Judaism
How Persia Created Judaism 1.2
Abstract
As the religion of a great empire, Zoroastrianism exerted its widest influence, notably on the Jews, contributing thus to shaping the beliefs and hopes of a large part of mankind.Mary Boyce
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Wednesday, August 11, 1999;
Thursday, 04 August 2005
Abstract
Pacification by Transportation
Transportation of populations has long been used for pacification. In Egypt, at the time of Amenhotep II (1453-1419 BC) and Thutmose IV (1419-1386 BC), these pharaohs deported about 80,000 Canaanites, many from Gezer. Amenhotep III (1386-1349 BC) fortified Gezer and other cities in Palestine to hold the royal garrisons. He provided these cities with fine temples and palaces. The Canaanites will have been moved to outposts in Nubia or Libya, and Nubians or Libyans were probably moved into Canaan. So, the leaders of the native populations were removed and others were transported in to replace them.
In the eighth century, the Assyrians had a warrior leader, Tiglath-Pileser III, who proved to be a great pacifier of troublesome populations. His policy was to set up colonies, claiming to be saving the colonized people, then to deport the leading elements of a colony to another colony elsewhere. Thus the bulk of the population left behind were leaderless and lacked necessary skilled people and the clever and perhaps dangerous people who were uprooted were planted hundreds of miles away in the midst of a hostile population. Thus 65,000 Medes were deported to Diyala near modern Baghdad and were replaced by Aramaeans.
In Israel, Tiglath-Pileser deposed the native king and replaced him with a vassal called Saviour or Salvation (Hosea), proof that the action of the invader was presented as a deliverance (2 Kg 15:29-30). 2 Kings 17:3 tells us that later Hosea was paying tribute to Shalmaneser but eventually sought an alliance with Egypt and was deposed by the Assyrian king. When Sargon (Sharru-Kin) II captured Samaria (biblical Israel) he implemented the policy of transportation, moving 30,000 Israelites to other parts of the empire, some of them to Halah near Haran and Habor on the upper Euphrates, others to Rhages near Teheran, the “cities of the Medes” of 2 Kings.
He replaced them with people transported in from Cuthah in Babylonia and Avva, Hamath and Sepharvaim in Syria. These people incur the anger of the writer of 2 Kings for worshipping their own gods, despite them also taking up the worship of the native god, Yehouah. It seems a safe guess that the displaced ruling class of Israel did the same in the lands in which they settled in the Assyrian plains and Syria. They will therefore have taken up the worship of Ashur, who was the god of the earlier race of Indo-Europeans that ruled in Assyria. This might be why an apparently Semitic people, the Assyrians, seemed to worship a god of the Aryans, similar to Ahuramazda.
The Median prince Daiukku, called by Herodotus, Deioces, possibly founder of the kingdom of the Medes, was deported with his extended family to Syria. The tribes of the Medes were called “Bit” so-and-so, meaning the house of so-and-so, like the Semitic habit (“beth”, “beit”), so the House of Deioces was lost just as the ten houses of Israel were supposedly lost.
New waves of Indo-Europeans were crossing the Caucasus—the Cimmerians and the Scythians who lived by plunder. The Cimmerians entered Asia Minor and ended the kingdom of the Phrygians led by king Midas. However Ashurbanipal defeated and dispersed them into the general horde of Scythian invaders. These new bandits from the north promised to ally with the Medes to attack Nineveh but took advantage of the absence of the Median king to take over his country, which was then ruled by Scythians for possibly 30 years.
Using Media as a base the Scythians attacked Assyria, then rampaged on through Syria and Palestine, stopping at Egypt only because they were offered a lot of gold to go away. Biblical scholars like to think Jeremiah’s description (Jer 4:13) of chariots like whirlwinds and horses swifter than eagles refers specifically to the Scythians, but Jeremiah speaks only of the north, which is where any such danger to Palestine would be, and he is a poet of considerable imaginative invention. His is probably a poetic description of any fearful invader from the north, Yehouah wanted to inflict on His Chosen, but particularly suits the Scythians.
Graves, dated to later than the eighth century BC, are found in Luristan in the south of the Iranian plateau that are of keen horsemen because everything found in them is portable and much of the ornamentation of the graves were bronze bits and other accoutrements of horses. Furthermore, there is no sign of any towns in the same place that could correspond to these evidently nomadic people.
