II


Iranian Thought and Later Judaism



1. THE FOUNDING OF ZOROASTRIANISM

 

Truly there are two primal Spirits, and it is a matter of renown how these twins conflict, how in thought, word, and action, they are two, the good and the bad; and how those who act well have chosen rightly between these two, but not those who do evil; and how these two created life and not-life when they encountered one another; and how at the end the Worst Existence shall be for the deceitful, but Best Thought for the just.


                                                                                             Zend Avesta, Yasna 30.3-4. Footnote


             Many of the notions we associate with later Judaism and Christianity, the immortality of the soul and a bodily resurrection, a Heaven and Hell, a last judgment, and an evil opponent of God, were acquired from Persian Zoroastrianism during and after the Exile. Zarathustra founded this religion about 1200 bce, perhaps somewhat earlier, among the Iranians, at that time residents of south central Asia, Indo-European cattle herders in a well watered region of lakes and birch forests. A relatively settled people, they fought from horses-drawn chariots—only after the central Asian peoples bred horses with backs strong enough to ride did they become wide ranging nomads of the steppes. Zarathustra’s teachings traveled with them when they occupied eastern Iran around 1100 bce, and, perhaps in the 8th century, they converted the Magi, the hereditary priesthood of western Iran, and their faith spread to the Medes and Persians. Footnote

             The sacred book of the Zoroastrians is the Zend Avesta. The Gathas, comprising that portion of the Zend Avesta composed by Zarathustra Footnote himself, survived in oral transmission until the 4th, or even as late as the 6th century ce, before they were finally written down. This indicates an unbroken continuity of practice, since even one generation’s gap in the oral tradition would have resulted in the loss of the liturgies. Footnote Zarathustra appears in the Gathas as a prophetic reformer of traditional religion. He was probably a member of a hereditary guild of priests like those who composed and preserved the Vedas, who opposed those priests worshiping Indra and the Daevas who claimed exclusive possession of secret ceremonies and songs through which they could control the actions of the gods. He insisted on the goodness of a supreme God, and the availability of that God’s help to all who seek virtue, regardless of access to magical ceremonial. His cause encountered violent opposition, but eventually found a patron in the chieftain Vishtaspa. Zarathustra died as an old man, his religion firmly established among Vishtaspa’s people. Footnote

             The Gathas teach a supreme God, Ahura Mazda, creator of all things, both spiritual and material. This God thought creation into existence through the Holy Spirit, Footnote first producing things in an immaterial state, and then providing this immaterial world with a material existence. Footnote Holy and righteous, Ahura Mazda dwells as absolute lord in his kingdom beyond the reach of evil, a kind and generous ruler of his creation. He is father and creator of seven other beings, namely Holy Spirit, Truth or Justice, Good Thought (thought in accord with Truth), Dominion (rule in accord with Truth), Devotion (obedience to rule in accord with Truth), Health, and Immortality. These seven are all qualities of Ahura Mazda conceived as individual beings, of “one will” with Him. Footnote Each of these qualities is associated with an element of creation of which it is the ruling spirit. The Holy Spirit is most closely identified with Ahura Mazda himself, Dominion with the sky, Justice is found in fire, Good Thought in cattle, Devotion in earth, Health in water, and Immortality in plants. A good and just man shares in these qualities, so that his good qualities derive directly from participation in Ahura Mazda. Footnote These seven are Amesha Spentas, Holy Spirits, along with several other deities subordinate to and made by Ahura Mazda, including Hearkening, Recompense, and the other Ahuras, Mithra and Varuna. Footnote Hearkening (Sraosha) served as the mediator between Ahura Mazda and men. He was said to protect the body just as the Wise Lord protects the soul. He never sleeps, engaging the Daevas at night, when they are most active, to keep them from men, and he cannot be deceived. It is Sraosha who conducts the souls of the dead to the Bridge of the Requiter, where they meet Mithra and Rashnu to be judged.

