Abstract

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Thursday, August 30, 2001
Thursday, 13 August 2009

The Later Persian Kings

By the death of Darius II in 404 BC, the administrative structures erected by Darius the Great had been neglected. The satraps were out of control. They were local monarchs. When Darius II’s son, Artaxerxes II (404-358 BC), came to the throne the empire was in turmoil. Bithynia, Caria, Lydia, Lycia, Pisidia, Pamphilia, Cilicia, all asserted their independence in Asia Minor and so did Cyprus, Syria and Phœnicia. The Egyptians rebelled again under the Pharaoh Amyrteus and established home rule as the twenty eighth dynasty for sixty years. Now independent, the Egyptians destroyed the Persian military colony of Jews at Yeb and the Persian military colony of Arabs at Tell el Maskhuta, symbols to them of Persian occupation. Aramaic papyri discovered at Yeb prove that the colony was pro-Persian, one document being a copy of the inscription on the monument of Darius at Behistun.

Among the papyri were letters to Bagohi (governor of Yehud), and to Delaiah and Selamiah, sons of Sanballat, governor of Samaria (mentioned in Ezra-Nehemiah) which testify to the continuing existence of an unorthodox Jewish temple to the end of the fifth centuty. The temple serviced the garrison of Jewish soldiers pernmanently stationed there. At this point, Ezra will have replaced Nehemiah in the true order of events. What seems to have been another colony in the eastern delta of Qedarite Arabs (Tell el Maskhuta) has revealed a silver bowl inscribed to “Qainu bar Gashmu king of Qedar”. This Qainu seems to be son of “Geshem the Arabian” who was among those who opposed the plans for Jerusalem in the Jewish scriptures.

The pharaoh Nepherities I (399-393 BC) is the last king mentioned in the Elephantine letters, giving a close idea of when the Jewish colony was dispersed. To judge from an inscribed stone in Palestine, he even took back the coastal plain of Philistia, taking advantage of the civil war between the sons of Darius. The next pharaoh, Acoris, went further and, allied with the Cypriots, took control of Phœnicia. The Persian empire began to crumble as soon as the Jewish temple state was set up, but the Persians were not quite finished, yet.

Abrocammus, a new satrap of Abarnahara, with two others, Pharnabazus and Tithraustes, expelled the Egyptians from Abarnahara and restored the satrapy to Persia by 380 BC. The empire was teetering, however, and the instability was reflected in the fortunes of Palestine, which again succumbed to Egyptian incursions. Meanwhile the satraps also revolted. The Pharaoh, Nectanebo II (359-341 BC) was a thorn in the side of the Persians, fighting off the invasion of Artaxerxes III Ochus in 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:

1. the Zoroastrian calendar, still used in Moslem Persia
2. the Zurvanite heresy, popular until the end of the Sasanian Empire
3. the temple cult of divine images, popular until the end of the Parthian Empire
4. the temple cult of fire, continuing until today among the Parsis.

In his promotion of divine images, Artaxerxes II no longer reserved his praise for 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.

The Calendar—Feasts and Dates
Zoroastrian Calendar

The Achaemenians originally had numbers instead of names for the days of the month. Artaxerxes II (405-359 BC) dedicated each day and month to a divine spirit (Y 16:3-6), and appointed a year of twelve months with thirty days each. Each month had four weeks, the first two of seven days and the last two of eight days. Saturday was “Shanbeh”, the same word as “Sabbath”. Four days were devoted to Dadvah (Creator) Ahuramazda, acknowledging Zurvan—the god of time or the year, considered to have four parts (perhaps the four quarterly festivals). Later, the first of the four days was named after Ohrmuzd, and the other three after him as Creator, Dai (Pahlavi for Dadvah). The three “Dai” days are distinguished by adding to each the name of the following day, eg “Daibe Adar”.

The twelve months also received dedications, which coincide with those of twelve of the days. The month names are first attested in Pahlavi (Middle-Persian). Names of the months in New-Persian are:

1. Farvardin
2. Ardibehest
3. Khordad
4. Tir
5. Amordad
6. Shahrivar
7. Mehr
8. Aban
9. Azar
10. Dai
11. Bahman
12. Esfand

The year begins at the vernal equinox (Hamaspathmaidhaya, “Middle of Equal Paths”) on 1 Farvardin, about 21 March, the summer solstice is on 1 Tir, about 22 June, the autumnal equinox is on 1 Mehr, about 23 September, and the winter solstice is on 1 Dai, about 22 December.

The Old Avestan calendar became the religious calendar of the followers of Zoroaster everywhere, including the communities in the south and west. The Pagan Aryans seem to have divided the year (yar) into two seasons, a summer season from the spring equinox to the autumn equinox, and the winter from autumn to spring. The same practice is found in India, testifying to its Aryan origin. The Vedic system, consisted of two equal parts, two ayanas, either divided at the solstices (“uttarayana” and “daksinayana”), or divided at the equinoxes (“devayana” and “pitryana”). In Iran, two festivals marked the beginning (“maidyoshahem”) and the middle of the year (“maidyarem”). Yasht 8:36 speaks of the whole of life watching after the end of the year for the heliacal rise (mid-July) of Tishtrya (Sirius, heralding the rainy season). And elsewhere in the Avesta, the season beginning at the “maidyarem” is described as “the cold bringer”, so it spans winter. “Maidyarem” would therefore be the autumn equinox, and the year began in spring (cf K R Cama). Tir, when Tishtrya rose, was the fourth month (June-July) and Ahuramazda the seventh (September-October), the beginning of the second half year (mid-year).

Today, the seventh month is Mihr which is a name of Mithras, suggesting that Ahurahmazda is Mithras! But even calling it Ahuramazda shows it was a name given to it in the period of the acceptance of Zoroastrianism. It cannot have been its original name. Seeing Ahuramazda as Mithravaruna, the compound noun uniting the two half year seasons into a single god of the year would logically account for the month Ahuramazda being at the mid-year, where the two half years join. It also means Ahuramazda is a multiple god, like the Hebrew Elohim, which means “gods”, and the Christian Trinity! The first day of each month was also called Ahuramazda, suggesting he was like Janus, the opener and closer, looking forward and back. That might imply that the Zoroastrian year originally began at the autumn equinox. Then, the vernal beginning was a later harmonisation with Babylonian practice. Even every week began with a day named after Ahuramazda, so every week began with a Lord’s day.