Among the grave relics are depictions of a goddess and a god rather like Ahuramazda. Perhaps the goddess was Anahita (Aramaiti?) who was later known to have been revered by Persians but perhaps was at the beginning too. The subjects of the artwork are remarkably cosmopolitan, including pictures typical of Assyria, Babylonia, Syria and Asia Minor. Belt plaques look typically Scythian. The cultural mix is what might be expected of the Scythians that had crossed the Caucasus, plundered and raided various peoples, and mixed with the Indo-European stock already present, the Medes and Persians.
Cyaxares, the Median leader, learnt the skills of the Scythians, threw off their yoke and started conquests of his own. The Assyrians had exhausted themselves with constant warfare over several centuries. Cyaxares allied with the Babylonians to defeat them and their Scythian mercenaries, and in 612 BC, Assyria disappeared from history as a world power. The authors of Ezekiel and Jeremiah, writing long after the event make their heroes “prophesy” that Assyria would be defeated by the Medes and sure enough it was!
The state of Urartu submitted to the Medes about the same time, and Lydia about 590 BC. The kings of the Medes had evidently already subdued the states to the east so their empire stretched from Anatolia almost to India with only Babylonia standing free in between.
In the middle period of Elamite history, the Anzanite dynasty rose to power after a two century dark age. From the fifth king in the line, Untash-Humban (1275-1240 BC), contemporary with Shalmaneser I of Assyria (c 1273-1244 BC), Elam increasingly faced the rising power of Assyria. Tukulti-Ninurta I of Assyria (c 1243-1207 BC) campaigned in the mountains north of Elam. The Elamites raided Babylonia, but the Assyrians asserted their power and the Anzanite dynasty came to an end. Shutruk-Nahhunte (c 1160 BC) founded a new dynasty, and Elam again grew in military status, just as Assyria declined. He captured Babylon and carried off to Susa the stela of the law of Hammurabi. But then Elamite power in Babylon was broken, and soon Elam was overrun by Nebuchadrezzar I, ending the Middle Elamite period (c 1100 BC).
Another dark age centuries long separate the Middle and Neo-Elamite periods, until Humban nugash is king of Elam, about 740 BC. Curiously there is a mirror of the earlier period with Assyria and Elam vying with each other for influence in Babylon. Campaigning from 692 BC to 639 BC, Ashurbanipal’s armies eventually destroyed Susa. It is around this time that the Persian rulers were established in Elam, possibly as a consequence of an Assyrian deportation of Persians to rule the troublesome province.
Cyrus the Great (559-530 BC)
Dom Gregory Dix says that Herodotus recognized the sudden rise to empire of the Persians under Cyrus in 550 BC as the turning point of Greek history. Second Isaiah saw him as God’s saviour of the world! If God’s chief prophet and the world’s first historian tell us that Cyrus was so important, why do modern theologians and modern historians ignore the man?
Cyrus recognized the importance of the older civilizations and wished to unite them in a world empire.G M Cook
The Persians arrived in Parsumash, traditionally known as Anshan, sometime around 700 BC and Achaemenes founded a small kingdom nominally subject to Elam, an old country in terminal decline. Assyria had forced its choice of rulers on to the Elamites and the country was thoroughly divided between pro-Assyrian and anti-Assyrian factions. While the Scythians ruled Media, Achaemenes’ son, Teispes (Chishpish), took over the province of Fars or Parsa. Teispes was a diplomat and avoided the imbroglios of the great powers, but when he died, he divided his kingdom between his two sons. A gold tablet found at Egbatana (Hamadan) in 1920, where it must have been taken with Achaemenid archives during the empire, says:
This land of the Persians which I possess, provided with fine horses and good men, was given to me by the Great God Ahura Mazda. I am the king of this land. I pray that Ahura Mazda will help me.
Aryaramnes (640-590 BC) one of the sons of Teispes, was the author. This is the earliest mention of Ahura Mazda (Ahuramazda, Ormuzd). The parallel between the Persians migrating landless for a long time then being delivered by the grace of God into a wonderful land and the mythical journey of the Israelites into their land of milk and honey should not be missed. Both have the sound of deportation propaganda.
