, some terms like Zerada, Palga, Shide, Rishpe are obviously Hebrew/Aramaic, as is Qeteb, while some others, like Izlath, Asya, and Belusia, could be almost anything. Another important demon is Agrath or Igrath bath Mahalath, the queen of the demons in the Talmud. It has been suggested that this name came from Angra (Mainyu) and thus from the principal evil agency of Zoroastrianism. If this were true, it would strongly support the Iranian theory of Asmodeus; but it does not seem very likely.31

The purely philological analysis of the name Asmodeus seems, therefore, to be indecisive in its results. One might say that the Semitic and Iranian explanations are roughly equally balanced in probability, with the Semitic rather more likely on the whole, and the possibility remain- ing that it is neither. If the matter is not certain, then this name in itself is not enough to support the idea of a wide-ranging influence of Persian religion upon Jewish demonology or Jewish religion in general.

To this we may add features of the character of this unpleasant demon. His role and function seem remote from what might be derived

29 F. Zimmerman, in his edition of Tobit (63n.), simply dismisses the Iranian derivation without argument and declares the word to be Hebraic. Further folklore about Ashmedai can be found in the encyclopaedias. The name of the demon in the Midrash is often given as Shamdon: I follow the spelling of the Soncino edition. For the o of the Greek form, one might consider comparison with words like Sodom which have an o in the LXX (and at Qumran), where the Masoretic form has shewa. 30 For some general information about names of demons, see Gaster (1962) and Encyclo-

pedia Judaica (V:1521-28). 31 Ta-Sama says that the Iranian explanation of this name has been disproved, but does

not say why or how.

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from Aesma, who in Zoroastrianism is the wrath and violence, often under intoxication, of those who do injury to innocent cattle and the structure of the world. The only thing Asmodeus does is to kill Sarah's husbands on their wedding-night, and such occasional evil-doing on a limited scale is all that we know about him. He seems to be more a Jew- ish devil than an Iranian one bent on undermining the cosmos. He is a very demythologized devil, and a dose of fish liver paste, suitably burnt, sends him off with his tail between his legs. It is, of course, to Upper Egypt that he goes, certainly a place for demons but not particularly for those from Iran. He evokes neither the ultimate war between evil and good powers in Zoroastrianism nor the deadly sin-related power of demons in the Gospels, but something closer to the world of spirits and demons in the Talmud-essentially trouble-making beings, but no seri- ous threat to the stability of the religious world.32

Once we see this, we observe that the general cultural and religious atmosphere of Tobit does not necessarily have very much to do with Iran at all. Even if the book originated there, which is possible, and even allowing that it is set in Media and that Tobit had left his large deposit of money at Rages (now Ray, only a few miles from Teheran), there is no manifest reflection of any aspect of Iranian religion if the name Asmodeus is not such. If the setting is genuinely from Iran, it is the setting of Jewish life in Iran rather than a depiction of Iranian life and society for itself. Thus a number of scholars, including the great Noldeke (Simpson: 185), thought that the book came from Egypt, and this is the position taken in D. C. Simpson's commentary in the Charles edition. In view of the Qumran fragments, this now seems less likely, and one would think rather of a Palestinian provenance in which folk tales coming from Jewish experience in Iran were used. In any case the motifs and features that have been connected with Iranian religion seem pre- carious evidence: the angel Raphael is a very Jewish angel; the fact that a dog goes with Tobias and the angel is hardly evidence of Zoroastrian honoring of the dog; the emphasis on the burial of Israelite victims of war or sickness has nothing to do directly with the peculiar disposal of the dead in Zoroastrian practice; that Raphael is "one of the seven holy angels" (Tobit 12:15) is hardly a hint at the system of the Amesa Spentas. At the most, one might suppose that the peculiarities of Iranian religion had done something to suggest these motifs; but the content of the motifs

32 Miss Erica Frank, a graduate student at the University of Melbourne, kindly called my attention to the artistic representations of Asmodeus which appear in Syriac manu- scripts, with a legend such as hn' s'dy' 'smdy' 'this is the demon Asmodeus'. I am not sure whether this inclines the balance in favor of the Iranian or the Semitic explanation; on the whole, I think, in favor of the Iranian. On the general question, however, Frye writes (1962:266) that "none of the stories about this demon can be traced to either an Iranian prototype or even compared with an Iranian parallel."

