Chapter 7

THE LIGHT AND THE LIFE

Wars of Light and Darkness

On the day when the Kittim fall there shall be a battle and horrible carnage before the God of Israel, for it is a day appointed by Him from ancient times as a battle of annihilation for the Sons of Darkness. On that day, the congregation of the gods and the congregation of men shall engage one another, resulting in great carnage. The Sons of Light and the forces of Darkness shall fight together to show the strength of God with the roar of a great multitude and the shout of gods and men; a day of disaster.

THE WAR SCROLL FROM QUMRAN

SINCE THEIR DISCOVERY in 1947, the Dead Sea Scrolls have transformed our knowledge of Jewish history and the development of Jewish religious thought. Among other things, they reinforce what we know about the atmosphere of savage partisanship in the century or two before the Common Era. The Qumran group utterly rejected any kind of accommodation or collaboration with the Gentile world or indeed with most of their Jewish contemporaries.

Some documents go even beyond this rejection to frame those confrontations in a quite new vision of universal realities. I have quoted the War Scroll, an elaborate militaristic fantasy about how the Sons of Light must prepare for combat against the Sons of Darkness. Scholars disagree whether the evil enemies portrayed in the text are more likely to be Seleucid Greeks or Romans. What is new and striking, though, is the language of dualism, a system very different from anything found in the Hebrew Bible. Beyond positing a conflict of Light and Darkness, many items in the Scrolls divide humanity into two different camps, with the suggestion that such a division was determined or even predestined. Within a few decades, the universe was partitioned between the sons of justice, who walked on paths of Light, and the sons of deceit, who followed paths of Darkness.¹

Although it never gained mainstream status in any existing world religion, that Crucible-era rhetoric of Light and Darkness became a surprisingly common strand of religious thought. Ideas akin to those of Qumran gained wide influence in the centuries around the Common Era, powerfully influencing early Christianity.2

THE LITERATURE SURROUNDING the Dead Sea Scrolls is fraught with controversy, and that debate extends to every aspect of the origins, identity, and influence of the people who produced them. It is not clear that the sect was as monastic or as strictly celibate as is sometimes claimed or if it was so completely isolated from the wider world. Nor is it certain how much of the hoard reflected ideas distinctive to the sect. The fact that something was found at Qumran does not necessarily mean that it reflected a common ideological approach. Sectarian groups can collect materials for polemical purposes in order to refute their ideas. A fair consensus today holds that the Scrolls represent a spectrum of thought: some of the texts were written at Qumran itself and reflected its distinctive doctrines, while others were of more general interest and application.³

Some points are however agreed widely, if not universally. Most scholars believe the community grew out of the Essene sect. We have already met the Essenes as a third strand or party in the Jewish religious spectrum, but the Qumran movement was a breakaway from that larger movement. Strictly speaking, there is no evidence for the existence of the Essenes before Josephus’s description set around 150 BCE, but they already seem well established by that point. Confirming that some kind of linkage did exist, Roman author Pliny (first century CE) describes an Essene settlement on the western shores of the Dead Sea, close to Qumran. The Qumran community itself would have existed from perhaps 150 BCE to 70 CE, a very long period in which ideas must have changed and evolved.⁴

The Essenes emerged early in the second century BCE. They may well have had precursors in the previous century, who were connected with the writing or editing of the Enochic documents around this time. For what it might be worth, the Damascus Document of the Qumran sect offers a historical framework for their sect in which God sends “a root of his planting” 390 years after the Babylonian capture of Jerusalem. If that date is to be taken literally rather than symbolically—and this is hotly debated—that would establish a foundation date for the Essenes, or a group like them, in 197 BCE. Such a chronology meshes well with the fraught political era at this time: the shift from Ptolemaic to Seleucid authority, the split within the Tobiad clan, and the civil war. Later in the century, the Qumran documents report that two factions struggled in Jerusalem. In reaction to an individual described as a Wicked Priest, a dissident priest challenged him and the Temple order, before leading a defection. (The term “Wicked Priest” uses a pun on the title of “high priest.”) Breaking with its Essene parent stem, the dissident group—the Qumran sect—followed this man, whom they knew as the Teacher of Righteousness.5