The feast of Baga, originally a pre-Zoroastrian and old Aryan feast consecrated to the sun god, was a great and popular festival in ancient Iran. It was connected with the worship of the oldest Aryan deities, called by the compound Bagamithra, who were noted as far back as the fourteenth century BC. Baga was identified in the Rig Veda as Varuna, the twin of Mithras, so Bagamithra means the two gods, but the Iranians came to see Mithras as the Baga, as if Bagamithra stood for Mithras with the title Baga. The festival’s place in the calendar must have been the month dedicated to Baga, and later to Mithras. It was called “Bagayadi” or “Bagayadish” and corresponded to the Babylonian month Tishritu, the patron of which was Shamash the Babylonian sun god, who according to Stuart Jones, is identified with Mithras on a tablet in the library of Assurbanipal. This month might have been that of the earlier Iranian New Year festival, when the year began at the autumnal equinox. So, “Bagayadi”, the same month as the later “Mithrakana” and the modern “mihragan” or “mihrjan”, was the feast of Baga, originally the autumnal equinox. The feast of Baga seems to have been celebrated for five days, and five days were intercalated at mid-year to make the year fully 365 days. Herodotus’s story of five days’ uproar after the Magi of Smerdis were killed, suggests it was at this feast.

In Babylon, long before under Hammurabi, the beginning of the civil year was transferred from Tishritu to Nisan, from autumn to spring. The first month of the Babylonian year, Nisan, could start between 24 March and 23 April, according to van der Spek and Mandermakers. So, the Babylonian year began at the vernal equinox when the Iranian year had its New Year at the autumnal equinox. But a calendar of the Babylonian type was adopted early by the south-western section of the Iranian people, who were influenced by the civilizations of Elam and Assyria-Babylon. At some stage, the Achaemenian kings fully adopted the Babylonian calendar, with its luni-solar year, and Babylonian month names, except perhaps in the beginning of the year. A compilation by Thompson, called Reports of the Magicians and Astrologers of Nineveh and Babylon, has a passage where two different dates, Nisan and Tishri, spring and autumn, are mentioned as the beginning of the year. When the Persians ruled in Babylon, there was confusion between the two systems, the compromise being the acceptance by the Persians of a religious and a civil year, as in the Babylonian and Jewish calendars.

Artaxerxes II supervised the introduction of a new calendar, suggesting that he was consciously involved in religious innovation. The old calendar already had some intercalary days, but the original Persian names for the months had been changed to Babylonian ones. The Babylonian calendar had been introduced into Egypt by Darius, and it seems that the modified calendar of Artaxerxes was based on the Babylonian one. The reform of the calendar was to adopt a regular solar year of twelve thirty day months, with five intercalated days, to change the names of the days and months to Zoroastrian ones, and possibly to fix some of the feast days. The calendar of the Essenes seems to reflect it.

The Babylonian calendar had 360 days of twelve months of 30 days. Contemporary Babylonian texts speak of months of thirty days, and even of a year of 6 60 day “months” in Babylon, perhaps an attempt at rationalisation to match their counting system. But Babylonian business documents kept months of standardised thirty days, though the religious calendar seems to have been a luni-solar one. It is no accident that the number of days in a year equalled the number of degrees in a heavenly cycle. The shortfall from the full 365 days was made up by intercalation of the odd days. The Persian calendar was the same because Artaxerxes was reported to have had 360 concubines, one for each day of the year. Presumably his wives were intercalated!

In this scheme, the months and even the days on the month had names taken from yazatas. The tenth month, December to January, was the month of Ahuramazda (as Creator, “Dadvah” or “Dai”), but Mithras had the seventh month (September to October) when he had the great autumn festival. The spring festival was the important New Year festival for Zoroastrians, beginning on “No Roz” (Norouz), New Day in Persian. The Babylonian calendar began in Nisanu (Jewish, Nisan—March to April) at the corn harvest and required an “akitu” or ritual placing of the images of the gods from the temples to the outside of the city boundaries. It was therefore a festival full of pageantry lasting a week. The Persians seem to have copied the whole festival, although for them on the plateau it was at sowing time not harvest time, and they made it their New Year festival. The six seasonal feasts of the Pagan Iranian calendar were rededicated to the Amesha Spentas.

So, the Persians took the ceremonial of their annual renewal festival from the Babylonians, though Old Iranian religion had celebrated the birth of Mithras (Mitra, Mihr, Mica). The Babylonians believed that order that came out of chaos with the defeat of the monster of chaos, Tiamat, by Marduk. Marduk was identified with Mithras. Disorder and chaos ruled at the beginning of the festival, then over its twelve days, representing the twelve months of the year, considered also to stand for twelve periods of long time (millennia), order was restored via bonfires, lights and a succession of rituals, processions and religious dramas. On one of the days chaos is mimicked by a reversal of the normal positions of people in society. Masters became servants, and servants masters. Mithraists took this celebration into Rome after the wars with Macedonia, where it merged with and modified the Saturnalia, the festival of an old rural fertility god. Here began the long-lived tradition of the Lord of Misrule with the coronation of a mock king. Lamps were lit to make the spirits of darkness flee.

The strange story in the book of Esther, was probably written in its present form about 100 BC, as most of the present Old Testament was. The Persian monarch, Ahasuerus (Xerxes), drops the queen, Vashti, and marries Esther, a Jewish woman. This alone is highly important. Neither Zoroastrianism nor Judaism permitted mixed marriages. The king must have regarded a Jewish woman as a Zoroastrian for the marriage to be legal! The implication here therefore is that Judaism and Mazdayasnaism were considered the same religion by the Persian prince and by the Jewish author. The closeness of the relationship between Israel and Persia is indicated by the Semitic words in the later, Pahlavic parts of the Avesta. No such intrusions are found in the Yashts and the Vendidad and obviously therefore not in the Gathas.

Esther’s cousin and foster-father, Mordecai (Marduk), warns the Persian monarch that people are plotting against him. A Persian Grand Vizier, Haman, who opposes Mordecai, convinces the monarch to decree death against Mordecai and other Jews in his empire, selected by lot, on a certain date. Esther, intervenes, and the Grand Vizier is instead hanged (crucified?—crucifixion was the Persian punishment) and Mordecai is appointed Grand Vizier. Instead of being killed themselves, the Jews slay seventy-five thousand of their enemies.

The legend justifies a Jewish feast, the Feast of Lots, held at the Persian New Year, celebrating the Jewish escape and the massacre of their enemies. Yehouah has no role in the story, and the characters are all historically fictitious except for the king. Esther is the goddess Ishtar (Anahita). Mordecai means Marduk (Merodach), who we saw is Ahuramazda and therefore also Yehouah. Haman oddly enough is the king again in another guise (perhaps standing for the king of the old year) because the royal family name Achaemenides in Greek is Hakhamanish in Persian. The story is said to be based on a Persian tale about the shrewdness of Harem queens.

