The Shadow of Persia

The Shadow of Persia

I made a quick comment below wondering about the lack of acknowledgment of the influence of Persian culture, specifically the set of religious ideas which became Zoroastrianism, upon the “Abrahamic” religions. This influence is particularly important during one stage of the “evolution” of this religious tradition: the 6th century Babylonian Exile, during which the Jews of Mesopotamia waxed in power, and arguably dictated the nature of what Jewishness meant to the rump which remained in the ancient homeland of Judea. Again, I don’t want to get bogged down in the details, but many scholars have made the case that this period of cosmopolitan exile in Mesopotamia, dominated by a Persian monarchy which was itself evolving toward a crystallization of what we would later term Zoroastrianism, fashioned the precursor to the sort of Jewish religion which gave rise to the Judaism of the Hellenists and Pharisees, as well as Christianity, and at a remove Islam. In short, the period in Babylon on a fundamental level saw the change of the worship of the God of Abraham from conventional tribal parochialism of an obscure Semitic nation to a more flexible and philosophically fundamental creed, extracted from time and place, and ultimately from national assocations.

And for those of us familiar with the cosmological pantheon of the Abrahamic religions, often preserved in folk-tales and later compiled and interpreted in literature such as the work of John Milton, these clearly derive from the milieu of proto-Zoroastrianism, when the religion of Ahura Mazada tangled with the customary gods of the Aryans. Much of this is not to be found in the primary scripture, but on the ancillary traditions and wisdom literature, so I believe we don’t tend to wonder explicitly where exactly the fleshed out details of various angels and Satan come from.

Addendum: Thi s period was famously the “Axial Age.” There is a lot of debate about the role of the Persian Empire in facilitating the spread of religious ideas from India to the Mediterranean. Just as Judaism was developing out of the religious cult of the two remaining Hebrew tribes, Buddhism was maturing from the welter of  Shramanic cults.

Razib Khan