The natural context for such a conflict would be in the revolutionary politics of the Maccabean years, which we encountered in Chapter 5 above, and one moment in particular looks very apposite. After the high priest Alcimus died in 159, no successor is recorded until 153, with the installation of Jonathan Apphus. That might mean that the office was indeed empty for those intervening six or so years, but that view is improbable for many reasons. More likely, there was indeed an incumbent, or perhaps even multiple claimants, and one of those, whose name has been lost or expunged from the records, was the Qumran sect’s anonymous founder. If this reconstruction is sound, that would make Jonathan the Teacher’s deadly foe, the “Wicked Priest” who serves Belial, which would make sense in terms of the bitter opposition to the Hasmonean seizure of the office. Both Jonathan and his successor, Simon Thassi, were of priestly descent, but neither was a Zadokite. The “Teacher” would thus have shared the widespread resentment to the new order but carried it to much greater extremes.⁶

Jonathan’s accession thus split an older religious movement—Essenes or pre-Essenes—between accommodationist and diehard factions. Some partisans utterly rejected the legitimacy of the ruling regime and withdrew from a damned world, physically as well as symbolically. These rejectionists went to Qumran, where they claimed to follow the true Sons of Zadok. They venerated their Teacher, to the point of using near-messianic language. He was one “to whom God had made known all the mysteries of the words of his servants the prophets.” The group’s position as a sect within a sect explains their harshly confrontational view toward the outside world.7

To put him in cultural and political context, the Teacher would have been a near-exact contemporary of the author of Jubilees, as well as the pseudo-Daniel who wrote the apocalyptic sections of that book, and the creator of the Sibylline Oracles dating from this time. Also working at this time would have been some of the authors of the building blocks of 1 Enoch. This revolutionary generation was stunningly creative and obsessed with judgment and heavenly battle.⁸

The conflict that spawned the Qumran community began as a struggle of priestly elites, but it soon escalated to cosmic proportions. The sect taught a rigid separation from what they saw as a sinful and contaminated world. In their most extreme texts, they presented themselves as the true Sons of Light, while the official Temple cult was in the hands of these false Israelites, the Children of Darkness. The conflict, they wrote, would rage until it culminated with a divine intervention, a Judgment, which would annihilate the present world order; the fate of God’s enemies is often described as extermination or annihilation. As one Qumran writer declared in a commentary on prophet Habakkuk, “On the day of Judgment, God will destroy completely all who serve the idols and the evil ones from the earth.”⁹

THE TERM “DUALISM” has different meanings in different contexts. In the history of religion, dualistic ideas imply an eternal struggle between the equal forces of cosmic good and evil, a doctrine held today by none of the world’s major religions. Both Christianity and Islam teach the existence of a devil, Satan, who is the enemy of God, but it is never implied that he is in any sense God’s equal. He is a rebellious force whose continued existence God tolerates, for his own mysterious purposes. That is different from the mythological vision of the eternal conflict of Light and Darkness, which appears in versions of the Persian Zoroastrian faith and in the Manichaean religion that emerged in the third century CE.

As we will see, the Qumran texts—the Scrolls—make frequent reference to diabolical figures, usually Belial, who is seen as a very potent force in the world. That theme emerges in the Thanksgiving Hymns, which might conceivably be the work of the Teacher of Righteousness himself and which perhaps enjoyed canonical status at Qumran. These Hymns speak in the first person, and if they can in fact be linked to a real individual, then the voice in which they speak is both agonized and deeply paranoid. The speaker interprets every act and thought of his foes and critics as the plots of Belial, who constantly persecutes the virtuous and godly. He declares, “Brutal men seek my soul, while I hold fast to our covenant. They are the fraudulent council of Belial, they do not know that my office is from [God].” He refers often to the plots and conspiracies directed against him and fantasizes about the screams that the plotters will utter when divine vengeance overwhelms them. In contrast, the Hymnist himself (the Teacher?) proclaims that “my office is among the gods,” again using near-messianic words.10 If these are indeed the words of the Teacher, and debate rages about that point, then the attitudes of the sect on which he left his imprint can be easily understood.

