The Late Development of Afterlife and Satan

Summary

The critics are right about the order. Most of the Hebrew Bible says little about life after death. The dead go down to Sheol, where "who shall give you thanks?"¹ The first resurrection text that nearly all scholars accept is Daniel 12:2, which critical scholars date to about 165 BC. A judgment of the dead appears a little earlier, in the Book of the Watchers in 1 Enoch, and the first text explicit about the body is 2 Maccabees 7. Satan grows the same way. In the Hebrew Bible satan is a role, "adversary" or "accuser", used of human enemies, of the angel of the LORD, and of a member of God's court in Job and Zechariah. A Satan who rules evil spirits appears in Jubilees, 1 Enoch and the Dead Sea Scrolls. Angels are everywhere in the older texts, but named archangels first appear in Daniel and Tobit.

The claim that these beliefs were borrowed from Persian Zoroastrianism is much weaker than the claim that they came late:

The timing allows some borrowing. Greek writers report Persian belief in two opposed powers and in a life after death in the fourth century BC, and one Avestan hymn that speaks of the dead rising is probably that old. This article concedes the point.
The shape does not match. In every pre-Christian Jewish text the evil power is God's creature or acts by his leave; in Zoroastrian theology the evil spirit is not God's creation. Daniel raises "many", some to "everlasting contempt"; the Persian ordeal of molten metal purifies everyone.
The words are Hebrew. Daniel 12:2 is built from Isaiah 26:19 and 66:24, and the oldest Enochic judgment scene is a reading of Isaiah 65-66. The angels' names are Hebrew. The only clear Persian loans are a demon's name, Asmodaeus, and pardes, "park".
The full Persian scheme is late. Most of what is compared with Daniel is known from Pahlavi books finished about AD 880, and even the Avesta survives in no manuscript older than AD 1288.

The specialists mostly agree. Collins finds "no evidence of Persian motifs" in Daniel 12 or 1 Enoch 22; Bremmer, Kelly, Barr and Yamauchi reject or doubt Persian origins; Boyce argued for deep influence, and Shaked for influence on a general resurrection, while granting that the Jewish themes "were partly available in biblical verses".

The development fits what Christians call progressive revelation, which the New Testament itself teaches: Christ "brought life and immortality to light".¹ The doctrine predicts later teaching that extends earlier teaching without correcting it, growing from seeds already there. The evidence mostly fits. Its weakest point is Job 14:12 and Ecclesiastes 9:5, which say the dead do not wake, and which a Christian must read as limited human views within books that frame them that way.

Part 1: The dead in the older Hebrew Bible

Sheol

The Hebrew Bible's word for the place of the dead is Sheol. It occurs 66 times.² Jacob, told that Joseph is dead, says, "I will go down to Sheol to my son, mourning."¹ It is a place of silence: "For in death there is no memory of you. In Sheol, who shall give you thanks?" "The dead don't praise Yah, nor any who go down into silence".¹¹ Psalm 88 asks, "Do the departed spirits rise up and praise you?", expecting the answer no.¹ Ecclesiastes is blunter still: "the dead don't know anything", and "there is no work, nor plan, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in Sheol, where you are going."¹

Yet the dead in Sheol are not simply gone. When the king of Babylon dies, "Sheol from beneath has moved for you to meet you at your coming. It stirs up the departed spirits for you".¹ The "departed spirits" are the rephaim, the shades, a word used eight times for the dead.² At Endor a medium brings up Samuel, who speaks, remembers, and predicts: "tomorrow you and your sons will be with me."¹ The law forbids anyone who "consults with a familiar spirit" or is "a necromancer", and Isaiah asks, "Should they consult the dead on behalf of the living?"¹¹ Laws against consulting the dead only make sense if people believed the dead could be consulted.