             The world as we know it is divided, according to the Gathas, between Truth and Spenta Mainyu, the Holy Spirit, on the one hand, and the Lie, Truth’s twin, Angra Mainyu, the Destructive spirit, on the other. Footnote The Destructive Spirit chooses by its nature to do the worst possible things, and, like Ahura Mazda, is associated with subordinate deities, including the Daevas. Footnote The uniqueness of Zarathustra’s religious vision lies in his emphasis on this dualism of good and evil, Truth and the Lie. The world in its spiritual state (as thought by Ahura Mazda) was perfect and immune to attack, but in its material state it is vulnerable. So Angra Mainyu assaulted it as soon as it was rendered material. He broke into the bottom of the solid sphere of rock that forms the boundary of the world, turned the water salt as he moved through it toward the land, rendered much of the land desert, withered the primal Plant, killed the Bull and the First Man, and polluted fire with smoke. The divine spirits then spread the essence of the Plant throughout the world in clouds and rain, so that plants grew up everywhere, and cycled the seed of the Bull and Man through the sun and moon, so that it too fell to earth in the rains and gave rise to cattle and human beings. Footnote Eventually all evil will be destroyed, even Angra Mainyu himself, and a perfect material world will endure forever. Footnote Creatures are made so they may choose between the two Spirits, and human beings are rewarded or punished in accord with their choice, a choice for evil condemning one to utter destruction. Footnote Upon death a person enters the immaterial state once more, and is judged, going to a hell or a heaven, or possibly a neutral place like the underworld of the Greeks. Footnote At the end of time, when Ahura Mazda has won the struggle, all the dead will go through an ordeal in which they pass through a river of molten metal, which will seem to the righteous like warm milk, and while it will purge the righteous of any remnants of evil, it will utterly destroy the unrighteous. Footnote (This harsh doctrine later changed, and it came to be supposed that, though the evil went to a hell, they escaped eventually after revolting from Ahriman, and were purified with the faithful in the river of molten metal on the final day.) Footnote The world will be restored to its original state before the introduction of evil, but the multiplicity of people, plants and animals will be retained, and an eternity of happiness will be spent by human beings here on the now perfected Earth. Footnote

             The sort of polytheism Zarathustra faced recognized gods behind all natural forces, including those, such as warfare, that work for ill. Zarathustra conceived of a perfectly ethical God, and so could not recognize the gods of such forces as aspects of his Ahura Mazda, and was faced with the task of explaining how such evil forces could be present if his God in fact ran the world. In particular, He set himself against the worship of the Daevas, a group of gods who were to become the deitiesh of Hinduism, the Ahuras being reduced to the status of demons (“Asuras”) in India, where Hinduism came to dominate the scene. The Daevas are the younger generation of gods, which superseded the older generation, much as Zeus and his fellows overcame Saturn’s generation in Greek mythology. The older gods in such a scheme generally reflect creative power and ancient, anarchic wisdom, while also displaying a monstrous character suited to the age before order came to the world, while the younger gods are warriors full of youthful vigor, and the ordering wisdom of the practical politician. So the Hindu scheme is the usual thing, but in Iran it went the opposite way, due to Zarathustra’s influence, and the Asuras became the gods, the Daevas the demons. Zarathustra repudiated the warrior mentality characteristic of the men’s cults that worshiped the Daevas, though he did not, it seems, repudiate the military aspect of the state which brought such beings to the ruling position in the pantheon, at least, not if the state could maintain order. It is likely that warriors returning with their modern bronze weapons from service abroad initiated a period of unrest, a “Heroic” age, among the Iranians. Heroic ages involve a breakdown of central authority, and the growth of attitudes characteristic of cattle-raiding warriors, as found, for instance, among the Greeks of Homeric times. The worship of the Daevas would have been favored by these returning mercenaries and their descendants, since these are the military gods of youth and vigor—but Zarathustra rejected the cult along with the attitudes and behavior of its adherents, promoting to exclusive Godhood Ahura Mazda, the wise old creator god, originally the father of the Asuras. Footnote

             Zarathustra opposed the worship of the Daevas in part because of the drunkenness and riot associated with their ceremonial, and the wholesale slaughter of cattle in sacrifice to them, which indicated the evil nature of these deities. Footnote He replaced the sacrificial altar with the fire-altar, where a pure and perpetual fire is maintained and venerated. (The practice is a development of the Indo-European cult of the hearth fire reflected, for instance, in the Roman worship of Vesta.) Fire is the abode of Truth and Justice, and it is through an ordeal of fire and molten metal at the end of days that humanity will be judged and purified. Ideally, one makes no sacrifice to Fire beyond veneration, a “sacrifice” with the function of raising one’s thoughts to Justice, that is, giving oneself over to the Spirit inhabiting the fire. Footnote The other of the major rituals was the haoma sacrifice, representing the sacrifice of plant life. Here the “drink of immortality” was taken (in anticipation of the drink to be given to virtuous human beings in the last sacrifice when Angra Mainyu was at last defeated), and the officiant was expected to recover the state of purity enjoyed before his spiritual essence was mixed with matter, occasioning Ahriman’s attack on the good creation. Hence the ceremony contributed to the redemption of the world through the redemption of the celebrant. Footnote Zarathustra viewed religious ritual as a purification of the soul, filling it with the various Holy Spirits of Ahura Mazda, and driving out the Destructive Spirits of Angra Mainyu.

