Zoroastrianism

Relation to other religions

The debt of Israel to its Eastern neighbours in religious matters is easy to demonstrate on a few precise points of minor importance but less so in other more important points, such as dualism, angelology, and eschatology.

Isaiah 40–48 offers striking parallels with the Gāthā 44:3–5, as has been shown by Morton Smith. Besides the common procedure of rhetorical questions, there is the notion of a god who has created the world and, notably, light and darkness. The very idea of a creator god may be common to all of the western part of the Semitic world. But the notion that God created light and darkness appears in both prophets. It is true that Zoroaster associates light and darkness only to waking and sleep and that no Iranian text says that God created good and evil. Nevertheless, the juxtaposition, in Isaiah, of light–darkness with good–evil sounds remarkably Iranian.

After the exile, the traditional hope in a messiah-king of the House of David who would reestablish Israel as an independent nation and make it triumph over all enemies gave way gradually to a concept at once more universal and more moral. The ... (200 of 7,125 words)