The description in the story of the parade through the streets in royal robes, and of mock combat, features in the Persian New Year celebrations, when the old year lost in mock combat to the New Year and was hanged or crucified. The Jews took this New Year celebration, like the rest of their religion, from the Persians and then had to find a reason for it—much as Christians found reasons for celebrating Pagan festivals as Christian holidays. The Persian and Jewish New years were at the spring equinox—Easter (Esther) to us!

The older autumn festival was again dedicated to Mithras, the Babylonian festival to Shamash being held in October. At “Mithrakana” or “Mihragan”, kings distributed winter clothes. A festival was dedicated to Tiri in June when the festival of Tammuz was bewailed, because it was the start of the Babylonian dry season when plants died off in the heat. The link of Ishtar with both Tammuz and Nabu allowed the Iranians to see Tiri as Tammuz. At Tiragan people bathed in rivers. These were not among the Holy festivals Zoroaster prescribed. At the Adar-jashns they lit fires in their houses, and, at Sada, they lit mid-winter bonfires, to nourish the sun and initiate his strengthening. A grand bonfire was particularly placed near a stream to warm its waters in anticipation of spring.

“Sada” preserves the meaning of the festival, for it is “the hundredth”, the hundredth day from the end of the Zoroastrian winter—which had contracted from a full half year to only five months, from the beginning of Aban (October-November) to the end of Esfand (February-March). This uneven division of the holy year seemed to have given mystical significance to the numbers seven and five. Here too is a hint of the division of the year into pentacosts (fifties), winter neatly dividing into three of them. Summer did not divide so neatly, four pentacosts with a remainder of ten. The extra days might have been combined with the five intercalated days to give the New Year holy festival which needed twelve days to represent the twelve epochal millenia of Zoroastrian cosmic time.

The feast of “hamaspathmaidyem” was in the last days of Esfand, the end of the year. It was connected with a religious ceremony, perhaps including a remembrance of the dead. Originally at the end of the month Azar (November-December) and immediately before the month Dai (December-January), was a festival of the souls (fravashis) of the departed. It corresponds precisely with our All Souls and All Hallows eves. It must have been the original New Year feast at the end of the summer at the autumn equinox, but was transferred in its importance to the beginning of summer at the spring equinox.

So, the Iranians had notable feasts in the spring and the autumn. The spring festival welcomed back the growth of herbage, and the autumn one was the Mithrakana, a harvest festival for the end of the current season and a fertility festival for the coming spring dedicated to Mithras. A sacrifice of a bull to Apollo was made at the Athenian Bouphonia. It will be the practical source of the bull-slaying images in Roman Mithraism, though the myth accounting for it drew on the heavenly Perseus astride the bull Taurus. However, since all domestic animals return to the Ox-soul, any could be used for sacrifice depending on the circumstances. With a different intention, it seems a bull was sacrificed to Anahita too, but here to promote human fertility. In Sasanian times, Mithrakana was the one time when the king could get drunk. Having settled, it seems the Persians had two new years, one in the spring and one in the autumn, but they celebrated other festivals including the solstices. The Jews had different years too:

One the first day of Nisan is the beginning of the year for kings and festivals. On the first day of Elul is the beginning of the tithing of cattle. On the first day of Tishri for the beginning of years, and for the sabbatic years and the jubilee years, for the plants and the vegetables. On the first day of Shabat is the beginning of tree-fruit.

Mishnah

So the Jews had four new years, but the religious one in spring was the most important one in a theocracy, and Rosh ha-Shanah in the autumn preserved the old harvest festival, as the occasion when creation is judged by God.

Herodotus says Persians had no temples, altars or statues of gods, and by Greek standards, that was true. In Achaemenian times, Persian processions were led by an empty chariot drawn by white horses. It was for Ahuramazda. A similar habit is recorded in Urartu, but in Assyria, the chariot carried an image of the god, Ashur or Ishtar. Zoroastrian worship was al fresco—all altars in Persia being, usually in pairs, in open country—but, under the first Achaemenids, temples had appeared in Persia to preserve the sacred flame. Xenophon describes the procession, led by sun chariots, that took the sacrificial animals to the paired altars where they were sacrificed before the king.

The Iranians always used the winged disc which originated in Egypt as a symbol of Horus in the third millennium BC so Herodotus was only relatively correct about this, and from the time of Artaxerxes, statues of Anahita became popular. The many sun names like Surya, Asura, Ahura, Aura, Huar, Hvar, Khor, Hor, Ra and words for gold (Aureus, Or), derived from its bright sun-like colour, betray a common origin and perhaps the winged disc accompanied it. Note that many of these words came to mean a “lord”, and the word “hero”, and names like Hercules will have the same origin, not to mention words like “har” meaning “high” or a “hill”.

The solar disc spread through the near east in the second millenium when Egypt was its most imperial. Standing for the pharaoh who was the sun god incarnate, it came to represent royalty and thence power. In Assyria a figure appears in the disc carrying a bow or a ring in one hand while saluting with the other. The Persians took the motif from the Assyrians. Yasht 19 explains the significance of Xvaranah, an Old Iranian divinity, represented as a raptor, who was adapted to stand for the fravashi of the king or, some think, Ahura Mazda himself. It therefore hovered over the king in symbolic scenes on inscriptions. Bronze objects from Urartu had this symbol in a form thought close to that of Darius’s monument at Behistun, the earliest Persian example. The word Hormuz (Ormuz, from Ahuramazda) still exists in use for the straits in the Persian Gulf, an island and a town.

Alexander and the Persian Heritage

Bagoas poisoned Ochus in 338 BC, then after the short reign of Arses (338-337 BC), Darius III Kodomanes (Codomannus) (335-330 BC) became the last of the Persian shahs whom Alexander defeated in 333 BC, when he fled and was killed in 330 BC. While he was seiging Tyre, Alexander had to suppress a revolt in Samaria. Josephus says the Samarian religion was reformed by someone called Manasseh at this time. Despite the antagonism between the Jews and the Samarians, Nehemiah informs us that the noble priestly houses of Judah had many bonds of friendship with the Samarian noble houses. According to 2 Kings 17, they had a religion of Yehouah but of other gods also. It sounds closer to the original religion of the Israelites.

In fact, the author of 2 Kings tells us that the Assyrians had carried off the inhabitants of Israel and replaced them by deportees from the north of Abarnahara, who brought in their own gods and so did not “fear the Lord”. The Assyrian king sent a priest of Yehouah to instruct the deportees in the religion of the land.

The puzzling aspect of it all is that these people were supposedly not Israelites, so why should they have been bound by Yehouah’s covenant with the Israelites? The truth is, of course, that not all the Israelites had been transported out by the Assyrians. Indeed, the story suggests that the Assyrian king was doing what Cyrus and Nabonidus did later—he sent a priest to train the natives in the proper worship of the “god of the land”. Here we might have the origin of the earliest stories of “return” in the bible—the “return” of Abraham and his family who came from just that part of the Assyrian empire.