             Zarathustra’s religion arose from an ethical response opposing the views we have seen in Indian documents such as the Bhagavad Gita. There it is advanced that one should follow the duties attaching to one’s place in society regardless of any apparent injustice or exploitation built into the structure of that society. In particular, a warrior must kill others as the duties of his station demand, for one must follow his duties within the cosmic order, of which the social order is a permanent part, and any damage done fades into insignificance against the background of the endless succession of lives the soul must live. Zarathustra, like some of the Hebrew prophets, and the Buddhists and the Jains within the Hindu milieu, rejected the system of caste duties and the use of violence to enforce the rule of the upper castes. In their place he envisioned a single set of moral duties, enjoining peace and non-violence, binding on everyone without exception, in the light of which the existing social order might well be subject to criticism and reform. Zarathustra pictures world history as a struggle between good and evil, and a struggle of finite duration, so that the success of one’s individual moral efforts during the time of struggle make a real contribution to the eventual victory of the good. This provides background for his ethical views undermining the arguments of the Gita, which pictures the world as the product of a single God, acceptable in every part to one free of the illusion of an individual temporal Self, and an endless series of lives within which the outcome of one’s efforts of the moment lose all significance. Metaphysical doctrines like those of the Gita were probably not yet developed when Zarathustra lived, and it is unlikely his metaphysics was set up in deliberate opposition to such doctrines. But it was intended to support a view opposed to the picture of social duty and the meaning of life supported by the Gita’s metaphysics, and it is reasonably assumed that this picture of things was prevalent in Zarathustra’s day, even if the Gita’s metaphysical support for them was yet to be contrived. Zarathustra’s picture of God and the world presses upon us an intensely moral vision of life in its stead.



2. MITHRAISM


             The worship of the Daevas seems to have been regarded by the Zoroastrians as a matter of propitiating violent and evil deities, perhaps even enlisting their aid, while worshiping the good deities. Such a religion presupposes that evil forces are able to hold their own, so that it would be foolish to worship the good deities alone, leaving oneself open to attack from the bad, an attack the good deities may well be unable to ward off. One must also maintain good relations with the evil ones. If the ‘evil’ forces turn out to be nothing more than natural forces opposed to one’s individual, temporal self, a self which is, in the end, illusory, then reconciliation with them makes even more senses.

             It is unlikely that the Daeva worshipers themselves took this view of the their practices—they no doubt thought the Daevas good— but Mithraism is another story. Doubts about the power of the good God in this world seems to have led the Mithra cult to sacrifice to the evil Ahriman, who was viewed as the legitimate god of this world, in order to ensure one’s well-being here, as well as one’s escape to the world where the good God ruled after one’s death. The cult originated, it seems, in Iran under the Parthians in the second century B.C.E., and a Hellenized version of it became established in the Roman Empire, apparently first in the first century C.E. among soldiers and functionaries stationed and recruited in the East, though it probably never embraced more than one or two percent of the population. Footnote The religion in the Roman Empire had no doubt become Hellenized, with deletions and accretions, and an alteration of the sense of much that was original in it. Our knowledge of the doctrine of the religion is quite uncertain, based as it is on surviving art work and graffiti in the meeting houses of the cult, not on any written documents, except those of the Zoroastrians, of course, which, though a religion ancestral to Mithraism, is nonetheless a very different religion. Cumont, an important early scholar of this cult, likened the situation to reconstructing Christian beliefs from the Old Testament and the artwork of Gothic cathedrals.

             Working from what evidence we have, the central event in the Mithraic view of the world was the ritual slaying of a bull by Mithras, who seems to have restored the world by this sacrifice. Originally, it seems, a god the Romans identified with Saturn made the world, represented as Earth and a Sky supported by Atlas. The three Destinies (the Parcae) ruled the world. A god represented by Jupiter in the syncretistic myth of the Romans succeeds Saturn, inheriting his weapon, the thunderbolt, with which he destroys snake-headed giants who try to take over the creation. The evil behind the giants continues its efforts, though, perhaps creating a drought, and Mithras, arising miraculously from a rock, handles this subsequent challenge to the good. The Bull killed by Mithras apparently had taken into itself the life-giving moisture, which was cycled into him through the Moon. Mithras captured the bull, forced him into a cave, and slew him there, releasing the moisture and bringing nature alive again. Afterwards there was a feast with the Sun-God, all sitting on the hide of the slaughtered animal. This feast is represented in the cult by a communal meal, apparently held on Sunday, in the Mithraeum, a meeting house decorated as the cave in which the bull was killed, and representing the universe. It seems that Mithras displaces the Sun God due to his heroic deed, and he is represented as the Invincible Sun in Mithraic dedications. Apparently the Sun did submission to Mithras, and then was crowned, and this is the act reproduced in a soldier’s initiation into the cult, in which he stands beneath the sacrificed bull to be indued with its blood, and afterwards is crowned.

             All of this is represented in the cultic images in connection with the Zodiac and the seven days of the week, and the image of a winged god wrapped round with a snake with the Zodiac on it, and the head of lion. This God may represent Time, from which all things arose and to which they will return, indicating a sacred cycle of events endlessly repeated, and a Stoic view of God’s providence. Conservative scholars, trying not to outrun the evidence, have for the most part settled on such a view. But there is one statue from York with the name “Arimanius” is inscribed under it, and Plutarch makes Ahriman the lord of the underworld. Footnote So perhaps we have here the Lord of this world, an underworld power to which a sacrifice is made (in a cave) to prevent his destruction of the natural world and save the cultist from his power.

