How Persia Created Judaism 4.1
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Thursday, August 30, 2001
Friday, 03 February 2006
Abstract
The Later Persian Kings
By the death of Darius II in 404 BC, the administrative structures erected by Darius the Great had been neglected. The satraps were out of control. They were local monarchs. When Darius II’s son, Artaxerxes II (404-358 BC), came to the throne the empire was in turmoil. Bithynia, Caria, Lydia, Lycia, Pisidia, Pamphilia, Cilicia, all asserted their independence in Asia Minor and so did Cyprus, Syria and Phœnicia. The Egyptians rebelled again under the Pharaoh Amyrteus and established home rule as the twenty eighth dynasty for sixty years. Now independent, the Egyptians destroyed the Persian military colony of Jews at Yeb and the Persian military colony of Arabs at Tell el Maskhuta, symbols to them of Persian occupation. Aramaic papyri discovered at Yeb prove that the colony was pro-Persian, one document being a copy of the inscription on the monument of Darius at Behistun.
Among the papyri were letters to Bagohi (governor of Yehud), and to Delaiah and Selamiah, sons of Sanballat, governor of Samaria (mentioned in Ezra-Nehemiah) which testify to the continuing existence of an unorthodox Jewish temple to the end of the fifth centuty. The temple serviced the garrison of Jewish soldiers pernmanently stationed there. At this point, Ezra will have replaced Nehemiah in the true order of events. What seems to have been another colony in the eastern delta of Qedarite Arabs (Tell el Maskhuta) has revealed a silver bowl inscribed to “Qainu bar Gashmu king of Qedar”. This Qainu seems to be son of “Geshem the Arabian” who was among those who opposed the plans for Jerusalem in the Jewish scriptures.
The pharaoh Nepherities I (399-393 BC) is the last king mentioned in the Elephantine letters, giving a close idea of when the Jewish colony was dispersed. To judge from an inscribed stone in Palestine, he even took back the coastal plain of Philistia, taking advantage of the civil war between the sons of Darius. The next pharaoh, Acoris, went further and, allied with the Cypriots, took control of Phœnicia. The Persian empire began to crumble as soon as the Jewish temple state was set up, but the Persians were not quite finished, yet.
Abrocammus, a new satrap of Abarnahara, with two others, Pharnabazus and Tithraustes, expelled the Egyptians from Abarnahara and restored the satrapy to Persia by 380 BC. The empire ws teetering, however, and the instability ws reflected in the fortunes of Palestine, which again succumbed to Egyptian incursions. Meanwhile the satraps also revolted. The Pharaoh, Nectanebo II (359-341 BC) was a thorn in the side of the Persians, fighting off the invasion of Artaxerxes III Ochus in 351 BC, then fomenting the rebellion in Phœnicia of king Tennes. Artaxerxes III Ochus (358-338 BC), however, was ruthless enough to to subjugate Egypt again, and he restored order in the empire. Artaxerxes reconquered Phœnicia in 345 BC, and sent the army under the rule of Bagoas, the satrap of Abarnahara, into Egypt which he conquered in 343 BC. Mazeus (Mazdi) was made satrap of Abarnahara, and held it until Alexander defeated the Persians. According to Josephus (Against Apion), the Jews rebelled in this time, presumably with the Phœnicians, and many were punished by expulsion to Hyrcania by the Caspian Sea, which was, or became, a center of Judaism.
Isocrates appealed to the Greeks to stop squabbling and unite against the Persians. It was Philip of Macedon who heard this call. The Macedonians were not ethnically Greeks but had adopted Greek culture and were not exhausted by centuries of internal strife as the Greeks were. The Empire was looking strong under Artaxerxes III and the Athenians sought a separate peace though Philip wanted to stall. Safety necessitated that the Athenians be secured by conquest and so he and his son, Alexander, finished Athens off in 338 BC. The Persians under Artaxerxes, the king of the Anabasis, brought the Greeks to heel with the peace treaty of 387 BC, called “the King’s Peace”, dictated to them in Sardis, the satrapal capital in the West.