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as developed in the book seems to derive nothing from Iranian religion. An important emphasis of the book is the insistence that on the day of the Lord's anger Media will be a much better place to be than Assyria. So far as the text tells us, this seems to come not from any suggestion that Media has a better sort of religion than Assyria-nothing at all is said about that-but out of the denunciations of Assyria by certain Hebrew prophets.33 Besides, the intellectual source clearly specified by the book itself is the Sayings of Ahikar, a Semitic document, whose hero turns out to have been a Jew.

To summarize: the Jewish evidence lacks any indication of curiosity about the distinctive character of Persian religion. The Persians seem accepted in it as de facto authorities with whom one could negotiate on a basis of respect and even friendship, but the actual nature of their religious belief and practice is left aside. Jewish assessment of the Persian regime depended not on understanding its religion but on the quite different criterion of the extent to which its actions favored the interests of the Jewish community. This kind of assessment was encouraged by the policy of the Persian emperors themselves, who generally did not seek to Iranicize the empire outside the Iranian lands. Affairs abroad were conducted in Aramaic and, on the whole, Iranian culture and religion were not for export.

The contrast between the Jewish attitude to the Persians and that of the Greeks is instructive. Unlike the Jews, the Greeks were intensely curious about Persian culture and religion. Herodotus passed on a great deal of information about them. Considering the circumstances, in De Iside et Osiride Plutarch provides a remarkably well-informed account of certain aspects of Zoroastrianism. In particular, he mentions the opposition between Ahura Mazda and Ahriman and the six "gods," as he calls them, the Amesa Spentas, created by the former.34 But this material did not come from Plutarch's own experience; he got it from earlier sources like Theopompus, Eudoxus, and Hermodorus.35 That is, during the same century, Nehemiah, from the Persian court itself, revealed nothing about contemporary local religion, but Greeks in distant Europe could already

33 It must be noted that the places where the prophets call upon "Media" to assault a Mesopotamian power seem all to refer to Babylon rather than Assyria (cf. Isaiah 13:17, 21:2; Jeremiah 25:25, 51:11, 28); this is probably well covered by the fact of numerous anachronisms in the book. 34 Much the best source for study of this is J. Griffiths. The essential chapters are 46-47,

with his annotation on pp. 470-82. 35 Theopompus of Chios was a historian, born about 378 B.C.; Eudoxus of Cnidus, a

mathematician, lived about 390-340 and knew Plato; Hermodorus was a mathematician, from Syracuse, and also a disciple of Plato. This last is credited with the chronology followed by Plutarch, according to which Zoroaster lived five thousand years before the siege of Troy.

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provide a reasonably recognizable account of at least parts of it. This was partly a result of their natural curiosity, well exemplified by Herodotus, and partly because they thought it might be philosophically important.

Thus the Greeks, and not the Persians, may have been the missionar- ies who made the Iranian religious world known to non-Iranians, including the Jews. In this respect, Greek thought worked in two different directions. Through its own curiosity it spread the knowledge of Iranian conceptions. The Hellenized Zoroaster tradition disseminated these ideas very widely, and the Greek-speaking Judaism of Alexandria apparently knew of them. There were people who identified Zoroaster with Ezekiel, with Nimrod, and with Balaam.36 The evidence for this, of course, comes from a later time, but it is the result of a long process.

The Iranian material was significant not only because of the Greeks' curiosity, but even more because of the oriental reaction against Greek cultural expansionism. Indeed, it may have been as part of this oriental anti-Hellenistic reaction that the Jews came-if they did-to find Ira- nian conceptions useful for the expression of their own religion. I do not claim that this is certain, but such a supposition does fit many of the facts. The features that can most plausibly be understood to derive from Iranian religious influence emerge not in the Persian period but in the Greek. For the usual list of supposedly Persian ideas-periodization of the world's duration, resurrection, angels, and demons-the most likely evidence is in Daniel, Enoch, Jubilees, and various Dead Sea Scrolls. But we find very little sign of the same ideas in the material generally assigned to the Persian period that Persian itself. The same is true of the loanwords. It is in the Greek period that Persian loanwords become more common, just as it is in the Persian period that Akkadian loans are fre- quent, and in the Roman that Greek loans are most obvious, and not earlier. I do not seek to prove that Iranian influence actually operated in this way, but, supposing such influence, to supply a plausible hypothesis for its transmission.

Moreover, this hypothesis is by no means novel. Kuhn thought that Iranian influence could not have come earlier than the latter half of the Persian period, ca. 430-330 B.C., and he thought that it must have been mediated by Babylonian culture.37 Hengel, commenting on this, says

36 I here follow Hengel (11:154, n. 777). For a detailed problem in this see Neusner (1965) and Winston (213-16). 37 Kuhn (310) actually specified the time "roughly from the fifth to the third centuries."

