THE QUESTION OF RELIGIOUS INFLUENCE: THE CASE OF ZOROASTRIANISM, JUDAISM, AND CHRISTIANITY

Abstract

It is customary to connect certain phenomena of the later Old and of postbiblical Judaism with Iranian influence. The development within Jewish religion of such matters as angels, dualism, eschatology, and the resurrection of the body is commonly attributed to the impact of Iranian religion. This would not be surprising, at least in theory; for the Jews lived about two centuries under the Pax Persica, and some of their most important books were written in that time. It therefore is striking that, on the whole, biblical and Jewish studies have remained very much aloof from the study of Iranian language, literature, and religion. For most biblical scholars, the Oriental background of the Old Testament has meant the Semitic background, perhaps also the Egyptian and the Hittite, but much less the Iranian. The energetic effort invested in work on Akkadian and Ugaritic parallels stands in surprising contrast to the absence of similar attention to Persian materials. Part of the explanation for this circumstance lies in the attraction of novelty. The Avesta was known in the West from the end of the eighteenth century, and it therefore provided materials for exploration long before Akkadian, and still longer before Ugaritic, evidence was known. As usual, some of the theories built upon Avestan evidence came to seem highly unlikely, and it was doubtless felt that the resources of this literature had been fully exploited. Much of Old scholarship in the 1980s shows little greater consciousness of the Iranian sources than existed before the mid-nineteenth century. One also must consider the problem of linguistic difficulty. For the student starting from Hebrew, the natural path of expansion is that opened up by Semitic linguistics, and the passage from Hebrew to Ugaritic or even Akkadian is a fairly easy and natural one. But Hebrew has practically nothing in common with Avestan or Pahlavi, and Iranian and Indo-European linguistics are unfamiliar and difficult for the Hebraist. There are, of course, scholars who have studied both Hebrew and