At least some of the documents (by no means all) go even beyond that view of pervasive evil to offer an explicit statement of dualism. The War Scroll praised God, because “You appointed the Prince of Light [Michael] from old to assist us, for in his lot are all sons of righteousness and all spirits of truth are in his dominion. You yourself made Belial for the pit, an angel of malevolence, his dominion is in darkness, and his counsel is to condemn and convict.” Belial was “a hostile angel: in darkness is his domination, his counsel is aimed towards wickedness and guiltiness. All the spirits of his lot, angels of destruction, are behaving according to the statutes of darkness: toward it is their one urge.… Of old you appointed for yourself a day of great battle… to support truth and to destroy iniquity, to bring darkness low and to lend might to light.”11 Not only do mighty angels serve the respective powers of good and evil, but the conflict between the two is a universal reality.

Another critical passage occurs in the sect’s Community Rule, a fundamental statement of the group’s ideals and practices, representing an advanced theological dualism. New members were instructed as follows:

Now, this God created man to rule the world, and appointed for him two spirits after whose direction he was to walk until the final Inquisition. They are the spirits of truth and perversity. The origin of truth lies in the fountain of light, and that of perversity in the wellspring of darkness. All who practice righteousness are under the domination of the prince of lights, and walk in ways of light; whereas all who practice perversity are under the domination of the angel of darkness,… the God of Israel and the angel of his truth are always there to help the sons of light. It is God that created these spirits of light and darkness and made them the basis of every act, the [instigators] of every deed and the direction and the directors of every thought.

Although it survives in the Community Rule, this actually derived from an older document that was subsequently incorporated into the group’s instructional materials, and it is commonly titled the Treatise on the Two Spirits. It is difficult to determine just how much older it is than the rule, but it might be from the third century. As it is, it falls just short of true cosmic dualism, in that the two spiritual forces are not equal: God himself deliberately creates the evil force. Even so, that Two Spirits doctrine is a major departure from anything that might remotely be suspected from the older Jewish tradition.12

Another Qumran find was the Testament of Amram, credited to Moses’s father, and it is thoroughly dualistic. It describes a vision in which two figures dispute over the speaker, asking him which he would follow. One is the ruler of wickedness, the dark angel Malki-Resha, who boasts, “We rule and have authority over all the human race.” Of this figure, who is also named as Belial, it is explained that “all his deeds are darkness, and he dwells in darkness.” Against him there stands a ruler of Light, here named both Michael and Melchizedek, “King of Righteousness,” who explains the fates of the Children of Light and Darkness. In this vision, Belial was licensed by God to launch his war against the Sons of Light, which again falls short of absolute dualism. What it also shows is the group’s rigid determinism, in that God plans and ordains all things, even those acts seemingly launched by the Devil. Unlike in 1 Enoch, this is not part of a spontaneous angelic mutiny but rather a part of God’s plan.¹³

LATER DUALIST MOVEMENTS extended the struggle of Light and Darkness to propose a conflict between the realms of spirit and matter, one that often involved a rejection of sexuality. Such a view is rare in Judaism of any era, but Josephus does describe an Essene hostility to marriage and sexuality, which reflected suspicion of the material world. Such a view is not found explicitly in the Scrolls. Even so, the Thanksgiving Hymns teach a deep suspicion of the material creation that again departs from biblical understandings, and foreshadows that later dualism. At length, the Hymnist stresses the failings of his physical nature, which is less than dust. Repeatedly, he declares himself a mere vessel of clay. Only by receiving the spirit of God, the spirit of truth and light, can the body do anything right or virtuous.¹⁴

Despite their fragmentary state, other Qumran texts support such doctrines of a division of spirit and flesh, which perhaps dated back to the Creation. One puzzling tract is known by the technical title of 4QInstruction, most of which is standard Wisdom literature, in that it offered wise and pious sayings for the instruction of pupils. It differs from most of the genre in including apocalyptic materials and also contains what looks like a reference to a larger Creation myth. In an early Jewish legend, the children of the ancient patriarch Seth (Adam’s third son) are said to have erected inscriptions to preserve their knowledge of the heavens. This story is the subject of a contorted part of 4QInstruction, which reads: “And as an inheritance he gave it to [Seth’s son] Enosh together with the people of the spirit, because according to the blueprint of the holy ones he formed him but did not give ‘murmuring’ to the spirit of the flesh as it cannot distinguish between good and evil according to the judgment of its spirit.” That is anything but lucid, but it seems to indicate a story of Creation through angelic beings, the “holy ones.” There are two categories of being, the people of Spirit and of Flesh, and the latter are impaired because they do not understand the ways of Wisdom and the Law. The translator in this case has been restrained in his use of capitalization, but it would be tempting to render some of the words here as if they represented supernatural categories, such as the Holy Ones, the People of the Spirit, and the Flesh. The division between spiritual and fleshly foreshadowed the writings of Saint Paul, who announced that “to be carnally [fleshly] minded is death; but to be spiritually minded is life and peace” (Rom. 8:6).15