He thought (309) that the influence of Iranian religion was not suddenly broken off with the beginning of the Greek domination but continued thereafter to work for some time-in contrast to our own suggestion that the Greek period was the real time of Ira- nian influence. Hinnells (1969) carries us to a still later point of time. He considers that there is no substantial evidence of contact in Achaemenid times, that the real time of influence was during the Parthian invasion of Palestine-Syria in 40 B.C., and that Iranian

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that the mode of communicating Iranian influence remains an open question. In his view, the Babylonian intermediary is hypothetical, and its existence remains to be demonstrated. Furthermore, he suggests that "we might consider the possibility that an Alexandrian Jewish source was involved" (i:230). Whether or not we have to be so specific as to look for an Alexandrian Jewish source, we may perhaps consider that Hellenism as a whole provided the channel through which this sort of knowledge of Iranian ideas was diffused.

This brings us to the deeper questions of religious comparison. T. W. Manson (above, p. 214) regarded the name Asmodeus as the particular evidence for Iranian religious influence and "the general similarity of the two systems" as the general reason for its acceptance among the Jews. But is it true that the two religions had a similar structure? If Jews thought they perceived something akin in the Iranian religious world-and we hardly have found clear evidence that they did-did they correctly discern the structure of that religion and the lines of dependence and causation that connected one element with another? It is here, I suggest, that arguments for Iranian influence upon Judaism have often suffered from the gross fault of much comparison between religions, the isolation of similar elements and the ignoring of the structural reasons why these elements are important within one religion as distinct from another. It is one thing to make a list of things that seem similar in Judaism and Zoroastrianism-dualism, hell, resurrection, and so on-and quite another to say that the structures and internal dynamics of the two religions are similar. The structural question does not merely ask if both religions have a resurrection, or a hell, or angels, or whatever it may be. Rather, it seeks the reasons within each religion why a resurrection, or a hell, or angels, or dualism, is significant.

To approach this question we must attempt a sort of holistic description of some elements of Iranian religion, a depiction that highlights their interdependencies and interconnections. The description that follows reflects the perspective of a biblical scholar and will obviously be vulnerable to the criticism of a competent Iranologist, but that risk must be run.

One also has to take account of the substantial differences among Iranologist. Those who despair the inability of biblical scholarship to pro- duce consensus on anything will find their spirit lifted when they turn their attention to ancient Iran.38 The date of Zoroaster himself is symp- tomatic. Although most Iranologists seem to place him about the seventh

influence might have acted directly on Christianity without having to pass through Judaism. 38 The wide divergences in the understanding of Zoroaster are well illustrated in

W. B. Henning's critique of the ideas of E. E. Herzfeld and H. S. Nyberg, conveniently accessible in Zaehner (1961:349-59).

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to sixth centuries B.C., Nyberg treated him as a sort of "prehistoric man,"39 and Mary Boyce elevates him to the hoary date of 1500 B.C. Numerous other differences emerge at every turn.

In addition, one must be clear at the outset that there is no single "Iranian religion." Five different stages or sets of phenomena may have to be considered: (1) the ancient inheritance of pre-Zoroastrian Indo- Iranian religion; (2) the religion of Zoroaster himself; (3) the religion of the Achaemenid emperors, from Cyrus to the coming of Alexander- which at least has the advantage of tangible and datable inscriptional evidence; (4) the later Zoroastrianism, in which-as many see it-deities and mythological elements thrown out by Zoroaster found their way back into the religion; (5) the religion of the Magi, if that is something different. There may be further later stages, but these fall into a period too late for the purposes of this essay.

The obvious question for our purposes is: if the Jews had actually known the nature of Iranian religion (in any or all of its forms), would they have regarded it with sympathy? Would they have seen in it something in common with their own religion? Might they, for instance, have perceived it as another basically monotheistic religion, largely aniconic, with one single prophet comparable to Moses, and with a strong emphasis on ritual cleanness? The answer to such a question depends, among other things, on the stage of Iranian religion under consideration and the forms of it that were available to the consciousness of the observer. For example, there could well be a difference between a time at which Ahura Mazda appeared clearly as sole, supreme god and a period in which his association with other gods such as Anahita and Mithra was more manifest.