The best conservative study of the subject reads Sheol minimally. Philip Johnston, in Shades of Sheol, counts "about one hundred references to the underworld" against a thousand uses of the root for death, and concludes that the underworld is "an infrequent theme and an unwelcome fate." He adds that "the Hebrew Bible never indicates any form of punishment after death".³ Alan Segal, from the critical side, agrees that Sheol "was neither a place of reward nor of punishment inherently, merely the final destination where the dead go."⁴

What the tombs show

From the eighth century BC, Judahites buried their dead in rock-cut bench tombs: the body was laid on a bench, and the bones were later pushed into a repository to make room for the next burial. Elizabeth Bloch-Smith's survey of Judahite burials calls the bench tomb "the definitive Judahite form of burial by the eighth century BCE". Lamps, bowls and jugs were the most common goods placed with the dead, and she concludes that "Judahites believed in life after death."⁵ Two silver amulets found in a tomb repository at Ketef Hinnom in Jerusalem carry the priestly blessing of Numbers 6:24-26. Their excavator, Gabriel Barkay, placed the tomb before the Babylonian conquest of 586 BC; Erik Waaler, noting that they were worn before burial, argues they "could have been made in the first half of the seventh century (700-650 BC)."⁶ The living carried God's blessing with them into the family tomb.

How far these practices went toward a cult of the dead, with food offered to ancestors and help asked of them, is disputed. Theodore Lewis argues for "a strong circumstantial case"; Brian Schmidt argues that the necromancy texts are late and the evidence for an ancestor cult is "unfounded"; Johnston calls the reconstruction "hazardous" without textual evidence. The key verse, Deuteronomy 26:14, where a farmer swears he has not given his tithe "for the dead", is read as an offering to the dead or as food for mourners.⁷⁸³¹ This debate belongs to the article Israelite Religion on the Ground, and the Ugaritic rephaim texts to Ugaritic and Ancient Near Eastern Parallels. For this article the point is narrower. Pre-exilic Judahites thought the dead lived on in some form. Nothing in the tombs or the texts shows a judgment of the dead, a reward, or a resurrection.

Hints of hope

A few older texts reach further, and they are the ones the maximal reading builds on.

God's power over Sheol. "Yahweh kills and makes alive. He brings down to Sheol and brings up." "I kill and I make alive. I wound and I heal."¹¹
Rescue from Sheol. "For you will not leave my soul in Sheol, neither will you allow your holy one to see corruption." "But God will redeem my soul from the power of Sheol, for he will receive me." "You will guide me with your counsel, and afterward receive me to glory."¹¹¹ The verb "receive" in the last two is laqach, "take", the same verb used when "God took" Enoch and when Elijah was "taken".⁹
Men who did not die. Enoch "was not found, for God took him", and Elijah "went up by a whirlwind into heaven."¹¹
Job's question. "If a man dies, will he live again?" Job wishes God would hide him in Sheol "until your wrath is past" and then remember him.¹ But the same chapter says that man "lies down and doesn't rise. Until the heavens are no more, they will not awake".¹

The minimal reading takes the psalms as rescue from an early death, not from death itself. Jon Levenson, adopting a reading of Psalm 16:10 by Rosenberg, says the psalmist means "You [God] will not let your faithful servant die an untimely, evil death."¹⁰ Johnston reads Psalm 49 as the psalmist's own redemption, "clearly distinguishing himself from those for whom there is no such redemption."³

The minimal and maximal readings

The two readings, each in its strongest form:

Minimal. Sheol is the common fate of all. The dead are shades, without praise or knowledge. Hope is for this life and for the nation. Resurrection with judgment is a new idea, first stated in Daniel 12. Segal: "Metaphorical here, resurrection becomes absolutely literal in Daniel 12."⁴
Maximal. Levenson argues that Sheol is not everyone's fate but the fate of those who die unfulfilled: "In sum, the biblical Sheol is the prolongation of the unfulfilled life."¹⁰ The God of Israel is the God who "kills and makes alive", and the promise to Israel, a people of flesh and blood, needs that power. On this reading the later belief "fulfills the promise to Israel of the God of life".¹⁰

Johnston, the conservative, sits nearer the minimal reading on the evidence and nearer Levenson on the cause. "Various psalmists and other writers recoil from the thought of Sheol, but a few express a real if imprecise hope of some form of continued communion with God beyond death." The source of the later belief, he concludes, "was Israel's God and Israel's experience."³ That is the honest position: the older texts give seeds, not a doctrine.