THE ATTENTION PAID to the Qumran writings is understandable, but we must be cautious about assuming just what impact the group had in its own day. Sectarian isolation created a hothouse atmosphere in which extraordinarily violent dreams and fantasies could flourish. Some might even take the position that the sect stood at the extreme margins of the culture of its time and was no more relevant to mainstream discourse than, say, a modern-day American commune movement living in remote rural isolation. Even so, throughout history, marginal and even cultish movements have served as laboratories for ideas and motifs that seemed extreme in their day but soon joined the religious mainstream. In the case of dualism, the Dead Sea discoveries focused new attention on other documents that were already well known but had been dismissed as much later concoctions. Now, though, we realize how closely they recalled themes from Qumran. Taken together, these writings confirm the presence of a diffusive dualism in many areas of Jewish culture of the Crucible era, to a degree that would not have been suspected before the discovery of the Scrolls. That fact fundamentally revises our understanding of developments during the early Common Era.¹⁶

Some of the best evidence for dualistic thought comes from that rich collection of pseudoscriptures called the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs (second or first century BCE), which we have already encountered. The Qumran texts included a number of early documents using the testament genre, one of which, the Aramaic Levi Document, provided inspiration for the Testament of Levi. Before Qumran the Testaments also have connections to the literature of 1 Enoch and Jubilees.17 Recalling Qumran, the Testaments present the idea of the competing two spirits, which led a person to good or evil. In every human soul and mind, there were two paths. God’s messengers would protect his elect and those who chose the right directions. In his supposed Testament, the ancient Asher declares that

Two ways has God given to the sons of men, and two minds, and two doings, and two places, and two ends. Therefore all things are by twos, one corresponding to the other. There are two ways of good and evil, with which are the two minds in our breasts distinguishing them. Therefore if the soul take pleasure in good, all its actions are in righteousness; and though it sin, it straightway repents.… But if his mind turn aside in evil, all his doings are in maliciousness, and he drives away the good, and takes unto him the evil, and is ruled by Beliar; and even though he work what is good, he perverts it in evil. For whenever he begins as though to do good, he brings the end of his doing to work evil, seeing that the treasure of the devil is filled with the poison of an evil spirit.

Levi urges his children to “choose therefore for yourselves either the darkness or the light, either the law of the Lord or the works of Beliar.” Issachar warns his descendants that they must follow the commandments of God or pursue the way of Beliar. Naphtali says that a man’s word might be “either in the law of the Lord or in the law of Beliar.”18

A consistent theme in the various Testaments is how sternly they address issues of individual sinfulness. Believers must be constantly on their guard against the wiles of demonic forces who tempt them to sin. That did not mean offenses committed by communities or families, nor did it refer to ritual violations. If this sounds like the image of demonic tempters familiar from medieval Christian art, then that resemblance is made even clearer by the kind of sins at issue, sins such as lust, anger and envy, and roughly, the Seven Deadly Sins of later tradition. The Testament of Reuben specifically names seven evil spirits that lead people astray, namely, licentiousness, insatiability, contentiousness, flattery and hypocrisy, arrogance, lying, and injustice. All were bestowed by Beliar. The Testament of Dan reports that “one of the spirits of Beliar” tempted him to try to kill his brother Joseph. He warns of wrath and lying and the deep danger of combining the two offenses. “When the soul is continually disturbed, the Lord departs from it, and Beliar rules over it.” No less medieval in tone is the vision of the individual soul as a battleground between angels and demons, as in the Testament of Benjamin: “The mind of the good man is not in the power of the deceit of the spirit of Beliar, for the angel of peace guides his soul.” Such texts counsel constant introspection, of the kind to be expected from a monastic or eremitical setting.¹⁹