             According to the Zoroastrians, it was Ahriman that killed the primal Ox. (Such a destructive act would not have been committed by any ally of Ahura Mazda.) The Ox’s murder backfired, though, as Ahriman’s violence so often does, for its Seed rose to the moon, and falling as rain, gave rise to all good animal life. In Zoroastrianism, Mithra was the defender of the bodies of men against Ahriman and the Lie, and the defender of the sanctity of contracts. He was very much the young warrior accompanying the wise father. The Romans, of course, would not have had the horror of killing cattle that possessed the Zoroastrians, and they may have reinterpreted the old stories. Or, more likely, the original story of the sacrifice performed by the young Sun-God was reinterpreted by the Zoroastrians. It is interesting that the ‘wolf-species’ made by Ahriman in Zoroastrian mythology after his initial attempts at total destruction had failed, noxious forms of life such as cats, lions, and snakes, are represented drinking the blood and fluids of the Bull in Mithraic depictions of the sacrifice. This seems originally to represent an attempt by Ahriman to blunt the effects of the sacrifice, redirecting the resources provided for the good to his evil creations, but to Mithraism it may represent Ahriman’s acceptance of the sacrifice made to him.

             If that reading of the sacrifice is right, Mithraism probably imagined that Ahriman tries to keep souls here so that they can not rise to Heaven, and that he is the lord of this world, the source of material wealth and worldly success (as Pluto is the god of worldly success, since precious metals are found underground). The bull sacrifice made to him would be for the sake of these things, and also to gain the power to leave this world after our deaths. (Perhaps Ahriman is greedy enough for the life-giving blood to accept it despite the fact that it also empowers men eventually to escape from him.) It is clear that the initiates went through seven levels of attainment, representing a passage through the seven spheres (Sun, Moon and the five Planets), after which they enter the eighth, the sphere of the fixed stars. It may be that Yima originally tricked the underworld God into accepting this sacrifice, and Mithras, informed by Yima of the sacrifice and urged by the Sun God to perform it again, manages to carry it out despite Ahriman’s attempts to prevent it. Armed with the initiation and the agreement of Ahriman which Mithras, the God of the Contract, forces him to keep, one can rise through the spheres to be reborn in the Heavens, escaping his dreary underworld abode.

             This view of Ahriman, and the practice of his propitiation, was foreign to the Zoroastrians. They held that Ahriman had invaded the creation of Ahura Mazda and attempted to kill everything in it, and that he certainly exercised no legitimate sovereignty over it. But in Roman Mithraism, if this reconstruction of it is right, Ahriman became a Gnostic Evil One, rightful lord of this world who held the keys to Heaven, and had to be propitiated if the soul was to be allowed to escape to Heaven. He was identified with fate, with the head of a lion, a snake wrapped about him, and his body covered with the signs of the Zodiac. He had become the Prince of this World.

             The absolute sovereignty of God is also insisted on by later Christians, faced in the Gospel of Nicodemus with a similar story. There, Christ tricks Satan out of his right to the souls of human sinners for his underworld, now converted to the Hell in which God punishes him, by getting him to lay an unjust claim to Christ, who was sinless. This act somehow voided Satan’s right on human beings as well. It may be that the Mithraic story holds that Ahriman originally obtained his right on human souls because of the sin of Yima, and the birth of Mithras from a rock, which is often depicted, is a device to ensure that Mithras himself will not be inherit this primal sin from his parents, and so will have the right to oppose Ahriman. If so, elements of the notion of original sin, and the doctrine of the Virgin Birth, one of the functions of which is to prevent Jesus from becoming contaminated by original sin, may have entered Christianity from a Mithraic background.

             The mythical background of the ox sacrifice in Mithraism is confused in our sources. In some older versions it was carried out by Yima, the first man (perhaps the twin of Mithra), who, after reigning in a golden age, went to dwell beneath the earth, and will return at the end of time. Footnote The sacrifice was later forgotten, and had to be reestablished by Mithra. In the pagan myths that preceded Zoroastrianism, apparently related to early Mesopotamian stories recounted in the Epic of Gilgamesh, Yima’s disappearance under the earth with the best of men and animals is the result of human sinfulness, and deprives us of our immortality. Whatever brought about Yima’s withdrawal, it is the task of Mithras to undo the harm wrought by it. Perhaps the torch-bearing twins who accompany Mithras in the Roman monuments are Yima, as he was when, in one version of the story, he was sawn in two by a usurper, the Dragon King, and the two halves had healed. A visit to Yima in his underground kingdom may be represented here, during which Mithra is encouraged to restore the world by a re-inauguration of the bull sacrifice. In these Roman scenes, the initiate stands beneath the bull in the sacrifice, and, receiving the healing blood, is saved.