Part 2: Resurrection, text by text

The dated texts

The table lists every early Jewish text usually cited for resurrection, with the date range scholars give and the reason for it. "Bodily" means the text speaks of the body being raised, not only the soul surviving.

Text	Date of composition	Basis of the date	What it says	Bodily?	Judgment?
Isaiah 26:19	8th century BC to after 539 BC	Disputed; late dates rest partly on the resurrection language itself¹¹	"Your dead shall live. Their dead bodies shall arise."	Disputed: the nation or individuals	No
Ezekiel 37:1-14	593-571 BC	The book's dated oracles¹	Dry bones rise; "these bones are the whole house of Israel"	A picture of national return	No
1 Enoch 22-27 (Book of the Watchers)	3rd century BC	Older than Daniel (Nickelsburg); Aramaic copies at Qumran from the 2nd and 1st centuries BC¹²¹³	The spirits of the dead wait in hollows "till the day of their judgement"	Spirits	Yes
Daniel 12:2-3	c. 165 BC (critical); 6th century BC (traditional)	Daniel 11's detailed account of Antiochus IV; see When Was the Book of Daniel Written?	"Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth will awake"	Most say yes; Collins says the form is not stated¹⁴	Yes
2 Maccabees 7	After c. 130 BC	Its source, Jason of Cyrene, wrote "roughly after 130 B.C." (Charles)¹⁵	Martyrs expect their hands back	Yes, explicitly	Yes
Psalms of Solomon 3:12	c. 63-40 BC	Allusions to Pompey¹⁶	"they that fear the Lord shall rise to life eternal"	Not stated	Yes
4Q521 (Dead Sea Scrolls)	Copy made c. 100-80 BC	Handwriting (Puech)¹⁷	God "shall revive the dead"	Not stated	Yes
Josephus on the Pharisees	AD 75-94	Written then	The good soul passes "into other bodies"	In Greek terms	Yes
Mishnah Sanhedrin 10:1	c. AD 200	Redaction under Judah the Patriarch¹⁸	Whoever denies resurrection has no share in the world to come	Assumed	Yes

The early texts: Isaiah and Ezekiel

Isaiah 26:19 is the boldest text in the older prophets: "Your dead shall live. Their dead bodies shall arise. Awake and sing, you who dwell in the dust".¹ Its date is part of the argument. Scholars have placed Isaiah 24-27 anywhere from Isaiah's own lifetime in the eighth century BC to the second century BC. John Oswalt, a conservative commentator, points out why the late dates were chosen: "Ultimately, it is the theology, especially the references to resurrection (25:8; 26:19), that have caused many to opt for a date later than the seventh century." He calls this kind of dating "extremely tenuous" and "often betrays a distinctly circular flavor."¹¹ The point is fair. A theory that resurrection is late cannot use the resurrection verses to prove that the chapter is late.

Ezekiel's vision of the dry bones, from the exile, uses resurrection as a picture. God explains it: "these bones are the whole house of Israel", and "I will open your graves, and cause you to come up out of your graves, my people; and I will bring you into the land of Israel."¹ The vision is about the nation's return, not a doctrine of the end. But a picture only works if the idea it draws on can be imagined, and Ezekiel's God is the one who can open graves.

Daniel and 1 Enoch

Daniel 12:2 is the text nearly everyone agrees on. John J. Collins, whose Hermeneia commentary is the standard critical work, writes that "there is virtually unanimous agreement among modern scholars that Daniel is referring to the actual resurrection of individuals from the dead", and that "This is, in fact, the only generally accepted reference to resurrection in the Hebrew Bible."¹⁴ On the critical date it was written about 165 BC, during the persecution under Antiochus IV. On the traditional date it comes from the sixth century BC, in the reign of Cyrus (Daniel 10:1). The date is argued in When Was the Book of Daniel Written?; this article takes the critical date as the harder case for its own conclusion.