They seemed to take only partial notice of their instructor, if we are to believe the scriptural account, for they continued to worship their own gods as well as Yehouah, doubtless, the gods of the fathers! As in Judah, it worked only partially, and the Assyrians did not keep power long enough to enforce it.

The Persians doubtless aimed to transform worship to the Lord of Heaven in Israel as well as Judah, but the Samarians accepted it more readily having been primed by the work of the Assyrians. If the Samarians more readily accepted the Torah and abandoned the old polytheism, there was no need for all the Persian propaganda that had to be published as prophetic pseudepigraphs to show the Am ha Eretz the error of their ways. Thus none of this got into the Samaritan bible.

Nehemiah 13:28 has it that the son of the Jewish High Priest, Joiada, married the daughter of Sanballet, the Samarian governor, and so Nehemiah expelled him. Some commentators think that this young man reformed the Samarian religion, introducing the Pentateuch and temple worship on Mount Gerizim, and so equates with the Manasseh of Josephus, though the dates are a century out. The Sanballat of Nehemiah is confirmed by letters from the temple at Elephantine dated 407 BC in which two sons are mentioned, each having a name ending in Iah, indicating that Sanballat worshipped Yehouah. This early date makes Josephus wrong, but Sanballat might have been a title so, there were probably successive ones.

The Samarians murdered the Macedonian governor. Samaria was destroyed by Alexander in retaliation, and Alexander made Samaria into a military colony occuppied by Macedonian veterans. The Jews were delighted.

Persia and Greece were rivals to influence the world, Persia by a political empire and commerce and Greece by a cultural empire and commerce. Only political empires stop at boundaries so the Greek sphere and the Persian sphere always overlapped considerably, geographically in Asia Minor, but Greek traders, artisans, and soldiers and generals as mercenaries, moved around the Persian Empire. The Persian rulers were far sighted and sponsored Babylonian science. Naburimanni, an astronomer at the time of Darius, calculated tables of lunar eclipses that were more accurate than those of Ptolemy or even Copernicus.

Furthermore, Kidinnu, another astronomer in the fourth century BC, two centuries before Hipparchus, discovered the precession of the equinoxes and calculated the length of the year accurate to 7 minutes 16 seconds. The discovery of the precession of the equinoxes gave authority to the Persian view of the universal god as a sun beyond the sun—a god beyond the heavens that moved the heavens themselves! This became the basis of Platonic philosophy and the beliefs of the Mithraists.

After Alexander, the Persian religion was left with no political base, so information from earlier sources is especially valuable in knowing the nature of Zoroastrianism originally. Unfortunately, Magian ceremonies were held without anyone not of the faith permitted to observe, not at first for any reason of secrecy, but for purity reasons. Non-believers were impure, or at least likely to be impure. Greeks reporters were therefore dependent on what the Magi told them or translated for them from their sacred books. The Magi were keen on proselytizing, but they were subject to a government ministry which directed religious affairs, and this ministry will have had its own political agenda, doubtless with the syncretistic aims of making it easier for collaborating foreigners to associate with the True Belief.

The most important effect the Persians have had on the world is from their policy of creating new local cults on the model given by Zoroaster but based on an old existing cult. They set up the cult of Yehouah in the temple in Jerusalem based on the universal god, Ahuramazda. Their aim was to present the emperor, known as the “king of kings”, as the representative approved of the Universal God on earth. The Universal God was therefore the “king of the king of kings”. Yehouah has this very title (the Alenu Prayer), a title that we can hardly expect even liberal Persian kings to tolerate unless they were happy that Yehouah was Ahuramazda! The Jewish scriptures are copper plated evidence of the success of this Persian policy. Cyrus is incessantly praised.

The Rev G F McClear, sometime warden of St Augustine’s, Canterbury, writes in his New Testament History:

As subjects of the Persian kings, the Jews were eminent for their loyalty and good faith. While Egypt, Cyprus, Phoenicia, and other dependencies of the Persian crown, were frequently in rebellion, the Jews remained steadfast in their allegiance to the “Great King”, and increased rapidly alike in wealth and numbers.

This fidelity to the Persians even led Jaddua the High Priest to defy Alexander for a time. As Alexander approached, having seiged and razed Tyre, the priest was lucky enough to have a dream telling him to greet Alexander! He garlanded the city and went forth in his priestly finery to welcome the conqueror. Alexander was as shrewd as Cyrus, however, and fell prostrate before the priest in adoration at the holy name inscribed on his tiara (a Persian head dress), and declared he had seen it all in a vision. In fact, he must have been fully aware of the loyalty of the Jews and of the reasons for their loyalty. He offered to bestowe on the Jews any privilege they might select. McClear concludes:

They requested that the free enjoyment of their lives and liberties might be secured to them, as also to their brethren in Media and Babylonia…

Alexander agreed, but note that there were enough Jews not only in Babylonia but also at the heart of the Persian empire, in Media, to merit a special mention. These were the three lands whose gods, albeit of different names, the Persians certainly considered as “the God of Heaven”.

From these political manoeuvres came Judaism, Christianity and Islam, all the important patriarchal religions. The Persians and Greeks rather than the Jews and the Greeks were the founders of the western world.

Alexander’s burning and vandalism of Persepolis has always been considered inexplicable. He had read his history and Alexander aimed to do what Cyrus and Darius had done. He was always generous to enemies who yielded readily or caused him little trouble. He burnt Tyre for forcing him into a long seige but otherwise burning cities was out of character. The Persians had surrendered readily after their major defeat at Issus in 333 BC and Alexander’s campaign in the west.

Darius III repeatedly offered terms to Alexander, increasingly generous terms, virtually amounting to surrender, but Alexander refused. He overcame token resistance at Gaugamela and the Persians folded. He entered Persepolis and dallied there for four months, offering to train 3000 Persian princes in the techniques of the Greeks, before destroying the city. It seems so odd to some historians that they say it must have been an accident caused by drunken carousing, of which Alexander was fond. Was it a deliberate act of vandalism because the Greek scholars that Alexander took with him found the essence of Greek scholarship already in the sacred writings of the Persians, showing the Greeks as well as the Jews were indebted to their enemies?