Artaxexes the Great King deems it just that the cities of Asia Minor and Cyprus and a few other islands belong to him, that other Greek cities… be autonomous… Whoever does not accept this peace, I shall make war upon him… with ships and with money.
The Greek cities accepted it! Alexander of Macedon, who was brought up as a Greek but was not one, took revenge for the Greek ethnos 55 years later, destroying the Achaemenian Empire, saving Europe from humiliation, and earning the sobriquet, “Great”, for his services to European honour!
Artaxerxes II
According to Berossos, the third century BC priest and historian of Babylon, the Persians began to worship statues in defiance of Zoroaster’s explicit command that God was to be represented only by the flames of a sacred fire.
After a long period of time, they began to worship statues in human form, this practice having been introduced by Artaxerxes, son of Darius… who was first to set up statues of Aphrodite Anaitis, at Babylon, Susa, Ecbatana, Persepolis, Bactria, Damascus and Sardis, thus suggesting to those communities the duty of worshipping them.Berosus
Artaxerxes was a reforming king, approving four changes to Zoroastrianism, permanently altering its nature. As the changes survived, they were evidently popular among the people and the Magi:
- the Zoroastrian calendar, still used in Moslem Persia
- the Zurvanite heresy, popular until the end of the Sasanian Empire
- the temple cult of divine images, popular until the end of the Parthian Empire
- the temple cult of fire, continuing until today among the Parsis.
In his promotion of divine images, Artaxerxes II no longer reserved his praise for Ahura Mazda, but worshipped a Trinity—Ahura Mazda, Anahita (the Virgin, “Undefiled” or “Immaculate”), and Mithras. Plutarch paints Artaxerxes as a timid man. Parysatis, his mother, the Babylonian wife of Darius, dominated her son, and her favouring traditional Babylonian religious expression is usually considered responsible for the changes of Artaxerxes. At Persepolis he inscribed:
I built this palace by the wills of Ahura Mazda, Anahita and Mithra. May Ahura Mazda, Mithra and Anahita protect me from the Lie.
Artaxerxes II had put a Trinity of gods in charge. He promulgated the cult of the goddess, Anahita, and the empire was united from Sardis to Bactria under the cult of a Great Father and a Mother Goddess, who, together with Mithras, formed the trinity of father, mother and son. Traces persisted in Asia Minor until the time of Paul and helped Christianity to take root there so quickly. Roman sources give the source of western Mithraism as Cilicia in the south of Asia Minor, where Paul was traditionally born and brought up.
Anahita was the goddess of waters, and water was an element not to be defiled for Persians. Anahita will have retained her virginity by bathing in pure water, the message of the myth being that mortals should not defile a goddess. In a Greek myth, mentioned by Pausanias, Juno renewed her virginity by bathing in a magical fountain. Anahita was paradoxically identified with a Babylonian goddess and became Anaitis, a goddess who needed the restorative power of pure water, but was immensely popular. Aelian mentions a goddess who restored her virginity after every coitus by bathing in a fountain located between the upper Tigris and Euphrates, where Zoroastrians considered were some of their holy places. She must have been Anahita.
Oleg Basirov notes that the classical writers Heraclitus of Ephesus (c 500 BC), Herodotus (c 490-445 BC), Cicero (54-44 BC), and Strabo (63 BC-19 AD) all agreed that the early Persian kings were aniconic in their worship, and had no built temples. Heraclitus admired this stance, ridiculing men who prayed to statues. Herodotus admired them for the same reasons. Cicero says
Persians considered representation of sacred statues in human form a wicked custom,
and that Xerxes thought the Athenians sacrilegious…
…to keep the gods, who dwell in the whole universe, shut up within walls
To counter the images being introduced, the orthodox Zoroastrians seem to have introduced or re-introduced the fire temples. The Magi obviously realized that aniconism was unpopular, or the people were unable to worship satisfactorily without some focus. Fire was a divine element that could provide the focus without actually being an image. It had come from Asha Vahishta—effectively piety or righteousness—and the old Iranian fire god, Atar, and had long been venerated as sacred by the Iranians, even being acceptable to the prophet. Zoroastrian qualities seem fluid, constantly flowing from one to another, and here is a spiritual element, flowing out of an abstract quality, and a physical element via an ancient god, which looks like a form of truth or arta again! Fire thus becomes the force of arta, order, truth, honesty, righteousness, literally the cosmic moral standard which regulates the good creation. No magus was likely to dissent, since the cultivation of permanent fires gave them additional work, and the whole distinguishing feature of the fire of a fire temple is that it is everlasting!