Ultimately the two branches of the family were to be united again under the more vigorous of the Achaemenid kings though there seemed to have been no bad feeling, the subject branch carrying on as governors of what was their own country, an early example of the generosity of the Achaemenids towards losers and perhaps the influence of the Zoroastrian religion.
In Zoroastrian mythology, the king converted by Zoroaster, Vistaspa, convinced now of the support of the Good God and committed to defeating the followers of the Evil Spirit—anyone who refused to submit—set out on the “Wars of Religion”. The blessing of Ahuramazda or perhaps the novelty of fanaticism kept the Zoroastrians winning. There is no historical record of any of this, unless they are stylised versions of the victories of Cyrus, but set down in the annals, they were to be an inspiration to religious maniacs for millennia.
The Zoroastrian tradition suggested by Vishtaspa’s “Wars of Religion” enjoined on the Persian monarchs an enthusiasm for Holy Wars. It glorified the dissemination of Zoroastrianism by the sword, and the Arabs later took their cue from it, as the founder of the Persian empire Cyrus (Kurash) the Great did immediately. Herodotus confirms that his epithet was justified—he was a noble king.
Historically, Cyrus the Great became a Zoroastrian at some time in his career, for at his death Zoroastrianism was the official religion of his empire, and the Magi had attained the monopoly of religion. It was the proper religion of the Medes and Persians, so that being a Zoroastrian meant being a Persian. The two became equivalent, religion and ethnicity being identified, as they later did in Judaism.
As a devoted Zoroastrian, Cyrus believed that his religious duty was to bring about the eschatological promises of Zoroastrianism through active warfare. If the universe was an epic struggle between the forces of Ahuramazda and the forces of evil, Cyrus saw his job as personally bringing about the victory of his god. As an extension of this, Cyrus would bring Zoroastrianism to all the peoples he conquered, but not by forcing them. Zoroastrianism recognized all the gods of other people—some were of Ahuramazda’s Good Creation, and some were of Ahriman’s Evil Creation. Cyrus distinguished between them on the basis of the resistance the worshippers of the god offered him.
A scholarly Parsi, Ruhi Muhsen Afnan (Zoroaster’s Influence on Anaxagoras, the Greek Tragedians, and Socrates, New York, 1969), shows that expansion of the Persian Empire under the Achaemenids was motivated by a “divine mission to offer mankind” a true belief, like the wars of Islam. These wars “were dominated by a religious fervor that must be taken into account” in the sudden emergence of Persia, just as the Arabs suddenly emerged with a divine militancy and conquered most of the world.
Cyrus first refused to bow to the Medes and carefully planned to defeat them, thus merging the two strong Indo-European tribes of the plateau. Typically, he treated the defeated median king, Astyages, with generosity. Defeating the Medes gave him a ready made empire from Asia Minor to the Caspian Sea, with Babylonia ruling to the south. He moved his capital immediately from Persis to Egbatana, taking the royal archives with him.
Asia Minor, including the Ionian Greek cities, were subject to the wealthy kingdom of Lydia ruled by the legendary Croesus. Croesus was too rich and proud to bow to the upstart so was defeated in battle and had to yield to the new power in the near east. The Greek cities saw this as a chance of independence and also refused homage and were duly individually beaten or bribed into submission. Miletus was the only city to yield readily, and must have had some privileges as a reward. Herodotus notes the name Oromedan, a citizen of Cilicia about 540 BC, just about the time Cyrus subjected Anatolia. Oromedan is a Greek rendering of Ahuramazda.
So, from the earliest days of the Persian empire, Greeks were a part of it. They were soldiers, merchants and entrepreneurs and were vital to this very young country from its coming out into the world. It is childish school learning that depicts the Greeks as defenders of teutonic Europe against the Asian hordes. Greeks were serving in the armies of the Persians, and not just as infantry—as generals too.
Cyrus turned east to secure his boundaries there, facing India and perticularly the north east where armed bands from central Asia liked to gallop in to plunder. In each case of conquest, Cyrus allowed the defeated country to continue with its normal culture and practices, and left most of the officials in post. He knew he did not have enough trained men to administer all his conquered territories. It was a dangerous but necessary policy. Meanwhile he founded a college of seven Persian princes and later many more Persian nobles would be trained for colonial administration.