BESIDES THE GENERAL atmosphere of dualism, beliefs in determinism and predestination are also well documented. At the beginning of this book, I quoted Jesus’s parable of the wheat and the tares, which implied not only a dualistic vision of the world but also that people were predetermined for either salvation or damnation, regardless of their individual will or inclination. Such texts support doctrines of predestination, which are difficult to find in the Old Testament, except through intense proof-texting. That influential idea had its roots in the preceding centuries and not just in the Scrolls. While Hellenistic cities placed their hope in the random power of Tyche (Fortune), at least some Jewish thinkers framed spiritual conflict in terms of determinism and explicit predestination.20

Such a division is already hinted at in 1 Enoch. One passage describes the two paths or ways that individuals might follow, “the paths of righteousness and the paths of violence.… For all who walk in the paths of unrighteousness shall perish for ever” (91:18). The text counsels the listeners (“my sons”) to choose wisely between the ways, but already, other passages suggest that their ability to make such a decision was severely limited. The Parables tell us that God “knows before the world was created what is for ever, and what will be from generation unto generation” (39:11). The book of Sirach likewise points to the existence of deterministic ideas in the early second century CE. One curious verse protests that God has commanded no man to act wickedly, nor has he given anyone permission to commit sins (15:20). Such a rebuttal makes little sense unless somebody at the time was making just such arguments, and was attributing human evil to the deity.

It is, however, in the Qumran texts that such determinism emerges most powerfully. Josephus told us that the Essenes were strong believers in determinism, so that “nothing befalls men unless it be in accordance with her decree.” Not surprisingly, the Scrolls were uncompromising in their ideas of absolute divine control. The Pesher (or interpretive commentary) on Habakkuk remarks, typically, that “all of God’s periods will come according to their fixed order, as he decreed.” The Treatise on the Two Spirits describes two hostile and competing realities, although it is not obvious whether these are actual cosmic beings or metaphors for human inclinations. But whatever their nature, the spiritual conflict is deeply laid. The Sons of Light needed to learn that

from the God of knowledge stems all there is and all there shall be. Before they existed he established their entire design. And when they have come into being, at their appointed time, they will execute all their works according to his glorious design, without altering anything.… He created man to rule the world and placed within him two spirits so that he would walk with them until the moment of his visitation: they are the spirits of truth and of deceit. From the springs of light stem the generations of truth, and from the source of darkness the generations of deceit.

“[God] created the spirits of light and darkness and on them established every deed.” That phrase recalls the division of the world between carnal and spiritual people taught in 4QInstruction.21

Predestinarian ideas are no less evident in the Thanksgiving Hymns. For the righteous man, “from the womb, [God] determined the time of approval, in order that he keep your covenant and walk in [it].” “But the wicked you created for [the time] of your [wrath] and from the womb you have vowed them to the Day of Massacre.” Jubilees uses Qumran-like language about the Children of the Covenant and the Children of Destruction and actually sees circumcision as the factor dividing the two. That approach was more simplistic than that of the Qumran sectaries, who recognized that circumcision alone did not mark a man out as saved. In their view, plenty of so-called Jews were likewise destined for perdition.²²

Deterministic ideas drew on the theme of heavenly writings and tablets, which are the eternal and absolute originals of earthly copies. Long before the Flood, Enoch was able to “read the book of all the deeds of mankind, and of all the children of flesh that shall be upon the earth to the remotest generations.” Similarly, for Jubilees, the earthly Law is first written in heaven, and so are the deeds of individuals: “And the judgment of all is ordained and written on the heavenly tablets in righteousness—even [the judgment of] all who depart from the path which is ordained for them to walk in; and if they walk not therein, judgment is written down for every creature and for every kind.… [A]ll their judgments are ordained and written and engraved” (5:12–15).23