One final historical remark is apposite. This essay deals primarily with contacts between Iranian religion and Judaism before the rise of apocalyptic and the coming of Christianity. Contacts as late as Sasanian and Talmudic times have been well surveyed and have produced much interesting evidence. It is possible that these later contacts resemble those of several centuries earlier, but caution is necessary in supposing that this is usually the case. By the time of the Sasanians, the various religions concerned, including Christianity, appear to have fixed themselves into rather clear and distinct forms, and their interrelationships presupposed

39 Frye (1952:48-54) seems similarly vague about the time when the prophet may have lived: "After so many years of research we do not know when or where he lived or even precisely his teachings" (48f.); "It is highly probable that Zarathushtra is not a figment of the imagination and that he did exist.... To determine the date of Z. we have no historical data to help us, and we can only say that most probably he lived before the Achaemenid empire" (49). Again: "From the Greek sources, a date of, say, 1000 B.C.

might seem a shade more reasonable for Zoroaster than 600 B.C., but this is speculative" (50).

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these forms. This is particularly evident for Judaism; by 200 A.D. the shape of Judaism was much more firmly established than had been the case in 350 B.C. Moreover, even in this much later period the extent of contact with, and real understanding of, another religion seems not to have been very much greater than it was earlier.40

Let us now return to the questions we posed above and consider some significant features of Iranian religion. The first obvious feature is the aspect of abstraction and intention that attaches to the great Amesa Spentas. Wholeness or Immortality are abstract qualities, at least when compared with concepts known from the Old Testament. 'Good Mind' and 'Dominion' seem close to mental attitudes. This is important because the system of the Amesa Spentas is often taken to have been part of the model upon which Hebrew angelology developed. But the names and functions of the Amesa Spentas, and the nature of the entities as revealed by them, are very far removed from what counted as angels in most stages of Judaism. The Jewish angel develops from the side of being a man sent by God: just as it was three men who came to Abraham in Genesis 18, so even in Tobit Raphael is a man from God who walks with Tobias; and when angels have names they have human names: Gabriel, Raphael, Uriel. The more developed angelology of Enoch may come closer to the Iranian style, in that each of the "watchers," the fallen angels, controls a science, like astrology or the making of swords. The names, though extended from the style of human names, become names that no humans would ordinarily have: Shamsiel, Kokabiel, Barqiel. Nei- ther the total structure of the Enochic angelology, nor the style of the names, shows great similarity to the system of the Amesa Spentas.

The idea of angels is also sometimes traced back to another aspect of Iranian religion, namely the fravasis or 'guardian spirits' that attend ind- ividuals and maintain the bounty and prosperity of the world. Certain New Testament passages seem to come close to this Iranian conception, in particular the word of Jesus in Matthew 18:10 about the angels of the children looking continually upon the face of the heavenly father (cf. also Acts 12:15). This idea of the guardian angel attendant upon the individual is, however, less characteristic or typical of the major Jewish and Christian ideas of angels.

40 Cf., for example, Neusner (1976). He finds certain significant signs of contact but nowhere a great deal that is very definite. "The rabbis do not seem to have known much about Iranian religion and culture" (148)-a position rather in line with what we have said about the Old Testament. "The rabbis give evidence of knowing what they should have known: those few aspects of Iranian culture, law and religion, which impinged upon the practical affairs of the Jewish community" (149). Also see Neusner (1982), which appeared after this essay had been completed. Similarly, Frye seems to place the main locus of contact and influence in this later period, but even here finds rather little that is both central and definite (1952, 1967).

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In general, then, there seems to be no manifest relation between the underlying structure of Iranian thought, whether about the Amesa Spen- tas or about the fravasis, and the underlying structures of Hebrew ideas about angels. This does not make impossible the idea that Iranian angelology influenced Hebrew, but it means that, if this did happen, the ideas must have been seen quite out of their Iranian context and detached from it. The result must have been that the ideas were formalized.

A second main characteristic that, I suggest, seems manifest to the biblical scholar when he looks at Zoroastrianism is the strongly cosmological character of its nucleus.41 The six or seven main entities on the side of truth are related to the various major elements of the universe. The other main structure is the opposition between Truth and the Lie, with the supporters, human and superhuman, of each. Thus the elements of the universe are related not to personal, if irrational, beings like the gods of many pantheons, but to entities that in a way are qualities, purposes, and abstractions and that because of this character provide a sort of rational interpretation of the universe. The problematic and changing nature of the universe is accounted for by a mixture of contraries; for the creations were made good but forces from the opposition side man- aged afterwards to make their way in. Fire is pure and ahuric, but smoke is daevic. Similar interpretations of the universe in terms of mixture and separation are known to us, of course, from early Greek philos- ophy. The idea that Zoroaster was a philosopher and therefore to be aligned with Pythagoras and Plato is not completely fanciful; indeed, it is less fanciful than the alignment of Moses with the same company.