Cyrus was always astute enough to realize that most people he was conquering were far more cultured than his own, and made no attempt to impose a Persian “culture” nor was he interested in directly forcing the Persian religion on to others. He thought, though, that the universal god, Ahuramazda, was favouring him, his house and the Persian nation, and he was keen that people ahould see some god as universal so that the idea of a universal god would confer legitimacy on the idea of a universal king of kings on earth.
Cyrus still had a strong and rich country independent at the centre of his empire and decided it had to be made to submit. Chaldeans [†]
Cyrus returned from the east in 539 BC determined to settle the Chaldaean question. Nabonidus (Nabunaid) (555-539 BC), was apparently a cultured but loopy king, interested in the worship of the god, Sin—neglecting Babylon’s principal god, Marduk, who symbolized the city as well as the faith of its people—and in archaeological research, and quite uninterested in warfare, which he left to his son, Belshazzar. Cyrus had a large army with Medes and Persians at the core but lots of soldiers of conquered nations in support. He needed no army. Babylon submitted and only a few days of token resistance came from the guard of the royal compound. As ever, Cyrus was generous to the defeated king and his family, but Nabonidus died a year later anyway. Cyrus joined in the public mourning.
The victory over Babylonia expressed all the facets of the policy of conciliation which Cyrus had followed until then. He presented himself not as a conqueror, but a liberator and the legitimate successor to the crown. He took the title of “King of Babylon, King of the Land”.
Cyrus made cylinder seals and inscribed tablets with declarations of his treament of and welcome by the Babylonians. He entered Babylon “amidst exulting shouts”. His victory was “desired to the joy of their hearts” and “him did they bless with joy”. Then, “Marduk the great Lord made the honourable hearts of the people of Babylon inclined towards me because I was daily mindful of his worship” “the inhabitants realized the satisfaction of their hearts desires” and “their sighs I hushed, their anger I appeased”.
If Cyrus said all of this regarding Marduk and the Babylonians, it is credible that a similar tactic should have been employed in respect of the Jews, and indeed many other people, the evidence of which is now lost. Cyrus claimed to have been visited in a dream by Yehouah, a god of the Hebrews, the people who lived in “Beyond the River”, the Assyrian province of “Eber-niri” (Persian “Abarnahara”). Yehouah declared he was of the Good Creation and asked to be worshipped in the land of Yehud. The Jewish scriptures, not an unbiased source, tells us that Cyrus sent the “Returners from Exile” there to introduce the proper worship of Yehouah in the Temple at Jerusalem.
Thus saith Yehouah to his messiah, to Cyrus, whose right hand I have holden, to subdue nations before him, and I will loose the loins of kings, to open before him the two leaved gates, and the gates shall not be shut.Isaiah 45:1
Thus saith Cyrus king of Persia, Yehouah Elohim of heaven hath given me all the kingdoms of the earth; and he hath charged me to build him an house at Jerusalem, which is in Judah.Ezra 1:2
“Yehouah Elohim of heaven” means “Yehouah of the gods of heaven” not “The Lord God of heaven” as the dishonest translators will put it. For Indo-Europeans, the gods of heaven are the Daevas, the wicked gods derogated by Zoroaster. It seems the Persians saw all national gods as Daevas, but were ready to allow their worshippers to show by their deeds that they were really Yazatas, good spirits.
In fact no one, or very few volunteers went there and later kings were obliged to send deportees to shore up Jerusalem as a citadel against the Egyptians. It was set up as a temple City in which the people, a Nation of Priests, were privileged in return for their loyalty.
The Reverend Mills recognized that ancient politicians were sensible of propaganda. He comments on the propaganda of Cyrus: “All this piety was of course political” but still showed the Persian king as a man of faith. When Cyrus flooded the empire with these cylinder seals and inscriptions, he knew that they would be read by the literate and repeated by story tellers for a long time. He knew they would become the stuff of legends. Mills observes:
The empire was as complex in its religious types as it was vast in extent, and the amount of business entailed in administering it must have been phenomenal.
Beyond a question there existed a “Ministry of Public Worship”.