In the east, Iran lost Arachosia and Gandhara under Seleucus I to the Indian Mauryan empire. These lands of ancient Iranian settlement, had been re-colonized in Achaemenid times. Inscriptions there from the third century BC were written in good Persian chancellery Aramaic. They also could speak Northwestern Prakrit, and these eastern Iranians will have passed Zoroastrianism into India where it inspired Mahayana Buddhism

In the second-third centuries AD, Bardesanes wrote of “the descendants of Persians who lived out of Persia” as being still numerous and maintaining their traditional customs in Egypt, Phrygia, and Galatia. Zoroastrian sanctuaries still existed in Asia Minor, the oldest being at Zela in Pontic Cappadocia, founded in the sixth century BC by Cyrus the Great or his generals. As the Iranians worshipped in high places, the sanctuary was on a hill, banked up higher and encircled by a wall. Later this was one of the temples to Anahita, frequently attested in Asia Minor, and which show the Persian influence there. In the fourth century AD, many villages in Cappadocia were still populated by Iranians.

Traces of them in Egypt are mainly names only, but a mithraion—presumably a Zoroastrian sanctuary—is mentioned from the third century BC in Fayoum, and “Basilios the Persian” practiced in his community some form of Zoroastrianism in the fourth century AD. Temples let expatriate Iranian communities keep their identity by offering them centers for religious and social life. They also attracted pilgrims for their annual feast-days, bringing together Iranians from elsewhere. Persian Sibyllist oracles were also known, conveying Persian prophecies and expectations.

Christians suppressed Persian temples in western Asia Minor when they gained power after the third century AD, but Khusrau I Anushirvan negotiated with a Byzantine emperor, as late as the sixth century, to have fire temples rebuilt, probably in Cappadocia.

Temple and Diaspora

The Persians seemed to have meant the Hebrew people to have been all of the nations of Abarnahara. The temple was set up in the Palestinian hill country but was meant to be for the whole satrapy. The plan never had the time to take hold before Alexander conquered the Persians—less than a century. The religion had caught hold, especially in the temple state which it financed, but it never had time to unite the various people of Abarnahara into an ethnos. The Jewish priesthood were left in charge of an immensely valuable asset, the temple and therefore the religion, and the wider ethnos of the Hebrews was identified with the Jews of Yehud. Paradoxically, all of those who worshipped Yehouah were now Jews (Yehudim) whether they had ever been associated with Yehud or not. Many had not. So, already at the start of the Hellenistic era, Jews were widespread in Abarnahara and even beyond.

The Persians had encouraged all of those Canaanites and Babylonians who were devoted to Ea, Yah, and Yehu to accept the primacy of the temple state, and had provided a history which explained why they should—the diaspora of Samaria—and why their religion had needed restoration—it had become corrupted through being separated from its cult centre. Thus worshippers of Yehouah everywhere were persuaded they had been led in apostasy and adopted the Persian line that they should join the “remnant” who had remained pure. In Babylonia and even in Iran, many people worshipped Ea and thus became Jews. Even at its outset, Judaism had a diaspora! Before long Phoenician Jews carried the religion into Carthage in north Africa and to large merchant cities in the Mediterranean like Rome.

Judaism was a worldwide phenomenon in a remarkably short time, but it was the Egyptian Ptolemies who stimulated the extension of the scriptures from the relatively short and simple legends left by the Persians when they offered to translate them into Greek to add them to the Alexandrine Library in the third century BC. Much of it was freshly written or extended by redactors working to a Ptolemaic, pro-Greek, anti-Seleucid Babylonian agenda, claiming that the Greek archives allowed them to vastly expand the sketchy notion of Moses, the Jews at first had.

In the second century BC, the Maccabees re-nationalised what had been intended as a universal religion by the Persians. They claimed, as usual, to be puritans trying to keep the religion free of the Hellenization that was supposed to have been forced on them. Needless to say, they were not, but continued the Hellenization, though the nationalization of the cult must have dismayed the more catholic Jews now spread out over the world and thoroughly Hellenized out of necessity. Their dismay became the basis of a newly universalistic Judaism. It was Christianity.

The justification of religious reform is often presented as the need to get back to a more original purer religion. The Persians pretended that their own utterly new set of laws called “The Law”, or now Deuteronomy, had been found and implemented by Josiah 200 years before. It was not true, but was written up in the propaganda history that they were preparing to give the new colony an identity. The Persian colonists were restoring the reforms that Josiah had already introduced but the apostates who had remained in the land, the Am ha Eretz, had undermined. Could any faithful worshipper of Yehouah contradict this?

Certain epigraphic changes dated to the time of Josiah are taken as evidence of the reality of Josiah’s reforms such as the preference for “yhw” in the south instead of the northern form “yw”. Unfortunately, the dating of everything in the Palestinian hills has been botched by the Albright school who refused to accept that anything happened after the exile. They dated everything as pre-exilic, leaving huge gaps in the strata and epigraphy after the supposed “Return”. Many inscriptions like these therefore have to be dated afresh and many will be found to be post-exilic, in the Persian period, when they were thought to have been pre-exilic and attributed to people like Josiah. So, the form “yhw” might be evidence of Persian not earlier Jewish reform.

Anyone who believes the biblical history must wince at Yehouah’s awful injustice to Josiah. He followed instructions to reform the apostate religion, did it successfully, then God sent the Jews into captivity anyway because it apparently was not enough to make up for the apostasy of Manasseh.

Significant archaeological changes usually accompany a conquest or major regime change, they rarely occur with no strong cultural reason accompanying them. While, it is not impossible that Josiah effected a significant reform, it looks unlikely with the record of deviant rulers in both Israel and Judah, and when a clear reason for archaeological changes immediately follows when the Persians send colonists to take over. Indeed, the archaological boundary that ought to be obvious is when the “Returners” return! Even in the biblical scheme of things that ought to be the obvious archaeological break point.

In any case, Josiah never succeeded in centralising the cult in Jerusalem, though it was supposed to have been an important aim, yet that is precisely what the Persians did, albeit not in the times of Cyrus and Darius I as the tendentious biblical history makes out, but in the time of Darius II, who in fact is the biblical Darius, not Darius the Great. An ostracon found at Arad refers to a local “temple of Yehouah”. Curiously, an honest and iconoclastic investigator, like Garbini, who willingly accepts that the crux of Jewish history was the “Return”, can sneer at those (“though of course there are not many of them”) who argue that only the Persian institution of Judaism makes historical sense out of the confusion caused by the spurious history in the bible.

Syncretism and Temple States

Massoume Price in The Iranian confirms that Zoroastrianism made a place for certain foreign gods as helpers of Ahuramazda. The ruling principle was the advancement of reliable communities and the punishment of disloyal ones. Persian kings were ruthless with rebellions, including ones by the Persian satraps and members of the royal household. Groups which rebelled were punished irrespective of race or religion. The Jews were usually loyal and so were prosperous.