The features of Iranian religion most often identified as influences on Jewish religion appear to be meaningful within this Iranian cosmological context and, therefore, are not intelligible apart from it. The belief in resurrection is a good example, which I illustrate from the writing of Zaehner. It is certainly not enough to say, as he does (1961:57), that "both Jew and Zoroastrian regarded soul and body as being two aspects, ultimately inseparable, of the one human personality."42 In the Old Testament and earlier Judaism, even if soul and body were two aspects

41 I feel some doubt in pressing this point, for it might be argued that cosmology is not so central to the Iranian concept of God as appears to a biblical scholar. Is it rather a sophisticated account of deity, which is then provided with cosmological connections? Yet, even if the latter is the case, it seems to support a cosmological character for the system as a whole. In seeing it in this way, I am influenced by the presentation of it given by Mary Boyce; clearly, one might have to think differently if one followed the account given by some other Iranologists. 42 Considering that the idea of resurrection is often regarded as the most obvious area

for Jewish borrowing from Iran, it is disconcerting that Zaehner, while insisting on such borrowing in the doctrine of rewards and punishments, says of resurrection that "we cannot say with any certainty whether the Jews borrowed from the Zoroastrians or the Zoro- astrians from the Jews or whether either in fact borrowed from the other."

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of the human personality, this was not an adequate reason for a belief in resurrection; indeed, over long centuries it had not led to such a belief. Even in the time of Jesus it was still uncertain that resurrection was a valid and necessary part of the religion at all, and resurrection was considered to be a very surprising thing. In Zoroastrianism the roots of these ideas seem to have been quite different: the different aspects of the material world are different creations derived from the various creating principles. As Zaehner puts it, "Zoroaster saw the spiritual and material worlds as being the opposite poles of a unitary whole intimately linked together . . .physical life in its perfection is the mirror of the divine life" (1961:47). Thus, if I understand him rightly, the resurrection of the body is the corollary of the fact that the spiritual reality should and must manifest itself in the physical reality, a doctrine that much later, in the Pahlavi books, was systematized in the distinction between menog and getig, the spiritual and the material (Boyce, 1979:25; Zaehner, 1961: 200f.; and especially Shaked, 1971). If this is right, the basis of the resurrection idea is cosmological: spirit strives to manifest itself in created matter. But, if this is the framework within which resurrection operates in Iranian religion, it is quite different from that in which it operates in Judaism. And this must mean that, if the resurrection idea was taken over from Iranian religion, it can have been taken over only on a basis of inner-Jewish reasonings and motivations, adopted formally, but with no idea of the underlying reasons within Iranian religion.43

The same seems to be the case with the periodization of the world's duration, an important part of eschatological schemes. The tradition that the world existed for a fixed time divided into periods is old; Plutarch has it from Theopompus in a form that fits quite well with the Pahlavi books (Griffiths, ed.; 192-93, 480f.).44 There are three or four periods, each of 3,000 years. If there are four, then one belongs to the gradual manifestation of the creations; the next is dominated by Ahura Mazda; the next is a mixture in which Angra Mainyu is interfering; and then there is a final one in which we are led up to the Rehabilitation of the cosmos. Zoroaster is understood to have come along at the beginning of

43 G. F. Moore expressed himself somewhat similarly. Accepting an "unmistakable affin- ity" between Iranian and Jewish ideas in the area of eschatology and resurrection, he concludes, "The Persian scheme must have been most strongly commended by the fact that it seemed to be the logical culmination of conceptions of retribution which were deeply rooted in Judaism itself" (11:395). 44 For some other remarks on periodization see Winston (197) and Russell (224-29).

Some of the features listed, e.g., by Winston, may well be too late to count for pre- Christian times, e.g., the idea found in the Talmud that the total duration of the world will be 7,000 years. 2 Enoch is also probably much too late (cf. below, n. 48). Moreover, even where Jewish schemes of periodization are early, the question remains whether they too are not explicable from inner Jewish development, for certain aspects of chronological interest run back to an early stage within the Bible itself.