The objective of this ministry was to make a show of restoring gods and temples to please the peoples of the nations, but it is utterly naïve to imagine that the “restoration” had no strings attached or was simply restoration of an ancient worship rather than its “improvement” in the sense of arranging it in a form more conducive to civil obedience. No subtle king could miss the chance to cast the restoration in a direction favourable to himself. As Mills says:
These Achaemenids were men of business and practical to the finest point.
Darius took the same line but was more keen on monumental inscriptions than Cyrus. His main legacy is the immense carved cliff face at Behistun but other inscriptions are at Persepolis, Naksh-i-Rustem, Elvend, Kerman, Susa, Suez, Van and Egbatana, as well as on seals, tablets, pillars, weights and vases. Mills points out that “what the great Iranian inscriptions said, all officers of the kings government must have known”.
Cyrus the Deliverer of Oppressed Peoples
The interesting thing was that Cyrus offered himself to the Babylonians as a deliverer or Saviour (in Greek, Soter), just as he did to the Judahites. He said Babylon’s god, Marduk-Bel, had chosen him, Cyrus, as a righteous king who would rule the world. To prove it he ritually took the god’s hand at the new year festivities, thus legitimising him in the official title of the Babylonian king—“king of the land” of Babylon. Marduk-Bel was offered to his own worshippers in a new light—as a god with a world outlook not merely a local one.
Cyrus told the Babylonians that earlier kings, like Nabonidus, had taken their gods from their rightful homes and he promised to “restore” them. Nabonidus had used exactly the same approach in Harran when he persuaded the people he deported to the town that the proper god of the city was Sin. Even then the policy was not new. An inscription of Hammurabi who rules in Babylon from 1792 to 1750 BC speaks of him restoring to its rightful place the god who favoured the city of Assur.
Persians called Cyrus “Father”, Greeks “Lord” or “Master”, and “Law-Giver”, and Jews called him “Messiah”. Greek writers like Aeschylus depict the Persian king as a god, and Curtius Rufus has a sycophant encouraging Alexander the Great to accept divine honours by assuring him the Persians had worshipped their kings among the gods. It was not true. They did not and no Persian king claimed to be a god, but they did like to depict themselves as god-like. They had a doctrine equivalent to the divine right of kings. The shah had divine authority. He was king by virtue of God's will. He was God's chosen one, and held his hand. Shahs were God’s regent on earth, and if that meant some people thought they were an angel of God, doubtless they would be hardly likely to send an envoy to correct their misconception. They showed themselves larger than men and, as it were, conversing with God. To justify it, they propagagted monotheism in the lands they conquered. The shah ruled with divine authority, and that authority was that of God—one single monotheistic God. For Persians, Ahuramazda was the only true god, and each subject nation had to have an equivalent of Ahuramazda to be able to confirm the shah as the King of Kings—the Shahanshah.
Historians like to say Cyrus had “no thought of” moulding conquered countries in a Persian mould. That was perhaps true and realistic, but Ahuramazda was always depicted as a god rising above the solar or equinoctial disc, implying that the Persians saw him as transcendental, and certainly Cyrus was interested in persuading people that the true god was universal in outlook. His purpose seems to have been practical and political rather than religious, but it was a policy that led to all the main patriarchal religions of today. Cyrus was the founder of the modern great religions!
His novel and clever policy of conquest was to be generous to defeated people. In his propaganda he painted himself as the saviour and legitimate ruler of a conquered country. This must have been such a shock to people who expected to be massacred by conquerors that they could only conclude it was true.
Cyrus’s religious policy was an extension of this practical policy—to make it seem to be God’s will, whoever the local god was. He reshaped the Marduks and Yehouahs as Ahuramazdas—transcendental gods, suns beyond suns. To do so, he “restored” the local gods, but the restoration was in a mould that suited a universal king. The “restored” god was willing to look beyond his traditional worshippers to a world scale to recognize a righteous king when it saw one and approve of him in the appropriate way.
He got people to believe his propaganda by transporting them to a country that he declared was their proper homeland, where they had to start anew from the facts the Persians provided. Cyrus was their saviour, so-and-so was their rightful god, the god recognized Cyrus as the saviour—“Go thee and do likewise” and we Persians will help you.