Individuals could actually join the Sons of Light or at least publicly align with the sect. The group made extensive use of rituals involving dipping or plunging in water with the goal of achieving ritual purity, acts that in Greek would be called baptism. Such acts intrigue scholars who wish to present the community as precursors of later Christianity, and again they draw comparisons between the Qumran sect and the Essenes, who had a similar ritual. Describing the Essenes in a later era, Josephus writes of the procedure by which candidates were tested through a probationary period, before receiving a kind of initiation, through what is variously translated as “waters of purification” or “the purer kind of holy water.”²⁴

The Qumran sect’s Community Rule speaks of washings designed to remove ritual impurities, with the caveat that the person being treated thus must obey God’s laws before he can expect true cleanness: “When his flesh is sprinkled with purifying water and sanctified by cleansing water, it shall be made clean by the humble submission of his soul to all the precepts of God.” Coincidentally or not, that section of the rule leads directly into the famous Treatise on the Two Spirits, perhaps suggesting a linkage to the thought world of Light and Darkness. Tentatively, we might see the washing as a symbolic cleansing from darkness and evil. Another fragment from Qumran gives a series of set prayers and thanksgivings, in what some translators have described as a Baptismal Liturgy.²⁵

Struggling to avoid excessive Christian interpretations, modern translators generally speak of such acts as ablutions, washings, or lustrations, but the term “baptism” is just as accurate. It was as if even Jews were being initiated into a new and more authentic covenant and prepared for spiritual combat during the forthcoming End Times. Nor did recruitment violate ideas of predestination: those new members were only discovering and acknowledging their status as Children of Light, which hitherto had been known only to God. But baptism, too, must be seen in this larger framework of spiritual warfare. It is an open question whether actual continuities to Christianity can be traced, but parallels are apparent. The Christian gospels begin with the mission of John the Baptist, whose reported career bore many resemblances to Qumran practice; it was even situated in the same geographical area. John, like the Qumran followers, offered a ritual washing for Jews, parallel to the rites used to bring Gentiles into Judaism.

SO SUDDENLY DID the Qumran mythological framework appear, and in such fully developed form, that perhaps these various themes were imported in prefabricated form, rather than evolving locally. Through the decades, many scholars have turned eastward to find the origins of these ideas and located them in the great culture of Persia. Persia followed the religion founded by the prophet Zarathustra or Zoroaster, which at least in later times (and that distinction is important) was centrally concerned with dualistic themes. Palestine had been under Persian control during the Achaemenid era, from the 540s through the 330s BCE, some seven generations, so that a sizable Persian cultural inheritance might be expected. Apart from the Mesopotamian and Egyptian connections, Jewish apocalyptic has many points of contact with Persian notions. Persians too contemplated a day when those who betrayed or violated God’s laws could be duly punished, while the righteous were vindicated. Beyond doubt, the Jews imported many ideas from the cultures with which they came into contact. But if Persian influences were certainly present, that does not mean that all the new ideas in Judaism were a Persian import. The spiritual revolution did not come intact from a Persian shelf.26

At different stages of its existence, Persian religion imagined mighty spiritual figures. The great God of Light, Ahura Mazda, battled the evil Angra Mainyu, or Ahriman. Persian religion also had its spirits, ahuras and daevas, much like their ancient Hindu counterparts. For Zarathustra, these figures became more dualistic in tone, with the good ahuras in combat with the evil daevas, and in retrospect, it is easy to read these as angels and demons. In some cases, borrowings are apparent. The demonic Persian figure of Aeshma, “Wrath,” became Aeshma-Deva, who appears as Asmodeus in Tobit.27

Other suggested appropriations are convincing. Jews might just have evolved their own concept of the two spirits independently, but it is difficult not to see the influence of texts like this, from the Gathas attributed to Zarathustra: “Truly there are two primal Spirits, twins renowned to be in conflict. In thought and word, in action, they are two: the good and the bad. And those who act well have chosen rightly between these two, not so the evil-doers. And when these two Spirits encountered, they created life and not-life, and how at the end the Worst Existence [that is, Hell] shall be for the deceitful, but [the House of] Best Thought [that is, Heaven] for the just.”²⁸ Explaining such influence would only require the travels of a handful of individuals or even the migration of some manuscripts. Once these ideas had been absorbed by one intellectual center, presumably Jerusalem, they could easily be transmitted elsewhere.