Inscribed above the mausoleum of Darius the Great, and copied by other shahs, the king is shown bowing before a fire burning on an alter. It is a scene which became symbolic of Persian culture common to Persian inscriptions, coins and seals. It shows the deep respect the Achaemenids had for for fire as a symbol of their spirituality. Deep fire holders have been found in Persia, like the ones shown. The fires were kept blazing permanently, except when a king died, when they were doused, and, according to Diodorus, new ones were ignited for the new shah. Scholars like Boyce have concluded that the new emphasis on fire temples, in the time of Artaxerxes II, were an orthodox backlash in opposition to the blasphemy of the Queen Mother and her sons.
For Artaxerxes’ brother, Cyrus, certainly promoted Anahita in the west. It begins to look as if the brothers were following their mother, Parysatis’s, lead in worshipping the goddess, presumably with the approval, if not the open support, of Darius. If this is so, Darius might well have been ready to let Yehouah, the Ahuramazda-like god being imposed on the Yehudim, retain his age old consort, Asherah. If so, she was erased later. The king’s son, Artaxerxes III, rejected Anahita and worshipped only Ahuramazda and Mithras. An ambiguity in the cuneiform script of an inscription of Artaxerxes III at Persepolis would make it possible to argue that he regarded Father and Son as one person, suggesting that the attributes of Ahuramazda were being transferred to Mithras, and suggesting another identity of Zoroastrianism and Christianity.
Regarding the Zurvanite heresy—the theme of a God of Time was fashionable in the Mediterranean in the last few centuries before the birth of Christ. Modern Zoroastrians, according to Rashna Ghadially on CAIS, think Zurvan was at first the God of Time in Phœnician tradition around the seventh and sixth centuries BC, and was brought into the Persian realm of religious thought around the reign of Artazerxes II in 400 BC. It equates Zurvan with Chronos whom many think was El, and Iao (Yehouah), a god of the year, who became a Gnostic god. Some scholars, such as S F G Brandon, think earlier Aryan invaders of the ANE, such as the Mitanni, had a God of Time, so the influence could have been from the Aryan tribes to the Semitic Canaanites.
A God of the Year is quite logically the father of two seasonal sons (and suns), the sun of the summer and the sun of the winter, one good and one evil, which is which depending on location. This dualism is characteristic of Persian religion, but some think it was introduced by the Zurvanism of the time of Artaxerxes. Brandon seems more correct. It seems to have been older in origin. It is a good explanation of the origin of dualism, and Zoroastrian dualism extends right back into the Gathas. It does not mean, of course, that there could not have been a resurgence of Zurvanism at this time.
The two principles were not equal, arta and druj, and therein was the problem. What seemed to differ was the emphasis. Ahura Mazda with arta would prevail, but needed the commitment of everyone good to eschew the Lie, so Zoroaster emphasized the need of people to do good deeds, whereas the Zurvanite approach placed the emphasis on destiny. If Ahura Mazda would prevail, then it was destiny and human endeavour was incidental. Each human must also have been destined to be good or a liar. It no longer seemed to offer any proper moral options. No doubt it was not so simple. The Essenes had the best of both worlds, and that might have been the Zurvanite approach. Essenes believed people were destined all right, but even destiny could be tipped at the edges by human will. A devil could not be made into a saint, but by yielding a little of his devilishness helped the victory of the Good. These marginal differences made all the difference in the End.
During the Sassanian era, Zurvanism flourished and Zurvan was accepted even by priests as a supreme God, though Ahuramazda remained the good God, and the chief God in religious practice.
- For a short readable account of the Persian empire at CAIS, search Google for:
+"(HAKHÂMANESHIÂN) The Empire of Achaemenid Dynasty (550-333 BCE)" +CAIS
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Moses and Exodus