Cyrus “restored” Yehouah to Jerusalem and supposedly 40,000 worshippers of Yehouah—Jews, for that is the name of people who worship Yehouah wherever they come from—“returned” to Jerusalem. The truth seems to be that very few did. Into the third generation of captivity and having the privileges of a deported class, the Judeans are unlikely to have wanted to return.
In the Jewish scriptures, Cyrus is presented as a saviour and an agent of God—the Jewish god, Yehouah—and is even described as the messiah (the anointed). Yehouah had used the righteous but foreign king, Cyrus, to avenge the Jews against Babylon. We even find Yehouah shaking Cyrus by the hand (Isa 45:1) just as Bel had done:
Thus saith the Lord to his anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I have holden, to subdue nations before him.
Two separate gods, Marduk and Yehouah, of people who were enemies, Babylonians and Jews, saying kind things about a foreign prince, choosing him as a deliverer and taking him by the hand in proof. It all begins to look suspicious—like pro-Cyrus propaganda. Cyrus depicted himself as the benefactor of conquered peoples and the “restorer” of gods to their rightful place.
The leaders of the “returners” were Zerubabel, supposedly a member of the Jewish royal family, and Joshua, supposedly the descendant of a dynasty of High Priests. The name Joshua means “saviour!” They were accompanied by an assortment of Persian officials.
Is it not curious that Zerubabel, a Jewish leader, should have a distinctly Babylonian sounding name, and one that in “Zeru” suggests “Zara” (Zoro), the beginning of Zoroaster’s name, the latter part simply meaning Babylon? Zara pertains to the sun and seems to have connotations of “power” or “strength” and so “protecting” or “saving”. Zerubabel is the “saviour from Babylon”. The same is true of a later and more famous Jewish leader to “return”, Ezra, where again we have the characteristic consonants “ZR” appearing in a language which did not write vowels, so that it could equally be rendered as Zara—another saviour!
In fact, Zerubabel was the Tirshatha, the Persian governor, whose duty was to act on behalf of the king, Cyrus, and whose bogus Jewish royalty was to give him authority over the skeptical natives of Judah. He is also called Sheshbazzar which seems to mean “mighty power of the king” or “citadel of the king”.
The society of Jerusalem was a feudal class system based on aristocracies called “houses” of princes and nobles, rulers and elders. The Persian governor was the top official but then came the priestly houses, led by the High Priest, a hereditary position. Sacred objects supposedly stolen by Nebuchadnezzer from the temple in Jerusalem were returned by Cyrus, but Nebuchadnezzer would have melted down or broken up any valuables to make them easier to transport, and so these were new items given by Cyrus to furnish the new temple.
Historians, believing the bible rather than their inspection of the relevant documents, have said that Cyrus was kind to Jews because he found the Jewish God so impressive and akin to his own god, Ahuramazda. Most biblical scholars would not be interested in anything that cast any doubt upon the bible, and if it looked threatening, would denounce it as fraud or copying or anything else they could think off. Here the evidence is as clear as could be that Cyrus manipulated the worshippers of Yehouah that he had returned to Jerusalem, exactly as he had manipulated the worshippers of Marduk.
Before the exile, Judahites conceived of their anthropomorphic tribal God as a fertility and storm god. The earlier Yehouah had been a local god that the simple hill folk of Palestine could easily recognize. Most called him “Baal” their word for “Lord”. The Jews who “returned” worshipped a different Yehouah from those who had been originally deported. This Yehouah was a universal god like Ahuramazda, the Persian Most High God, who thought nothing of choosing a foreign prince as a Jewish messiah. He was good, perfect, remote and a God of righteous living—just like Ahuramazda. He was, however, also a vengeful god for those who did not live righteously. Naturally, since no one previously had known that Yehouah was like this, all of His earlier worshippers were sinners! That is why He had had His revenge, but now He had sent the Persian kings as His saviours.
Cyrus was killed on the eastern front in 530 BC and his body was laid embalmed in a tomb with a pitched roof typical of ancient Indo-European tombs. He was still there 200 years later and was seen by Alexander the Great. Evidently Cyrus was not exposed in a silent tower as the Zoroastrian religion requires, showing the Achaemenids were not strictly Zoroastrian or that this was a requirement introduced later.