Other temple communities were set up besides the Jewish one—Cyprus, Cilicia, Lycia and other places in Asia Minor had their own temple states. Even such remote tribes as the Arabs, Colchians, Ethiopians and Sakai had. The Achaemenian administration allowed them all to keep their religions with apparently little interference but had a chancellery minister of religions, and it is inconceivable that he did not aim to regularize worship to suit imperial policy. The case of Egypt is revealing how discreet the Persians were. Egypt was under Persian domination from 525 BC to about 405 BC, and then from 343 BC to 332 BC. The Egyptians rebelled several times, and Egyptologists think the shahs from Xerxes were disillusioned by Egypt, and paid it little attention. Egyptian civilization was assumed to have continued essentially unaffected by the Persian conquest, and the lack of Persian material evidence in Egypt was taken to corroborate the idea.

A remarkable find in the Western Desert in Egypt shows that the Persians had a policy of regional development. South of the Khargeh Oasis, in the region of Dush, Michel Wittmann excavated an entire buried village at Ayn Manâwîr, assiduously publishing reports every year. Its water came from more than ten qanats (Persian underground canals) discovered there. Perhaps it was intended as a temple state, the temple of Hibis having been built there by Darius, and an undiscovered temple of Osiris was also unearthed. In the temple of Osiris were found hundreds of precisely dated archival ostraca written in demotic. Archaeological and written sources were found together, allowing the texts to date the pottery exactly. The documents themselves are private contracts, drawn up among Egyptians. Not a single Iranian or Persian personal name has yet been found in them, though they are dated by the regnal years of Xerxes, Artaxerxes and Darius, probably Darius II. Thus, the documentation of Ayn Manâwîr covers the entire fifth century BC, which is now particularly well documented. Moreover, for the first time, specialists can certainly date qanats to the Achaemenid period. Previously, qanats were known from the Hellenistic historian Polybius, who writes about Iran:

In this region of which I speak, there is no water visible on the surface, but even in the desert there are a number of underground channels communicating with wells unknown to those not acquainted with the country… At the time when the Persians were the rulers of Asia they gave to those who conveyed a supply of water to places previously unirrigated the right of cultivating the land for five generations… people incurred great expense and trouble making underground channels reaching a long distance.

Histories, 10:28:2f

Polybius explicitly credits the shah’s governments with a plan of stimulating regional development. For investing money and labour in bringing the land under cultivation, local communities had free use of it for five generations. Unlike the Babylonian administrators, the Persians were keenly interested in what went on in the empire, but they were astonishingly discreet about it.

Ayn Manâwîr is a village that was created by the Persians, and using a technology that only they had, the qanat, but were happy to share. Surveys show that other nearby sites also had water supplied by the same method at that time. Together with the temple built by Darius, the archaeology suggests a grand plan of regional development. It is reminiscent of the Persian planning of the temple state of Yehud. Ultimately the purpose was trust, control, and improved economics, to make for good governance and a flow of taxes into the regional treasuries, the very aims of the temple states.

Persians occupied the highest positions in each temple state, giving them control of the cultural, legal and administrative traditions of the conquered nations. Nominally, these ethnic and religious minorities followed their own legal code in personal matters such as marriage and family law. The conquered people were given land allotments in exchange for taxes and military service. Among these settlers were all groups such as Babylonians, Aramaeans, Jews, Indians and Sakai. In Susa itself, besides the local population and the Persians, there were large numbers of Babylonians, Egyptians, Jews and Greeks.

After the conquest of the Achaemenian empire by Alexander, the Seleucid Greeks and Parthians followed the same policies. All the main cities had Persian, Aramaean, Babylonian, Greek, Christian and Jewish temples. The Jewish chronicles mention the Parthian period as one of the best in their history. Jews enjoyed a long period of peace and had close contacts with the government. Centers of Jewish life in the Parthian empire were in Mesopotamia at Nisibis and Nehardea. A representative called the “exilarch” represented the Jewish minority at court and also carried out functions of a political-administrative nature. Jews took an active part in organizing the silk trade, supported by the kings and started a community in China.

Philo and Flavius Josephus documented the earlier relations between Jews and Parthians. The Jews took part in the rebellions against Trajan in Mesopotamia (116 AD), adding to their unpopularity in the Roman world after the Jewish War of 66-70 AD, and shortly, in 132-135 AD, they were to rebel under Bar Kosiba and finish up evicted from Jerusalem, taking many Jewish refugees into the Parthian empire.

In the reign of the Sassanid dynasty from 205 AD until the conquest of the Muslims in 651 AD, oppression of rival religions to Zoroastrianism began. Kidir, the chief Mobad (priest) under King Bahram II (276-293 AD), promoted Zoroastrianism in the empire and persecuted other religions. He declared:

The false doctrines of Ahriman and of the idols suffered great blows and lost credibility. The Jews (Yahud), Buddhists (Shaman), Hindus (Brahman), Nazarenes (Nasara), Christians (Kristiyan), Baptists (Makdag) and Manichaeans (Zandik) were smashed in the empire, their idols destroyed, and the habitations of the idols annihilated and turned into abodes and seats of the gods.

All of these were religions that had been regarded as Juddin, acceptable, in earlier times, and had syncretized enormously with Zoroastrianism.

It is a curious revelation that a large number of Jews, in spite of the freedom given by Cyrus, refused then to return to Palestine, as they refuse today, and Jewish scholars tell us that those who remained in Babylonia looked on themselves as the pick of the Jewry. The 87th psalm when it is unravelled, is a protest that the Lord counts a man born at Babylon as much a Jew as a child of Jerusalem. Jewish learning flourished there, and one of the rabbis lays it down that to live in Babylon is the same as to live in the Holy Land.

T R Glover

Judaism was the religion of the Juddin, a syncretic religion for cooperative people set up by the Persians. Yehud was set up as the center of it, and their presence elsewhere was explained by the Babylonian captivity. Few of them wanted to return to a place they had never known, but they accepted Yehud as their origin, the Temple priesthood as their leaders, and the myths planted by the Persians as their own. By the time of the Sassanids, they had forgotten or abandoned the earlier policy of syncretism in the fear that the children were overwhelming the parent.

Persia and the Essenes

Zoroastrian parallels with the Qumran documents are huge. The Damascus Document condemns those who enter the New Covenant but then leave to join the Liar. The Habakkuk Commentary enlarges on the theme of the Liar, telling of trouble within the community when the Liar secedes from the order and comes into conflict with the Teacher of Righteousness. In 2 Corinthians 11:31, Paul is insistent that he “does not lie” apparently answering an unpleasant criticism of him. The choice of language in these instances stems from Zoroaster.

The Qumran Community was an apocalyptic sect. They were expecting the end of the world just like Zoroaster. The Jewish messianic ideal of a Deliverer came from Persia. The Enoch Literature is Persian of about the fourth century BC. Apocalypticism seems to owe everything to Persia and the flavour of Persian religion on Judaism stems largely from the apocalyptic writers. The Qumran library proves that Apocalypticism was a considerable movement in Judaism not merely a fringe interest. Christian theologians used to believe that the anticipation of God’s kingdom to come was uniquely Jesus’s message. Now we see it was hundreds of years old, had come out of Persia with Cyrus’s “returners” and had been perpetuated by the Essenes.