Daniel 12:2 is not the earliest text with judgment after death. The Book of the Watchers in 1 Enoch is older: George Nickelsburg, its leading modern commentator, withdrew his earlier claim that Daniel came first, and now holds that the Book of the Watchers "antedates the Book of Daniel."¹³ In its chapter 22 the angel Raphael shows Enoch hollow places "created for this very purpose, that the spirits of the souls of the dead should assemble therein", to wait "till the day of their judgement". Of one class of sinners it says that "their spirits shall not be slain in the day of judgement nor shall they be raised from thence", which implies that others will be.¹⁹

The wording of Daniel 12:2-3 is borrowed from Isaiah. The verbs and nouns match Isaiah 26:19: "awake" and "dust" stand together in only these two verses of the Hebrew Bible. The rare noun dera'on, "contempt" or "abhorrence", occurs in only one other place, Isaiah 66:24, where the bodies of the rebels "will be loathsome to all mankind". And Daniel 12:3's "Those who are wise" and "Those who turn many to righteousness" echo the servant of Isaiah 52:13 and 53:11, who "will deal wisely" and "will justify many".¹¹¹²⁰ Collins notes the first of these borrowings: "The language echoes Isa 26:19".¹⁴ The first generally accepted resurrection text in the Hebrew Bible thus presents itself as a reading of earlier Hebrew prophecy.

2 Maccabees and the martyrs

The first text that is explicit about the body is 2 Maccabees 7, from after about 130 BC. Seven brothers are tortured to death for refusing to eat pork. The second tells the king, "the King of the world will raise us who have died for his laws up to an everlasting renewal of life." The third holds out his hands to be cut off: "I got these from heaven. For his laws' sake I treat these with contempt. From him, I hope to receive these back again." The fourth tells the king, "as for you, you will have no resurrection to life."¹

Scholars once explained the rise of resurrection belief by this persecution: God would vindicate the martyrs. Nickelsburg built his 1972 study on that idea, and in 2006 he withdrew its chronology. Because the Book of the Watchers is older than Daniel, "This conclusion upsets the chronological aspect of my typology according to which belief in resurrection grew out of the circumstances of the Antiochan persecution". He adds that Daniel 12:2 "probably reflects the interpretation of Isaiah 65–66 in 1 Enoch 24:2–27:5."¹³ So the persecution gave the belief its urgency, not its birth. The belief is older, from the third century BC. And its oldest form is also a reading of Isaiah.

The Pharisees and the Sadducees

By the first century the belief divided the two main Jewish parties. Josephus says the Pharisees hold that "all souls are incorruptible, but that the souls of good men only are removed into other bodies,--but that the souls of bad men are subject to eternal punishment." The Sadducees "take away the belief of the immortal duration of the soul, and the punishments and rewards in Hades."²¹ Josephus wrote for Greek readers, and Steve Mason argues that "another body" is his Greek way of describing resurrection.²² The New Testament says the same thing in plainer words: "the Sadducees say that there is no resurrection, nor angel, nor spirit; but the Pharisees confess all of these."¹

The argument between them was about scripture. Jesus answers the Sadducees from the Torah itself, from God's words at the burning bush: "He is not the God of the dead, but of the living."¹ The Mishnah, about AD 200, denies a share in the world to come to "One who says: There is no resurrection of the dead derived from the Torah". According to David Grossberg, the words "from the Torah" are a later addition: "Early manuscripts do not include this phrase."²³²⁴ On either reading, the rabbis treated resurrection as a doctrine to be found in Israel's own books, and the Sadducees' denial as a misreading of them. Neither side argued about Persia.

Part 3: Angels and demons were early; their names and ranks were late

The older books of the Hebrew Bible are full of angels. Cherubim guard Eden, angels climb Jacob's ladder, and a "commander of Yahweh's army" meets Joshua.¹¹¹ Isaiah sees seraphim around the throne.¹ Harmful spirits are there too, and they serve God. "An evil spirit from Yahweh troubled" Saul, and in Micaiah's vision a spirit volunteers before God to be "a lying spirit in the mouth of all his prophets."¹¹ The divine council, the "sons of God" and the gods of the nations belong to the article Did Israelite Monotheism Evolve? and are not argued here.

