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By Root 2147 0

When the Iranian religious documents were first published in the West, in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, a wave of interest began in all things Zoroastrian (from the Greek spelling, “Zoroaster,” of its principal figure Zarathushtra), not just because they were exotic and new expressions of wisdom, though that was certainly part of the attraction, but because Iranian imagery and especially its religious dualism seemed to mirror many things about Jewish and Christian thought in the first few centuries of our era. After a period of extravagent claims and intense polemical scrutiny, most of it hostile, the scholarly world has admitted almost nothing from Zoroastrianism as an influence on native Jewish tradition.3

But the counterreaction seems almost as mistaken as the prior enthusiasm.4 In its two-hundred-year rule of Israel and subsequent five centuries-long influence in the Middle East, Iran and Zoroastrianism had many chances to influence Jewish thought. The problem is that there is no easy way to date Zoroastrian texts, leaving us no clear, unmistakable settings for cultural borrowing.

The general rules of borrowing seem easy enough. There is one important rule-of-thumb: An idea will be accepted only if it can be fully incorporated into the life of the second people. After all, neither lox nor bagels are Jewish in origin. It is the special use that is made of them in Jewish society which accounts for their special place in Jewish cuisine. Furthermore, lox and bagels become Jewish ethnic identifiers in the United States, which gives them their even more special status. In short, knowing the origin tells us something about a cultural item but it falls far short of an adequate description of its meaning in any particular culture. Knowing Zoroastrian or Greek origin of particular notions of the afterlife are important data. But, to get the full picture we must see how the idea functioned in Jewish thought.

The Antiquity of Iranian Religion and Its Undatability

WITH A HISTORY of some three thousand years, Zoroastrianism ranks with Judaism and Christianity as one of the ancient living Western religions. But Zoroastrianism has fared much worse even than Judaism in numbers. If Judaism currently has more than 14 million adherents worldwide, then Christianity with more than 1.4 billion members is certainly one hundred times larger. On the other hand, surviving Zoroastrians number more than one hundred times less than Jews, with considerably fewer than 140,000 contemporary believers.5 One reason for the scarcity of Zoroastrians in the world is their hostility to intermarriage. Zoroastrians, except for a forward-thinking few, considered the children of all intermarriages non-Zoroastrians.

Zoroastrianism takes its name from that of its founder, Zarathushtra, who may have lived anytime between the eleventh and seventh century BCE but probably lived around the beginning of the eighth century BCE.6 Zoroastrianism became the major religion of Iran, which took its name from its inhabitants, the Aryans. Their earliest Persian document, the Avesta, lends us the name of their earliest written language, Avestan, which seems to have separated from Sanskrit in the second millennium BCE.7 The Avesta itself is made up of compositions, oral and written, from many different periods but started its process during this early period.

Earliest Zoroastrianism

THE ROOTS OF Zoroastrianism can be located in an eastern Iranian, tribal, pastoral society. Zoroastrianism should probably not be called a founded religion, as Zarathushtra was a prophetic reformer, who innovated in the original Mazdian Religion (“Wise” religion from the name of the supreme God Ahura Mazda “Wise Lord”). The religion developed yet further under the first Persian Empire, somewhat diluting Zarathustra’s contribution.8

R. C. Zaehner established the usual chronologies and periodizations of Zoroastrianism in the very title of his work, The Dawn and Twilight of Zoroastrianism.9 Even though we know little of Zarathushtra himself, we do know something of the “dawn” of Zoroastrianism