             Does Mithraism, then, represent a bastardization of the Zoroastrian world view, substituting a kind of collaborationist attitude toward evil, even if the ultimate aim is to escape from it through trickery? This picture of the religion is probably too infected with later Christian attitudes toward Paganism in general, reinterpreted as Satanism, to be trusted. We should note that providing resources to evil if we are to nourish the good is often unavoidable. One can often, for instance, distribute charity only through institutions and governments that siphon off part of the funds for purposes questionable at best, and one must often seek the help of powerful people without worrying over much about the sources of their power, if one is to act at all. One might justify such behavior by noting frankly that one can only do what is possible, and to do nothing, so as to remain untainted by the corruption that attaches to the use of worldly resources, is more self-righteous than charitable. One might also see it as a kind of trickery, for in the end it is the good that is done that has a future, and the bad that is done represents only a short-term gain for evil, bound to be lost again in the end. Indeed, one might see it as a kind of divine trickery, drawing good from evil despite itself. One might even draw good from evil motives, getting a rich man to give for the sake of his reputation, say, perhaps even with the expectation of the beginning of the rich man’s reformation once he experiences what it is to help others. Mithraism seems not to have aimed at simple worldly success, but escape from this world into a better one, and if the creatures of Ahriman drink at the sacrifice of the bull, that may be permitted only because there is no other way to get the world-restoring sacrifice performed. The Zoroastrian insistence that there be no compromise and no collusion is perhaps noble, but perhaps it is only prideful, ignoring the prospects of reforming bad person if one can once get them to do good actions, even for questionable motives, and refusing to do the works of love out of a prideful grasping after personal purity. Mithraism and Zoroastrianism certainly present different approaches to the way in which good and evil are intertwined in the world, but it is not obvious which has the better strategy for seeking the good, or even which has the nobler motives.



3. ZOROASTRIANISM UNDER THE ACHAEMENIDS

 

... they call the whole circle of heaven Zeus, and to him they offer sacrifices on the highest peaks of the mountains; they sacrifice also to the Sun and Moon and earth and fire and water and winds.


                                                                                             Herodotus, Histories I 131.


             Under the Achaemenids, the Persian rulers who fought the Greeks in the fifth and fourth centuries bce, and restored the Hebrews to their homeland, a catholic Zoroastrianism prevailed, supported by the King of Kings. The practice of exposing the bodies of the dead to be consumed by birds was not adopted (at least not by the royal family), but tombs were carefully designed to prevent any escape of pollution from the dead body, and other practices peculiar to the Zoroastrians were closely followed. Worship was carried out in the open air, with invocations of the guardian Amesha Spentas of the seven creations—Dominion ruling the sky, Health water, Devotion the earth, Immortality plants, Good Thought animals, Holy Spirit man, and Truth fire. The duty of praying in the presence of fire at appointed times each day was recognized. Footnote

             The Achaemenids were tolerant of others’ religious practices . They seem to have come to view their own faith less as a universal religion to be spread to all mankind, than a mark of their national identity, and perhaps took most other religions to worship Ahura Mazda or the Amesha Spentas, though conceiving them in various ways wrongly. They also generally attempted to gain the good will of those exiled by the Assyrians by restoring them, when they could, to their homeland. Thus, Cyrus allowed the Jews to return to Palestine and reestablish the worship of Yahweh, and it seems likely that at least some Persians saw the worship of Yahweh as a worship of Ahura Mazda under another name. The growth of Jewish purity laws, and their extension to the everyday household affairs of the layman, may have been connected to Zoroastrian practices, for the Zoroastrians conceived the good world of Ahura Mazda to be under continual assault by Ahriman, whose weapons included dirt, mold, rust, and decay, and took cleanliness as an essential part of religious duty, following an elaborate code of ritual purity. Nehemiah, a member of the court, would have had to observe this cleanliness code to keep from polluting his Zoroastrian companions, and it may be that the imposition of the old ritual purity of the priests of Yahweh on the whole nation was suggested in part by upper class familiarity with Persian practices. It must be observed, however, that there was also an internal rationale for the Jewish development, namely the conception that the whole nation must take on the duties of the priests of Yahweh under the new conditions of the Exile.

             We can see Persian influence on the Jews not only in Ezra and Nehemiah, but also in the Priestly Source in the Bible. So the creation account in Genesis 1 associates the Spirit of God with the act of creation, and it is hard to escape the parallel between the seven creations of Ahura Mazda, sky, water, earth, plants, animals, human beings, and fire, and the six creative acts of Yahweh. Again, the earliest signs among the Jews of a belief in a favorable life after death seems to be found in Isaiah 26:19, and the way in which it is put there, referring to the bodies of the dead rising again from the earth, echoes the Zoroastrian belief in the resurrection of the body in the last days. Footnote Indeed, it is hard to imagine the Zoroastrian apocalyptic beliefs associated with the final victory of Ahura Mazda not infecting the Jewish milieu. The Zoroastrian notion was that the earth would be made perfect, as it was when first created, something, it had come to be believed, to be accomplished by a world savior, the Saoshyant, who would be born of a virgin mother (by the seed of the prophet himself), and, who, coming from the East, would lead the forces of good in the last conflict with the forces of evil. Footnote