A dualistic doctrine was almost unknown to the Jews. Jacques Duchesne-Guillemin notes, in the Encyclopaedia Iranica, that the doctrine of two spirits was only sporadically attested in Jewish literature. In Judaism, the spirits under God’s command were not always good. God sent an evil spirit between Abimelech and the citizens of Shechem, and Saul was troubled by an evil spirit after the “spirit of God”, and presumably therefore good, departed from him.

The Qumran documents speak of Good and Evil, Light and Dark, the Way of Darkness and the Way of Light, the Spirit of Darkness and the Spirit of Light, The Children of Darkness and the Children of Light, Truth is Light, Falsehood is Darkness. The Teacher of Righteousness is opposed by Belial, the Demon of Evil. The Way of Good leads to salvation, the Way of Evil leads to torment. Of the four gospels, John reflects this terminology most accurately showing its Essene links. Good and the evil spirits are opposed to each other, in apocryphal, Christian, and rabbinical work. In the apocryphal Gospel of Judas (second century AD), three spirits appear!—the spirits of truth and error that serve men, and “in their midst is the spirit of intelligence, able to turn wherever he chooses”. In Hermas, the holy spirit and the evil spirit dwell together in man. But, the Manual of Discipline (Community Rule) of the Dead Sea Scrolls has a short account of the two spirits. The fact that God created all things is followed by, “God created all things”, then:

He created man to have dominion over the world and made for him two spirits, that he might walk by them until the appointed time of his visitation. They are the spirits of truth and error. In the abode of light are the origins of truth, and from the source of darkness are the origins of error. In the hand of the prince of lights is dominion over all sons of righteousness. In the ways of light they walk. And in the hand of the angel of darkness is all dominion over the sons of error. And in the ways of darkness they walk. And by the angel of darkness is the straying of all the sons of righteousness, and all their sin and their iniquities and their guilt, and the transgressions of their works in his dominion… But God in the mysteries of his understanding and in his glorious wisdom has ordained a period for the rule of error, and in the appointed time of punishment he will destroy it forever. And then shall come out forever the truth of the world.

These words call to mind the Zoroastrian doctrine of the two spirits, as embodied in the ethical and eschatological dualism of the Gathas. But the Qumran works are not slavishly gathic in origin. Thus the good and evil spirits are identified with with light and darkness respectively, a later doctrine. The critical difference is that, in the Gathas, Zoroastrian doctrine specifies free choice, but the Qumran sectarians seemed to believe in predestination. Now the thesis presented on these pages is that Judaism was a religion imposed on the people of Canaan by the Persians, to oblige them to be obedient to the Shahanshah. Obedience cannot involve choice, so the imposed religion could not be the same as the Zoroastrian religion of the Persians themselves, which did. Thus one vital difference between the religion of the masters and the religion they imposed on their subjects was this very matter of free choice. The subjects had none. They were obliged to accept what God had prescribed for them, and to disobey it was eternal death and torture. It seems that the Gospel of Judas was making an attempt to reintroduce the ideal of choice with its the notion of the third spirit of intelligence.

Duchesne-Guillemin explains that the identity of the spirits with light and darkness is an invention of Zurvanism, usually considered to be a later development of Mazdayasnaism. The Zurvanists held that the two spirits, Ohrmuzd (light) and Ahriman (dark), were created by a supreme God of time, Zurvan. Zurvanism prevailed in Iranian religions in the first century BC when the Essenes were active. Along with this change, predestination replaced free choice. Josephus wrote:

The sect of the Essenes holds that Destiny is master of all things and that nothing happens to men but what has been decreed by it.

The Dead Sea Scrolls generally confirms this, clearly regarding life as a lottery:

According to each man’s inheritance in truth he does right, and so he hates error, but according to his possession in the lot of error he does wickedly in it, and so he abhors truth.

Thou has cast for man an eternal lot.

But they seemed to try to square the circle by making choice possible too in that by choosing righteousness, men could overcome the destiny written for them.

Duchesne-Guillemin goes on to say that the Middle Persian word “menog” has meanings strikingly similar to the meanings of the Hebrew word “ruach”, used in the sectarian documents for:

1. the two spirits,
2. the two opposing forces in man,
3. various other human characteristics or abilities.

Apparently citing R C Zaehner’s Zurvan, a Zoroastrian Dilemma, Duchesne-Guillemin writes:

The complex of notions associated with the idea of “menog” forms part of a coherent system in Iran, and stands in complementary opposition to the term “getig”, while in Judaism the development… never comes to form anything like a coherent system.

Ahuramazda had forethought whereas Ahriman had none, the only distinction between them. Ohrmuzd knew the destiny of the world but his opposite did not. A description of God in the scrolls is El de’oth, the God of knowledge, suggestive of the origins of Gnosticism. A fifth century Armenian creation myth has Zurvan addressing Ahriman with the words:

I have made Ohrmuzd reign above thee.

Some such justification must have been used to make Ahuramazda into the God of the spirit (menog) while Ahriman remained the god of the material world (getig), thus cementing the base of Gnosis.

At Qumran, the present age is dominated by the evil spirit:

So shall they do year by year all the days of the dominion of Belial… And [the world] has wallowed in the ways of wickedness in the dominion of error until the appointed time of judgment which has been decreed.

There is also a single allusion to belief in physical resurrection, a Zoroastrian doctrine, in the Qumran scrolls, in hymn 17:

For the sake of Thy glory Thou hast purified man of sin… that… he may partake of the lot of Thy Holy Ones. Bodies gnawed by worms may be raised from the dust to the counsel [of Thy truth]… that he may stand before Thee with the everlasting host.

Philo is thought to have been close to the Essenes and their brothers and sisters, the Therapeutae. Yet, Philo’s religious allegories are considered to have been influenced by the Gathas, with which they have significant similarities. The six Dunameis of Philo, sort of angelic rays of god linking him with the world, are the Amesha Spentas. They fill the world with God’s presence and keep it in harmony. He calls them the six Cities of Refuge, which links the concept with the romance of Joseph and Aseneth, Aseneth being interpreted as meaning “City of Refuge” after her return from apostasy to the Jewish god.

Philo was influenced by Persia just as the Essenes were, though western scholars in their usual arrogance have tried to make out that the Persians were influenced by Philo! Mills was more honest:

Philo drank in his Iranian lore from pages of his exilic Bible, or from the Bible books which were as yet detached, and which not only recorded Iranian edicts from Persian kings, but which themselves were half made up of Jewish-Persian history.

