hmm. i was always given to understand that zoroastrian influence was more to be found in areas such as demonology than in something like the afterlife. it is hard to see how the iranian worldviews specifically would have been in a position to really influence judaism if it wasn't already showing up in, say, the books of daniel or esther.
b'shalom
bananabrain
Tracing these influences is probably a fool’s errand – hence, my interest. I mean it’s the whole impossible question of the mythological/philosophical soups the Hebrew/Jewish tradition passed through as it elaborated its foundational texts. Depending on the dating you accept, that’s close to 1,800? years before we even get to rabbinical Judaism, all the while passing through the sub-soups of Mesopotamia, Canaan, Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Persia, the Hellenistic age, the Romans, etc. I can’t see how anyone one will ever get a definitive handle on all that.
So pressures if not influences must have come from all directions, but the importance of the Iranian/Persian tradition I think is that it bears almost a point by point resemblance to the Judeo-Christian, at least when it comes to the big questions of ethical/cosmic dualism, linear time, eschatology, etc. – and you know the detailed list no doubt better than I do. Some refer to the “Irano-Semitic” tradition, which makes sense when you consider that outside this broad tradition there really is no “monotheistic” God in a strict sense of the term.
From what little I’ve learned of prevailing opinion out there, the main problem in untangling all this is as usual the destruction of primary texts; most of the early gathas of the Avesta have been lost. As far as the West is concerned, what little remained wasn’t even rediscovered until the 18th century. That means a lot of details of eschatology, redeemer figures, etc., come from rather late sources, and so can easily be seen as influence running the other way. And then there is the fact that Zoroastrianism was nearly wiped off the face of the Earth by Islam. (I wonder: which side was Ahura Mazda and which side Angra Mainu?) So the ancient footprint of Iran was nearly washed away, as far as the dominant cultures were concerned, even though the consensus seems to be that this footprint was laid down at least as early as the earliest strata of the Abrahamic tradition.
Again, you know this stuff far more intimately than I do, but it’s pretty clear that Jews were in the neighborhood of Zoroastrian thought through significant and formative periods of time. Many point to the Babylonian captivity, well before the first recensions of the Tanakh. They point out the drastically changed historical conditions of post-exilic compared to pre-exilic Jews, the development of eschatological thought between the exile and the beginning of the Common Era, and the likelihood that much of the resemblance between the two traditions stems from an influx of Iranian influence. The very late Book of Daniel, as you mentioned, is widely considered one of the first fully apocalyptic works in the canon. There are other examples in the Jewish apocrypha, I understand.
Anyway, by the time we get to the Pharisees, the Essenes, John the Baptist, Yeshua and the original televangelist, Paul of Tarsus, and the (comic) Book of Revelation, the end is certainly near, or at least the rapture. After that, we get new generations of Iranian dualism, especially Manicheaism, with adherents like St. Augustine. (Unfortunately for Christianity his conversion was never quite complete.)
I guess the question is whether all this would have occurred anyway without the essential input of those wild-eyed Iranians. Would all of this have bubbled up spontaneously out of the flowing waters of Midrash?
And why does it matter? Well, I think a clearer understanding of anything is an end in itself. Also, many sincere Christians and Muslims would like to wean some of their co-religionists from the dark side. I think they need more than good intentions and commitments to compassion to do the job.
And then there’s just a basic fascination with what Joseph Campbell popularized as the “invisible counter-player”. Every tradition is an iceberg, nine tenths submerged. So much of what Indians call “Sanatana Dharma” comes from a deep India we can never know. The case is probably the same with monotheism. Iran is just one of the once nearly invisible players.
(Oh, yeah, there’s the latest edition of Iranian religion: Ahmadinejad, herald of the hidden imam!)