Demon-like beings appear in old texts as well. Israel is condemned for sacrificing "to demons, not God", Hebrew shedim, and to "goat idols", se'irim, which most modern versions render "goat-demons".¹¹ On the Day of Atonement one goat goes "for Yahweh" and the other "for Azazel", a name set against Yahweh's.¹ Isaiah's ruined Edom houses lilit, a night creature, and Habakkuk pictures Plague (dever) and Pestilence (reshef, the name of a Canaanite plague god) walking in Yahweh's train.¹¹ What the older texts never do is organise these beings into a kingdom, rank them, or give them a ruler opposed to God.

What is late is names and ranks. Old Testament angels refuse to give names: "Why do you ask about my name, since it is incomprehensible?"¹ The first named angels are Gabriel and Michael in Daniel, where Michael is "one of the chief princes" and Israel's "prince", opposed by "the prince of the kingdom of Persia" and "the prince of Greece".¹ Raphael, "one of the seven holy angels", appears in Tobit, with the demon Asmodaeus.¹ 1 Enoch, in its Book of the Watchers, lists seven archangels by name, and teaches that demons are "the spirits which went forth from the souls of the giants", the offspring of the fallen Watchers.¹⁹ The Watchers and the giants are the subject of The Sons of God and the Nephilim.

The rabbis themselves noticed the change, and dated it to the exile. In the third century AD, Rabbi Simeon ben Lakish contrasted Isaiah's unnamed seraph with Daniel's "man Gabriel" and said that "the names of angels were in their hands from Babylonia."²⁵ Genesis Rabbah puts it more briefly: "Reish Lakish said: The names of the angels, Mikhael, Refael, and Gavriel, as well."²⁵ This is a real concession, and it should be stated plainly. But the names themselves are Hebrew, not Persian or Akkadian. Mi-ka-el means "who is like God?", Gavri-el "God is my strength", and Rafa-el "God heals". If Jews learned in Babylon to name angels, they named them in their own language after their own God.

Part 4: Satan, from a role to a name

In the Hebrew Bible satan is a role

The Hebrew noun satan means "adversary" or "accuser". It occurs 27 times in the Hebrew Bible.²⁶ Most of the adversaries are human. The Philistine commanders fear that David will become their satan in battle; God raises up Hadad the Edomite and Rezon of Damascus as satan against Solomon.¹¹ Once the satan is the angel of the LORD himself, who stands in Balaam's road "as an adversary".¹

With the article, ha-satan, "the adversary", the word names a member of God's court. This happens 17 times, all in Job 1-2 and Zechariah 3.²⁶ In Job he comes "among" the sons of God to present himself before Yahweh, and he can touch Job only within the limits God sets: "all that he has is in your power. Only on himself don't stretch out your hand."¹ In Zechariah he stands at the high priest's right hand "to be his adversary", and Yahweh rebukes him.¹ Neither text gives him a kingdom, demons or a share in creation. Both put him under God's command.

The census: 2 Samuel 24 and 1 Chronicles 21

The plainest sign of change is a single story told twice. The older account says, "Yahweh's anger burned against Israel, and he moved David against them, saying, 'Go, count Israel and Judah.'"¹ The Chronicler, writing in the Persian or early Greek period, retells it: "Satan stood up against Israel, and moved David to take a census of Israel."¹ Apart from the angel of the LORD in Numbers 22, this is the only place in the Hebrew Bible where the noun refers to a heavenly being without the article, and many readers take it as the first use of "Satan" as a name. Others read it as "an adversary", which could even be human.

Two points matter for the question here. The Chronicler did not delete Samuel; both accounts stayed in the same canon, read by the same people. And the two accounts can be held together the way Job holds them together: the adversary acts, and God permits and uses the act. A reader may judge that harmonisation strained. But it is not a later book contradicting an earlier one by putting an independent evil god in the story.