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the final period of 3,000 years. The system is a cosmological one, dominated by the principle of expressing how evil got into the cosmos and has to be got out again, and the very round figures express this cosmological character. In the Hebrew apocalyptic schemes the content is provided by indigenous Hebrew tradition, with important periods like the time from the creation to the flood, the period of the kings, the duration of the exile. Hebrew chronologies are on the whole much less rounded, and their figures are commonly jagged and uncomfortable blocks, like the 1,656 years from creation to the flood, or the Danielic numbers of days to the end, 1,290 and 1,335 (Daniel 12:11-13). Scholars have often attempted to make sense of the Hebrew figures by suggesting that they are really based upon some round number, like 4,000, and that the various detailed figures are attempts to bring the date into conformity with such a total. But all such attempts depend either on shifting between one text and another (e.g., the Masoretic and the Samaritan) or on forming a hypothesis about the original intentions behind the scheme of numbers, intentions which are not realized in any of the texts that we have. More- over, where clear examples of round numbers can be discerned, they sometimes represent not a round number for the duration of the world, but a round number for a particular period of history. An obvious case is the chronology of Jubilees, with 2,450 years, i.e., 50 jubilees of 49 years, from creation to the entry into Canaan. On the whole, biblical chronology was most positively and clearly worked out as a statement of the times from the beginning down to the events of early history, especially, of course, the flood, but also the Abrahamic migration, the Exodus, and the like. Once it got farther down into biblical times, after Solomon's construction of the temple, it became distinctly more vague and uncertain. No express and clearly stated doctrine of the total duration of the world in years existed in late biblical times. Once again, then, if the idea of the periodization of the world's duration came to Israel from Iran, it seems to have come in a way that greatly altered the scope, character, and motivation of that idea.

Again and again we find that the supposition of Iranian influence behind Jewish notions, though entirely conceivable and possible, remains intangible and undemonstrable. Sometimes scholarship has really been more favorable towards that supposition than the evidence, carefully examined, warrants. It has been widely accepted that the Qumran documents display some effect of the dualistic Iranian opposition between 'Truth' and 'the Lie'. I have already pointed out that the essential Ira- nian concept drug or druj 'the Lie' was not borrowed as a loanword into Hebrew. It would be possible, however, that the Iranian contrast Truth/ Lie was indeed borrowed but was expressed in Hebrew words; these Hebrew words would then enjoy a sort of semantic growth into a pattern formed by the Iranian ideas. This is exactly what T. H. Gaster, a

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devoted comparativist, says of 'emet 'truth': "Asha, [the principle] of truth and normalcy [represented in the Dead Sea Scrolls as 'emet]" (1962a:134).

The facts of the texts, however, make it seem unlikely that Iranian metaphysical dualism is being reproduced here. Although 'emet 'truth' is common in the Scrolls, the obvious contrary terms do not occur in anything like the same distribution, nor do they stand in the abstract and absolute sort of syntactical position that would satisfy the conditions for a clear semantic borrowing from Iranian religion. Among the Hebrew terms, seqer 'lie' is not very common: Kuhn lists 10 places, including one of the verb; of kazab he lists 15, including two of the verb. On the other hand, 'emet occurs far over 100 times. Most cases of the noun kazab are in collections like "the man of lies," "the speaker of lies," and similarly with seqer. The placing of 'truth' and 'lie' in central thematic positions of opposition, e.g., in antithetical parallelism, is actually rather rare. This means that the traces of genuine Iranian dualism in these terms are fainter than has generally been recognized.45 The position is not altered much if we take into consideration the terms for 'deceit' like mirmah, remiyyah. The basic opposition in the Dead Sea Scrolls seems to be that between 'truth' and 'iniquity' rather than that between 'truth' and 'lie': cf. the central passages about the two Spirits (1QS 3:18: rwhwt h'mt wh'wl). In the Scrolls, as elsewhere, evil men tell lies, and the evil oppo- nents of the Qumran sect had told a lot of them. The lie as such, however, does not seem to have been a quasi-independent metaphysical entity as in Iran. Again, when the opposite of truth is Belial or Mastema or the like, the similarity to Iran is again less clear. Taking the question as a whole, with openness towards either possibility, one is inclined to conclude that the dualism of the Two Spirits at Qumran, with the accompanying paraphernalia of light and darkness, truth and iniquity, could have evolved from inner-Jewish developments. Moreover, it is possible to consider that the Qumran phenomena can be explained as part of a common process of hypostatization that similarly affected a number of religions at the same time, rather than as a process of "influence" beginning in one and then passing from it to another (Colpe: 480).

The place of fire furnishes another interesting case. The veneration of fire in Zoroastrianism is something that might perhaps have escaped the censure of Jews as falling short of idolatry; it would be comparable with the Greek perception of the Persians as setting up no statues or images of the gods, nor worshipping them in temples. An interest in fire

45 This is essentially the same point on which Frye has already been quoted, n. 7 above: the textual evidence very often fails to provide the exact systematic analogies that are required if a real agreement of concepts between Iranian and Jewish sources is to be proved. Neither do the Iranian sources offer us 'children of light and children of darkness', nor do Jewish sources offer us the same systematic opposition of 'truth' and 'lie'.