4. JUDAISM UNDER THE PERSIANS

 

Then I, Daniel, looked on and saw two others standing, one on the near bank of the river, one on the other. One said to the man dressed in linen who was standing further up the stream, “How long until these wonders take place?”... he raised his right hand had his left to heaven and swore by him who lives for ever, “ A time and two times, and half a time; and all these things are going to happen when he who crushes the power of the holy people meets his end.” I listened but did not understand. Then I said, “My lord, what is to be the outcome?” “Daniel,” he said, “go away: these words are to remain secret and sealed until the time of the End. Many will be cleansed, made white and purged; the wicked will go on doing wrong; the wicked will never understand; the learned will understand... go away and rest; and you will arise for your share at the end of time.


                                                                                             Daniel 12:5–13.


             After the return of the exiles and the rebuilding of the Temple, Jewish intellectual life took its lead from the now omnipresent Scripture. The Hebrews had become the Jews, a post-classical people looking to a mythic and ever receding past embodied in their canonical books. Jewish authors could be original enough, but they either modeled their works directly on the Tanak (so I Maccabees), or worked their ideas into scriptural paraphrases and commentaries. The latter could be quite fanciful, for as long as the sacred text was there to guarantee the preservation of tradition, there was no harm in a little speculation. Indeed, it was generally accepted that scripture might carry any number of meanings, so that equally valid but conflicting interpretations were quite possible. All sorts of allegorical readings, folk tales and legends could be presented in the commentaries for what they were worth, simply because they were interesting, and not because of the author’s conviction of their absolute truth. Footnote Moreover, essentially new ideas, such as those gained from contact with the Persians on such topics as the afterlife, could be presented in this supplemental literature and establish themselves in the commentary tradition, even though absent from the Bible itself.

             In the realm of prophecy, everything was changed by the closure of the canon. Footnote Those works that became canonical emphasized the unity of Israel, and the Prophets of Israel were the prophets of the whole nation. But in the Hellenistic era many religious groups arose within Israel that saw themselves as the remnant of the faithful, in opposition to the rest of the Jews, though still seeking their conversion. The unfaithful Jews were typically represented as the dupes, or willing allies, of Satan and his demons in a war against God. The success of Israel against foreign powers hinged entirely on the outcome of this internal war, for foreign nations could conquer Israel only if God wished to use them to punish his people. It became dogma that there were no longer prophets in the classical sense, and those who called people to repentance and reform, preaching apocalyptic hopes of God’s victory in this war, did not regard themselves as prophets. Nor were their works, since they were perceived as divisive, taken into the Canon, though in truth the work of the old prophets was often divisive enough, and looked unifying only to later generations that could view themselves as the heirs of God’s party no matter who they were.

             The new prophecy took the shape of apocalypse. In Greek apokalyptein means “to reveal or uncover,” and an apocalypse is the revelation of some mystery by an angel or other supernatural source, but not, as with the prophets in the days of old, by God Himself. Here the angel takes the part of the prophet bearing the Spirit of Yahweh, and the purported writer of the apocalypse (almost always some ancient worthy, such as Enoch or Noah) is but a witness of the angel’s actions and words. The actual symbolic actions performed by the prophets are here entirely given up for allegorical and symbolic visions, though these find their pattern in such visions as those of Ezekiel. What is revealed may include cosmological lore (Enoch, written in the third century B.C.E.), or tablets and such stored up in heaven (the book of Jubilees), but always, in apocalypses written after the profanation of the Temple by Antiochus IV Epiphanes (167 bce), it includes God’s plan for human history and the eventual salvation of his people. Daniel (ca. 160 bce) is the prototype of this sort of work, with its extreme and fantastic images and their interpretations, and its assumption that God has planned out every event in advance. The scheme that became standard postulated four empires, each more evil than the last, and, when the last had set afoot a great persecution of God’s chosen people, the final salvation by God’s hosts. Footnote Daniel also includes the appearance of an anointed one, who shall be removed at the critical moment, “with no one to take his part,” followed by a Son of Man (or One Like a Man) who comes from the heavens and is given everlasting glory by Yahweh, and the resurrection of the virtuous dead in the last days, so that they may gain their reward. The imitation of Zoroastrian models in all of this is evident. That the Good overcomes the Evil not through violence or force, but through good and loving action and wise and patient suffering, is a Zoroastrian theme. But the Jews, and, later, Christians, did not entirely absorb the message—for them it seems right that God should pull off a coup de main of the sort that one might have expected from Yahweh, the God of might who supported David in his wars, after the suffering of his servant has established his right. For a Zoroastrian the forces of evil consume themselves when God’s preservative force prevents them from consuming others, and Ahura Mazda never employs violence. In any case, the message here for a Jew awaiting God’s salvation is not to expect one’s virtue or sacrifices to be rewarded here and now. Only in God’s good time would the unjust oppression be ended, but if one waited patiently (perhaps taking no political or military action on one’s own), there would be salvation in the end.