MIL-ZPAI

When God says: “Let us make man”, (Gen 1:26) Philo rationalizes the “us” as God addressing his Dunameis. Philo made the creative instrument of god, the Logos, as an aspect of the Father, but there were other Logoi who had roles akin to those of the Amesha Spentas. Plato had the same idea, god leaving the creation to a craftsman, the Demiurgos. There is not the least reason why these ideas should not have derived from Persian religion.

The Essenes used a solar calendar of twelve months of 30 days. The Persians used a similar calendar, the difference only being that the remaining five days were all collected together in the manner of the Egyptians rather than the Essenes. The year started at different dates for different purposes, just as the Jews had a religious year and a commercial year starting at different times in the year. The Persian reformed calendar is thought to have been introduced in 441 BC (or 481 BC). So, Ezra or Nehemiah could have brought it as part of their reforms to Yehud.

The Persians considered leprosy a severe punishment for falsehood, for “lying against the sun”—breaking a promise. The Essenes might have used the same terminology, regarding the Jerusalem priesthood as breaking their promises given to God, and therefore being called lepers.

Christianity as a Mithraic Cult

Christianity adopted these doctrines from the pro-Persian factions—baptism, communion (the haoma ceremony), guardian angels, the heavenly journey of the soul, worship on Sunday, the celebration of Mithras’ birthday on December 25th, celibate priests that mediate between man and God, the Trinity, Zvarnah—the idea that emanations from the sun are collected in the head and radiate in the form of nimbus and rays, and asha-arta, “the true prayer”. Centuries later in Greece this became Logos or “true sentence” and like in Persia it was associated with fire.

Mithraism is widely considered to be a syncretistic religion, that is, a combination of Persian, Babylonian and Greek influences. However, the Greek influence seems to be limited to the identification in Greece of Mithras with the Greek god Perseus. The Babylonian influence is said to have been astrology, but the Persians were also interested in astrology. Zoroastrians worshipped at altars on hills and had a whole class of professional Magi or priests who had lots of time on their hands to do astrological research.

Rather than a syncretistic religion, it would be more proper to call Mithraism a Zoroastrian subcult or heresy. The center of the Mithraic cult was in Tarsus in Cilicia, Southeast Turkey. This is whence Paul, the founder of the Christian church, came as a young man. By one of the perpetual coincidences of Christianity, the popular festival of the Mysteries of Mithras were celebrated at the spring equinox.

The New Testament was written, 300 years after the Persian empire, yet it is remarkably Persian in some of its crucial terms.

• “King of Kings” and “Lord of Lords” were Persian titles for their Shahanshah—literally, King of Kings
• Paul insisted that the women of Corinth should wear a veil in church, but he called it an “exousia” or an “authority”. This was the name of the veil worn by Persian women to show they were under the authority of their father or husband.
• The agent of the Persian king was the “man sent” by him—his “apostle!” Only the man sent directly from the court of the Shah at Susa could override the authority of the satrap. In this sense Ezra was certainly an apostle.
• John’s gospel calls an official, refered to as a centurion in Luke and a Chiliarch (colonel) in Matthew, a Basilikos, or a “Royal”, a Persian rank.

Paul’s insight on the road to Damascus was that instead of treating Jesus as a false saviour, he could be identified as the true saviour if combined with the new idea of “the second coming”. That would cure the embarrassing fact that nothing had come of Jesus’s time on earth. The rest was simple, Paul identified Jesus with Mithras and taught a modified Mithraism. That got Paul branded as a heretic by the Jerusalem church and James the brother of Jesus. Mithraic ideas were so generally attractive that they eventually won out.

In 2 Corinthians 11:12-15, Paul criticizes the archapostles as disguising themselves as “Servants of Righteousness” and uses the sentence “Satan disguises himself as an Angel of Light” both betraying Qumran and therefore Persian influence and apparently deliberately used against the upholders of the Community tradition.

If Ahuramazda originally created two spirits, rather than simply being one of them created by Zurvan, he is responsible for evil in the world. He cannot be a purely good god, though the later development of the religion identified Ahuramazda with the Good Spirit. Christians like to think that their Father god, in heaven is purely good too, but they do not read their bibles. Amos asks:

Shall evil befall a city and Yehouah hath not done it?

The author of 1 Kings says it is Yehouah’s will to send a lying spirit into the mouths of 400 prophets.

Christians like to say that Zoroastrianism is dualist unlike their own monotheism, yet there is not the least difference in practice between them, and to invent doctrinal differences is pure sophistry. Judaism and Christianity postulate a good god opposed by an evil god but ultimately the good will triumph. All forms of Zoroastrianism are the same. However the good and evil came about is irrelevant. The fact that good will triumph is the encouragement to people to be good and finish up on the winning side, otherwise the three systems are entirely dualist in practice and everyone, as Zoroaster says, has an equal choice between choosing good or choosing evil.

Zoroaster accepted fire as the symbol of the divine, as the ultimate purifying agent. Jews and Christians can have no objection to this symbolism. Deuteronomy declares:

For the Lord thy God is a consuming fire, even a jealous God.

Dt 4:24; 9:3

And to remind Christians Hebrews repeats it:

For our God is a consuming fire.

Heb 12:29

Moreover, if Mithras, seen as the Holy spirit and also the sun, took on the attributes of Ahuramazda as a god beyond the sun, then the Jews must accept that at the time of Ezekiel and later still, if the Essenes are to be considered, themselves worshipped the sun:

He brought me into the inner court of the Lord’s house, and, behold, at the door of the temple of the Lord, between the porch and the altar, were about five and twenty men, with their backs toward the temple of the Lord, and their faces toward the east; and they worshipped the sun toward the east.

Ezek 8:16

Christians have no need to feel superior because their most famous apostle essentially did the same:

Peter went up upon the housetop to pray about the sixth hour.

Acts 10:9

The time given is noon, so Peter is praying at the highest station of the sun, a meaningful time for him to pray as it was to the Essenes, but otherwise an add place and time to pray. And it was so hot it gave him hallucinations. Elsewhere (Acts 3:1), the “hour of prayer” is the ninth hour. It seems likely that the Essenes marked each of the stations of the sun with hymns and prayers.

When, in his letters, Paul speaks of the third heaven:

I knew a man in Christ above fourteen years ago, (whether in the body, I cannot tell; or whether out of the body, I cannot tell: God knoweth;) such an one caught up to the third heaven,

2 Cor 12:2

he is suggesting that there were different levels to the cosmos below the highest heaven. The Persians thought that there were seven levels or zones to the world, the seventh being the highest, whence our expression that bliss is being in seventh heaven.

If Christianity was revealed, it is time Christians found out properly when it was and who by.

• 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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