Jubilees, 1 Enoch and the Dead Sea Scrolls

The Chronicler's move is repeated several times in Jubilees, a retelling of Genesis and Exodus from the middle of the second century BC. Jubilees' adversary is "the prince Mastema", a Hebrew word that Hosea uses for "enmity".²⁷ Mastema proposes the test of Abraham: "bid him offer him as a burnt-offering on the altar", where Genesis 22:1 says God tested Abraham.²⁷ He tries to kill Moses on the road to Egypt, where Exodus 4:24 says Yahweh did.²⁷ R. H. Charles, the book's English editor, describes the pattern: "our author attributes to Mastêmâ the conduct which he deems unworthy of God but which is ascribed to Him by Gen. xxii. 1."²⁷ Yet Mastema still has to ask. When God binds the evil spirits after the Flood, Mastema pleads, "Lord, Creator, let some of them remain before me", and God grants him a tenth.²⁷

1 Enoch goes further. Its Similitudes speak of "Satans" and of a chief Satan, and name one of them, Gadreel, as the one who "led astray Eve".¹⁹ The Dead Sea Scrolls give the most dualistic picture in Jewish literature before Christianity: two spirits, of truth and injustice, "the Prince of Light" and "the Angel of Darkness", and a final war against Belial.²⁸ But even here both spirits are God's creatures. The Community Rule says of God, "it is He who created the spirits of Light and Darkness", and the War Scroll prays, "Belial, the Angel of Malevolence, Thou hast created for the Pit".²⁸²⁸ The Hebrew phrase there is mal'akh mastemah, Jubilees' word.

What the scholars say about the change

Peggy Day's study of every use of the word, An Adversary in Heaven, "sees no Satan in the Hebrew Bible". On 1 Chronicles 21:1 she concludes that the Chronicler does not use the word "as a proper name, but rather employs it as an indefinite common noun".²⁹ Elaine Pagels, whose The Origin of Satan traces how the figure was later used against religious opponents, describes Job's satan as one who "remains an angel, a member of the heavenly court, God's obedient servant". She sees a shift beginning in Zechariah, where "his role begins to change from that of God's agent to that of his opponent", and a full "split cosmology, radically revising earlier monotheism" only in the sectarian writings of the Second Temple period.³⁰ Neither book argues for a Persian source; Day finds no evidence even of "professional accusers" in the Persian administration, and Pagels does not discuss Zoroastrianism.

Henry Ansgar Kelly, whose Satan: A Biography argues that even the New Testament Satan is God's prosecutor rather than a rebel, weighs the Persian explanation and sets it aside: "the idea of Zoroastrian influence on the evolution of Satan is in limited favor among scholars today, not least because the satan figure is always subordinate to God in Hebrew and Christian representations, and Angra Mainyu does not function as an accuser or prosecutor. Moreover, the literary sources for Persian dualism are late." He allows that influence "cannot be totally discounted".³¹ Victor Hamilton, in the Anchor Bible Dictionary, puts the first clear use of Satan as a personal name in Jubilees and the Assumption of Moses, "both of which date to the period of the pogroms of Antiochus IV against Jews in Palestine (ca. 168 B.C.)."³² Hamilton thinks it "More than likely" that Persian dualism "provided some of the stimulus for the more pervasive demonology in these Jewish writings", but admits that when one asks how the borrowing worked, "The evidence is slim to nonexistent."³²

The conservative scholars agree on the facts and differ on their meaning. Sydney Page grants that "the concept of Satan was not well developed in the Old Testament period", and of Job he writes, "There is no metaphysical dualism here. Unmistakably, Satan is subject to Yahweh's will."³³ Michael Heiser reads ha-satan in Job as a title: "The satan in Job 1-2 is not a villain. He's doing the job assigned to him by God."³⁴ The two divide on the serpent, below.

When did the serpent become the devil?

Genesis 3 does not say that the serpent is Satan. It calls the serpent "more subtle than any animal of the field", and its punishment is to crawl and eat dust.¹ As late as AD 93, Josephus still tells the story as a tale about an animal: the serpent "shewed an envious disposition", and God "deprived the serpent of speech".³⁵ The first texts to link the tempter with the devil are late Second Temple writings. The Wisdom of Solomon, from the first century BC or early first century AD, says that "death entered into the world by the envy of the devil."¹ 1 Enoch's Gadreel "led astray Eve".¹⁹ The New Testament makes the identification explicit: "the old serpent, he who is called the devil and Satan."¹

Sydney Page agrees that Wisdom 2:24 is "In all probability ... the earliest example of the identification of the serpent with Satan that has survived," and judges that "it is highly unlikely that the author of Genesis 3 thought that the serpent was an instrument of Satan."³³ Michael Heiser disagrees. Reading the serpent beside Ezekiel 28's "anointed cherub" in Eden, he argues that "we are not dealing with a mere animal in Genesis 3, but rather a divine being that is cast as creaturely".³⁴ Heiser's reading depends on taking Ezekiel 28 and Isaiah 14 as describing a fallen member of God's council, rather than only as taunts against the kings those chapters name, the king of Tyre and the king of Babylon (Ezekiel 28:12; Isaiah 14:4).