Qumran also produced other Persian-sounding concepts. Around 420 BCE, the traveler Herodotus stressed the Persian view of lying (pseudesthai) as an ultimate evil: “The most disgraceful thing in the world, they think, is to tell a lie.” That may hint at a later Persian notion of the titanic struggle between competing forces, originally Truth and Falsehood, so that the world divided between followers of Truth and followers of the Lie. In later centuries, this was framed as a struggle between Light and Dark. The Qumran sect recalled this language when members denounced their enemies as “Man of the Lie” or “Spouter of the Lie.” Jesus himself would later denounce the Devil as a liar (pseustes) and Father of Lies.²⁹

But to acknowledge borrowings is not to accept that Jews imported a whole religious system intact. One obstacle to such a view is that of chronology. Although Persian rule over Palestine ended in the late fourth century, overtly dualist ideas are hard to find in the Jewish world until the post-170 era, and only in the following century do they become commonplace.

The other problem is in defining and dating the Persian ideas themselves. Nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Western scholars were overconfident about what they could reasonably say about Zoroastrianism in those ancient eras, and they often back-projected from much later writings to understand primitive forms of the faith. For instance, the Zoroastrian tradition has a messianic figure, the Saoshyant, or Benefactor, who plays a special role in the apocalyptic renewing of all things, the Frashokereti, the day of Judgment and Resurrection. That seems to prefigure Enochic and Christian ideas, quite uncannily. But even if the term “Saoshyant” is ancient, the earliest scriptural references are scanty and lack the later mythological framework. The messianic association with a Judgment Day is chiefly found in medieval texts in Middle Persian, dating from long after the rise of Christianity and indeed Islam. Eschatological influences might even run from the Abrahamic religions to the Persian rather than the reverse.

Western scholars interpreted Zoroastrian scriptures with strongly Jewish or Christian eyes, making Zarathustra’s doctrines resemble the beliefs they already knew. We see this problem with a particular group of Zoroastrian divine beings called the Amesha Spentas, or Bounteous Immortals, who at first sight look as if they must be the role models for the archangels we know from Judaism. The Persian exemplars were originally the six forces or divine sparks through which the good God, Ahura Mazda, created the world of Light, with names like Devotion, Purpose, and Wholeness. Yet these forces did not possess anything like the individual identity of, say, Gabriel and Michael, and they are represented not as individual spiritual beings but as character traits or virtues. Only in scholarly hindsight do they become the prototypes of the West’s archangels.30

Zoroastrianism itself changed dramatically over time, so that the faith as it existed in, say, 400 BCE looked quite different from that of 200 or 500 CE. Although Zarathustra’s system was accepted in Persia in Achaemenid times (550–330 BCE) and his deity Ahura Mazda was venerated, the prophet’s name does not even appear in inscriptions from that era. Nor, in this early era, is there much evidence of the dualist mythology that is usually labeled as Zoroastrian. Relying on Herodotus alone, we would never suspect that Persia in his time held any dualist beliefs whatever. Herodotus offers not a word about dualism, Light and Darkness, the Last Judgment, any kind of Satanic figure, or a messiah. Reading Herodotus, in fact, Persian religious life emerges something more like Indian Vedic religion, which makes sense in that Zoroastrianism stems from that common Indo-Iranian origin. The name Zarathustra was attached to a faith of sacrifices and libations. It was especially during the much later Sassanian era, from the third century CE onward, that the Zoroastrian religion acquired the hard-edged dualist tone for which it became famous. Just because the religion looked very recognizable in Jewish or Christian terms in 500 CE does not mean that this was its form seven hundred years earlier or that we can trace a direct influence from Persia to Judea, from Persepolis to Qumran.

WITH THOSE CAVEATS in mind, we can legitimately seek Persian influences in Judaism, if not on such a massive scale as might once have been suspected. Nor were such influences early imports; many arrived as part of a broader Hellenistic worldview. Moreover, ideas of cosmic confrontation evolved independently and naturally in the Jewish world, assisted by the imagination of such critical spiritual entrepreneurs as Qumran’s Teacher of Righteousness. This was an internal dynamic, with its own inexorable logic.

Whatever its origins, cosmic warfare beliefs became an integral part of the emerging Jewish synthesis of the Crucible years. And far from being confined to scholarly speculation, these ideas penetrated every aspect of daily life.