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could also have been linked with the important function of light, which, whether coming from Iranian sources or not, is very evident in the Scrolls.46 In Iranian belief, fire was the purest element and belonged especially to the supreme god; the maintenance of it was a cosmic neces- sity and a duty laid upon believers. In the Scrolls, however, there seems to be no sign that fire was so conceived; as in the older biblical tradition, it is a threatening force, used as a symbol for divine judgment and destruction. The same is the implication of a phrase like "Our God is a consuming fire" in the New Testament (Hebrews 12:29).

There are yet other aspects of Iranian religion that invite consideration, even if the results are likely to be negative in the end. The importance of ritual purity has not been noticed as much as other aspects. Scholars have been quick to fasten attention upon the more philosophical features, such as dualism, or the more eschatological, such as resurrection, so that the importance of complicated measures of ritual purification may well have escaped many biblical scholars. The recent works of Mary Boyce have brought these vividly to attention. It is a common position in Old Testament studies that the texts about Levitical purity,

46 Winston, who like Morton Smith sees substantial Iranian influence in 2 Isaiah, considers (187) the references to fire in Isaiah 50:10-11 to apply to Jews who had turned to the Persian cult of fire. The phrase qodehe 'es 'igniters of fire' is, he tells us, a "verbatim translation" of puraithoi, the designation of the Magi in Strabo 15.3.15 and equivalent to Avestan athravan. This whole interpretation seems very unlikely.

A more rewarding case for discussion is 2 Maccabees 1.19, 22, 33-34, the story of the concealment of the temple fire and its rediscovery in the form of a thick liquid, which proved to be naphtha. Winston (199f.) quotes Brownlee as saying that "this is a clear case of identifying the sacred fire of the Persians with the exiled fire of the temple altar in Jerusalem." Yes, but this is something other than 'Iranian influence on Jewish religion'; it is more like a Jewish take-over of Iranian religion. The Jerusalem temple fire was hidden in Persia and eventually discovered with impressive results. When the king of Persia heard of this and had verified it, he enclosed the site with a wall and declared it sacred. The effect of the legend on the reader will be, among other things, the following: if there is somewhere in Iran a sacred fire, authorized as such by the emperor and carefully walled off as a holy site, it is actually, if one only knew it, a Jewish fire, taken originally from the Jerusalem temple. This all-important feature of Iranian religion is thus an unknowing and secondary observance of a central feature of Jewish religion. There is some analogy with Paul's picture of Greek religion: "Whom therefore ye ignorantly wor- ship, him declare I unto you" (Acts 17:23). This entire aspect of the story, however, is evident only to such readers as are interested in Iranian religion at all, and one cannot say that that interest is pressed upon the reader by the author of 2 Maccabees. The Iranian religious background could easily be entirely missed by the reader. The story is set in Persia because Nehemiah was in Persia and because the Persia of the time contained the territory (originally Babylonia) to which the exiles had been sent. The idea of a hidden fire, eventually regained, could perhaps equally well have had a Jewish or a Greek background. Even if the semi-etymological word-play on naphtha through nephthar, explained as 'purification', should have some sort of Iranian basis, the allusion and its meaning had almost certainly been lost from an early time.

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mainly in the books of Leviticus and Numbers, belong to the Persian period. If there was reason, therefore, on other grounds, to believe that Iranian religion deeply affected Jewish, then one would have to consider the possibility that it stimulated some of the interest in ritual purity.47 Once again, however, it may well be that the Jewish ritual texts rest entirely on inner Jewish tradition. Perhaps comparative studies of the details of the rituals might lead to some useful conclusions.

That the name Mithra means 'contract', 'covenant', will hardly fail to attract at least the momentary notice of Old Testament specialists, especially at a time when it is argued that the covenant terminology of the Bible itself comes from a rather late stage, and when we have seen (above, p. 000) that the deity Mithra receives recognition from Arta- xerxes II in the early fourth century. Perhaps, however, this is no more than mere coincidence.