So the identification is a reading, made in the last two centuries before Christ and confirmed by the New Testament. A Christian who holds it does not need the original audience of Genesis to have known it. Genesis 3:15 already sets up a long war between the serpent's "offspring" and the woman's, which is more than a story about snakes.¹ But the honest statement is that the text leaves the serpent unexplained, and the explanation came later.

Part 5: The Persian hypothesis, tested

The case for borrowing, in its strongest form

Judah was a Persian province from 539 to 332 BC, and a large Jewish community lived in Mesopotamia and Persia for centuries. Shaul Shaked of the Hebrew University, one of the leading scholars of Zoroastrianism, states the case for influence in the Encyclopaedia Iranica. "There was no doctrine of Jewish eschatology up to the end of the Old Testament period—neither individual judgment nor universal judgment." Then these ideas "appear rather abruptly in Jewish writings that were composed during the last two centuries B.C.E." Coming after long Persian rule, a developed eschatology "that displays such great resemblance to the complex of Persian ideas, cannot be a coincidence and must be explained as a result of contact between the two cultures." He adds that "the strong dualistic character of Jewish eschatology seems also to suggest the likelihood of a borrowing from Iran."³⁶

Shaked also names the case's weak point, in the same paragraph: "the main ideas of Zoroastrian eschatology are only known to us in their fully developed form from the Pahlavi sources, and these are much more recent than the earliest Jewish writings which contain eschatological ideas."³⁶ So the test has two parts. What can be dated, on the Persian side, before the Jewish texts? And where the timing allows borrowing, does the shape of the Jewish belief match the Persian one?

What the specialists conclude

The scholars divide into three groups.

Strong, early influence. Mary Boyce of the University of London, the most influential modern historian of Zoroastrianism, held that it "has probably had more influence on mankind, directly and indirectly, than any other single faith". She dated Zoroaster "some time between 1700 and 1500 B.C." and wrote that he "was thus the first to teach the doctrines of an individual judgment, Heaven and Hell, the future resurrection of the body, the general Last Judgment, and life everlasting".³⁷ On Satan she wrote that "in the Jewish apocalyptic literature of the Parthian period Satan is conceived, like Anra Mainyu, as a cosmic force", and that "Zoroastrian dualism, consciously rejected, it seems, by Second Isaiah, thus came in time to influence Judaism deeply."³⁸ Her date is far earlier than the rough consensus of about 1000 BC, and her account of Zoroaster's own teaching reads the later Pahlavi system back into the Gathas, where, as Shaked says, resurrection is "not quite clear".³⁶
Influence on some points, adapted to Jewish ideas. In the Cambridge History of Judaism Shaked judged that "The idea of a general resurrection of the whole of mankind ... seems to have been moulded by contact with Iran", but "An earlier idea (Isa. 26: 19; Dan. 12: 2-3) seems to have envisaged a selective resurrection — and that idea may or may not have been originally Jewish." He insisted that the themes "were partly available in biblical verses", so "the process must have been one by which an existing tradition was adapted to express a new mood, rather than an alien tradition arbitrarily grafted." And he set a test: "The similarity in structure, on the other hand, does not by itself require the assumption of influence."³⁹ Collins, writing on Daniel, grants that "it is reasonable to suppose that foreign influence played a part", but adds: "There is no evidence of Persian motifs in such crucial Jewish passages as Daniel 12 and I Enoch 22."¹⁴
Influence unproven. James Barr, the Oxford Old Testament scholar, examined the question in 1985. On angels he wrote that the names and functions of the Amesha Spentas "are very far removed from what counted as angels in most stages of Judaism. The Jewish angel develops from the side of being a man sent by God". He granted that "The more developed angelology of Enoch may come closer to the Iranian style", but concluded that "Neither the total structure of the Enochic angelology, nor the style of the names, shows great similarity to the system of the Amesha Spentas."⁴⁰ N. T. Wright calls the Persian account one "which remains popular in some quarters despite being regularly refuted", "hampered not least by our radical uncertainty (because of the lateness of the primary sources) as to what ancient Zoroastrianism actually consisted of." He reports John Day's two arguments: Daniel echoes Isaiah and Hosea, and Ezekiel's opened graves would make no sense as a Persian idea, "since the Persians exposed, rather than buried, their dead."⁴¹ That last point needs a qualification. Herodotus reports it as a secret tale that "the dead bodies of Persians are not buried before they have been mangled by birds or dogs", says he knows for certain that the Magi do this, and adds that "before the Persians bury the body in earth they embalm it in wax."⁴² Persians did bury, but the Magi, the priests whose beliefs the Greeks reported, exposed their dead. Jan Bremmer, a historian of Greek and Persian religion, finds that "an interest in resurrection is clearly not attested in the Old Avesta", reads Theopompus's people who cast no shadow as suggesting "a spiritual rather than" a bodily resurrection, and concludes: "There thus is little reason to derive Jewish ideas about resurrection from Persian sources."⁴³ Edwin Yamauchi, the leading evangelical historian of Persia and the Bible, makes the same point about Satan: "the Jewish devil, who is subordinate to Yahweh, is not like the primordial Ahriman, who is equal in power to Ohrmazd." He grants that "The strongest evidence for an Iranian influence upon Jewish religion is the probable derivation of the demon Asmodeus in the book of Tobit from the Iranian Aeshma daeva."⁴⁴