 

5. JUDEA UNDER THE GREEKS: THE MACCABEANS,

THE DISPERSION AND HELLENISTIC JEWISH LITERATURE

 

Alexander of Macedon, son of Philip, had come to the land of Kittim and defeated Darius, king of the Persians and the Medes... so he advanced to the ends of the earth, plundering nation after nation, the earth grew silent before him, and his ambitious heart swelled with pride... But the time came when Alexander took to his bed, in the knowledge that he was dying. He summoned his comrades, noblemen who had been brought up with him from his youth, and divided his kingdom among them while still alive... From these there grew a sinful offshoot, Antiochus Epiphanes, son of King Antiochus... It was then that there emerged from Israel a set of renegades who led the people astray. “Come,” they said, “let us reach an understanding with the pagans surrounding us, for since we separated ourselves from them many misfortunes have overtaken us.”... and a number of people eagerly approached the king, who authorized them to practice pagan observances. So they built a gymnasium in Jerusalem, such as the pagans have, disguised their circumcision, and abandoned the holy covenant, submitting to the heathen rule as willing slaves of impiety.

 

                                                                                             I Maccabees 1:1–16.

 

             In 332 Israel and Judah (together called Judea from this point on) fell to Alexander the Great of Macedon, along with the rest of the Persian Empire. In 323, when Alexander died, Judea passed into the hands of the Ptolemies of Egypt, the Macedonian successors to Alexander in that part of his empire. Footnote Under the Ptolemies the Jewish Council of Elders, under the leadership of the High Priest, administered the country. (It was around this time that Ecclesiastes was written.) In the century or so during which the country was ruled by the Ptolemies, the priesthood remained in the control of the line of Zadok, but under Ptolemy III Euergetes (246–221) the High Priest withheld taxes for some reason (probably to aid Egypt’s Seleucid enemies in Syria), and the Pharaoh retaliated by handing over the secular part of the government to one Tobias. The Tobiad family became wealthy as tax collectors, and influential at the Alexandrian court.

             It was always part of the agenda of the Hellenistic kingdoms to make their subjects as Greek as possible, and the Tobiads were receptive to many aspects of the Greek way of life, unlike the family of Zadok, who saw in it a danger to be avoided, and considered the Tobiads collaborators seeking their own personal profit. Alexandria by this time had the largest settlement of the Dispersion in its Jewish quarter, and life there was attractive, for the Pharaoh gave the Jews many privileges, including self-rule under their own Council of Elders, and a legal ranking the equal of the Macedonians’, and higher than the native Egyptians’. The Tobiads were no doubt representative of the Dispersion, Jews who knew how to accommodate themselves to the native populations they lived among, gaining wealth from their commercial connections with other Jews in foreign lands, and, in Egypt, willing to work for their Greek masters as bureaucrats who could be trusted to have greater loyalty to the Ptolemaic government than to the local population. While retaining their Jewish identity, such people would almost unconsciously adapt to Gentile customs where it seemed their Law permitted it, and would come to look quite Hellenized to the Jews of the Homeland. The conflict between the Jews of the Dispersion and the more conservative Jews based in Palestine was already apparent, and it grew as time went on.

             The conflict with the Gentiles was also becoming apparent. The Jews were resented by the Egyptians in Alexandria, as might be expected, and the first bout of anti-Semitic literature is to be found there in the history of Egypt by Manetho, High Priest at Heliopolis under Ptolemy II Philadelphus (283–246). Manetho asserted that the Egyptians drove the Hebrews from their land to prevent the spread of the infectious diseases they carried (including leprosy), and attacked the Jews for cruelty toward and hatred of other peoples, and for sticking to themselves and not mixing with others. There were many other writers in Egypt and elsewhere who followed Manetho’s example.