Rather more convincing is the idea that an Iranian source lies behind the role of the fallen angels, the "watchers" of apocalyptic. In Zoroastri- anism the dethroned gods seem to cast a constant shadow. In India the devas became the great gods and the asuras sank to the rank of demons; in Iran the cognate term, ahura, was the name of the supreme god, and the daevas became demonic anti-gods. The fallen angels of the Bible have a basis in older Hebrew story: in Isaiah 14:12 Lucifer is fallen from heaven, and in Ezekiel 28:12-19 the king of Tyre had had a sort of angelic existence in Eden before he was thrown out. It is not clear, however, that these angelic falls and expulsions had always been the beginning of quite catastrophic evil. Even in Genesis 6 the same is true of the angelic marriages as described in the earlier sources, for it is not expressly stated that the offspring of these unions were great sinners, as they were later to become: they were "mighty men of old, men of renown," which could be taken, if alone, in a rather praiseworthy sense. It could be the Iranian influence that identified all this as a uniquely bad breakdown of the cosmic order, with the ancient evil and daevic powers getting back in, where they were supposed to keep out. This conception would lead to the reading of the passage in a totally unfavorable light, as suggested by our text of Genesis 6:5-7, and still more clearly expressed in apocalyptic.

47 Boyce (1982:189f., 200) says that Nehemiah, in order to serve as cupbearer to the king of kings, must have had to keep the Zoroastrian purity laws, so as not to bring pollution upon his royal master. After years of this it would not be surprising that he, returning to Jerusalem, concerned himself with questions of purity among the Jews. It is therefore "not overbold" to suppose that it was Zoroastrian example that led to the gradual transforma- tion of the Jewish purity code so that it came to be a set of laws applicable to every individual in his daily life. As the reader of this article will have realized, Professor Boyce's reconstructions of what may have happened on the Jewish side are often highly adventurous.

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This very tentative and uncertain survey must now come to an end.48 The question, whether Jewish religion was really influenced by Iranian, has not been answered. On the whole, the most probable thing seems to be the suggestion that Iranian religious influence, if it did come in, came in through the admixture of Oriental ideas in the Hellenistic world and was adopted because it was part of the anti-Hellenistic reaction: if so, then in Judaism this did not occur until the second century B.C. and really after 170 or so, with the later sections of Daniel, with Enoch, and with other comparable works. Substantial and convincing evidence of Iranian influence on earlier strata of the Old Testament seems to be lacking.

As for the mental operation of this influence, we may perhaps consider the following model. Faced with a religion quite different from one's own, one may react in two or more ways. One way is to say that, since this is a different religion, no points in common and no points of comparison exist at all. One may deny, or one may ignore, but there is nothing to discuss and no point in seeking to understand. The second way is to recognize that there are certain common concepts and elements, even if their place and function is quite different in one's own religion and in another. One can then say, "yes, we also have one supreme god, we also have a resurrection, we also have one great prophet back in the beginning of time." This second way is not necessarily one of accceptance of another religion or of submis- sion to its ideas; but it is a recognition that there are certain comparable elements. This is of interest to our question in two ways. First, it may suggest how another religion can influence one's own without one's making any actual surrender to the other's claims. By accepting that there is some sort of comparability, one may begin to cast the expression of one's own

48 There are indeed a number of other features of Iranian religion that deserve to be taken into consideration in a full account; but some of these seem more marginal, or else are probably too late in date to count for the question as here posed. One striking passage is 2 Enoch 58:6, which tells how the beasts will not perish, nor all souls of beasts which the Lord created, until the great judgment, and they will accuse man, if he feed them ill. This is remarkably like Zoroastrian conceptions (cf. Videvdat 13, and, among modern scholars, Duchesne-Guillemin [1963:84]). Winston (197) says that this is "perhaps the most strikingly characteristic Iranian doctrine in the Apocrypha." This is right, but of course it is equally striking that no other so completely characteristic Iranian doctrine is to be found in them. This leads on to the question of the date of 2 Enoch. Although it is built upon early Jewish tradition, much of it is Christian and very late. Milik, in a highly learned argument, maintains that this document originated as late as the ninth or tenth century, while its longer text is even later (109-112). The striking nature of its doctrine arises therefore from the fact that it is much too late for our period.

More probability might attach to the idea that the interest in the calendar, so obvious in Enoch and Jubilees, had something to do with the Persian calendar (as also, no doubt, with the Greek calendars)-if only in the sense that the awareness of foreign calendars might have made more clear to Jews that there was a real question what the true calendar was and how it operated.

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religion in part in terms intelligible in that other, or in imagery meaningful in that other, even while resisting all the time the actual claims of that other. Jews in the Greek world, one may suggest, were doing this much of the time; Philo of Alexandria is the chief example. Secondly, comparison of this kind may help to explain how one religion can influence another even if the inner connections and causations of the source religion are neglected or unknown.49 Through this model of comparison, it is intelligible that Jews might find stimulus in an element or pattern of Iranian religion, such as its dualism, its idea of resurrection, or its picture of the dethroned powers penetrating back into the cosmos, even if they did not take over or even understand the inner bonds of cause and meaning that held these same things together within Iranian religion itself.50

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