             The Jewish population in the Dispersion increased dramatically as the troubled history of Judea unfolded, and refugees flowed into foreign communities. The increase in population exacerbated the conflict with the Gentiles. The resentment of the Egyptians overflowed into violence in the reign of the Emperor Gaius Caligula (37–41), when the Jews in Alexandria applied for full citizenship. Pagan gangs set up statues of the emperor within the synagogues, and Avillius Flaccus, the Roman governor, had thirty-eight members of the Jewish Council flogged publicly. Agrippa I, Tetrarch of Judea, grandson of Herod the Great, and a friend of Caligula, intervened with the Emperor, as the ruler of Judea often did on behalf of Jewish settlements abroad, and in 40 C.E. the Greek and Jewish communities in Alexandria each sent delegations to the emperor to plead their cases. The philosopher Philo Judaeus led the Jewish representatives. When the Jews pointed out that they would not sacrifice to him, but were accustomed to sacrifice to God on his behalf, Caligula was unimpressed, and when trouble broke out in Jamnia in Judea because the Greeks there had erected an altar to himself, which the Jews had destroyed, the Emperor ordered all Jewish places of worship to be converted to Pagan temples. Luckily Agrippa persuaded him to withdraw the order, on the condition that Jews permit the Greeks to worship the emperor in Judea. When Caligula was murdered and Claudius (41–54) came to the purple, a policy of toleration was adopted, with the warning that the Jews must also show toleration. But the situation remained tense, and with the first Jewish revolt in the homeland, trouble arose as well in the Dispersion, with fighting in Alexandria, Caesaria and other cities. A second, ferocious rebellion in the Dispersion occurred under Trajan (98–117). Footnote The refusal of the Jews to be assimilated, and their unwillingness to participate in the official civic religion of the Empire created continual friction between them and the “Greeks.”

             But the prejudice among the subjugated Egyptians did not influence the prosperity of the Jews, which expressed itself at Alexandria in a flowering of scholarship. Footnote First of all, the Bible was translated into Greek, producing what came to be called the Septuagint, the Bible of the Greek-speaking Jews of the dispersion. The translation was supposedly the work of seventy translators who, divinely inspired, all arrived independently at exactly the same Greek rendition of every passage. In actuality, the text seems to incorporate a number of preexisting translations by different authors, and was put together over a period of time, though most of it was done under Ptolemy II Philadelphus (283–246). The myth of the seventy functions to authenticate the Septuagint’s authority, so that one need not know Hebrew to verify the translation. The story comes down to us in the Letter of Aristeas, which purported to be a letter from a Pagan official to his brother, giving an account of the Septuagint and the Jewish religion. ‘Aristeas’ goes so far as to identify Yahweh with Zeus. It is an apology, then, but also a kind of testament to the Dispersion arguing that one could share in the Greek way of life without giving up Judaism. (It should be noted that the Hebrew version from which the Septuagint was translated has since been lost, and so the Septuagint varies in many readings from the modern Hebrew Tanak. It also included fifteen books, retained in the English Bible as the Apocrypha, which were not recognized in the Hebrew canon.) Footnote

             The literature of Hellenistic Judaism at Alexandria typically looks in two directions—to the Pagans, who are to be convinced that Jewish beliefs and practices are reasonable and philosophically justifiable, and to the Jews of the Homeland, who are to be convinced that one can preserve the essence of the Jewish faith while consorting with the Greeks and adopting some of their ideas. Among the philosophical Hellenizers we find Aristobolus (ca. 100 bce) and Philo Judaeus (ca. 25 bce – late 40’s ce) arguing through an allegorical exposition of the Torah that Moses not only taught philosophy after the Greek manner, but taught much to the Greeks. Footnote

             IV Maccabees, an Apocryphal book found in the Septuagint, was written in Syria about this time, attaches an account of the deaths of a number of Maccabean martyrs to a description of reason as the guide of life. In particular, wisdom controls the emotions through rational judgment, courage, justice and self-control, so that the wise man is able to do what he understands to be right, despite irrational emotional impulses to contrary actions. Footnote So a fundamentally Stoic reading is given to the tale of the martyrs, tortured to death by a tyrant for refusing to eat defiling food. (The role of the tyrant testing the wise man with the threat of torture and death is borrowed especially from Roman Stoicism, of course, though it is perhaps to be noted that the situation is not made up, but actually occurred over and over again in the autocratic governments of the Mediterranean.)

             Again, the Wisdom of Solomon (a part of the Apocrypha) seems to have been written by a first century Alexandrian. It adopts a Stoic-Platonic interpretation of the Torah, accepting, for instance, the preexistence and immortality of the soul, Footnote and identifying the Wisdom of Yahweh with the Platonic Logos and the immanent Stoic world-soul. Footnote The book is especially concerned with the problem of evil, and the suffering of the good, most especially the suffering of the Jews at the hands of the Gentiles. It suggests that God intended all his creatures to live forever, but the devil introduced sin into the world, and with sin entered death, non-being presumably being an appropriate punishment for turning away from Being. Footnote It is obvious to anyone of good will that the world was made by God, Footnote but when evil men began to worship creatures, noxious animals and plants were introduced to chastise them appropriately, clearly showing their error to those who could see. Footnote The good suffer, because this world is a place of testing, and the good who pass the test go to a heavenly reward after their deaths, while the wicked are punished. Footnote God patiently gives the wicked every opportunity, with gradually increasing punishments, to repent their injustice and idolatry, Footnote and sometimes takes a good person young, knowing that he would be corrupted if he were to live younger. Footnote

             Other Hellenic-Judaic works include the tragedies on Jewish themes by Ezechielos (2d century bce) and an epic poem on the Kings of the Jews by Philo the Elder (ca. 200 bce).