When the Persian sources were written

The Zoroastrian scriptures have three layers, and the dates matter more than anything else in this debate.

The Gathas, seventeen hymns in Old Avestan attributed to Zarathustra himself. Their date is unknown. William Malandra's survey in the Encyclopaedia Iranica gives the nearest thing to a consensus: "ca. 1000 BCE give or take a century or so", while "reputable scholars have proposed dates as widely apart as ca.1750 BCE and '258 years before Alexander'", that is, the sixth century BC.⁴⁵ No Gathic text mentions a datable event.
The Younger Avesta, a larger body of hymns and laws in a later form of the language, composed over several centuries after the Gathas, at dates no outside evidence fixes.
The Pahlavi books, written in Middle Persian. These hold the full end-time scheme that is usually compared with Daniel. The Bundahishn, the main source, reached its final form with a priest named Farrbay, a contemporary of Zadspram, who "is known to have been active about A.D. 880." D. N. MacKenzie adds that "it is impossible to say even approximately at what date the first compilation was made."⁴⁶

All three layers were handed down orally for a long time. The Avestan alphabet itself was invented in the Sasanian period: "It is generally considered that the Avestan script dates to the Sasanian period (224-651 A.D.)", perhaps as early as the fourth century AD. "The earliest manuscript dates from A.D. 1288."⁴⁷

What is attested before Daniel

A few Persian beliefs can be dated before Daniel, because Greek writers reported them. These reports survive only in later authors, but the writers they quote are securely dated.

Two opposed powers. Aristotle, who died in 322 BC, wrote that the Magi "believe in two principles, the good spirit and the evil spirit, the one called Zeus or Oromasdes, the other Hades or Arimanius."⁴⁸
Life after death. The historian Theopompus, writing in the fourth century BC, "says that according to the Magi men will live in a future life and be immortal". The Greek verb, anabiōsesthai, means "to come back to life".⁴⁸⁴⁹
An end to the conflict. Plutarch, around AD 100, reports Theopompus as saying that the two gods take turns for three thousand years each, then fight for another three thousand, and "finally Hades shall pass away; then shall the people be happy, and neither shall they need to have food nor shall they cast any shadow."⁵⁰
"The Lie" as the enemy of order. Darius I's inscription at Behistun, about 520 BC, blames each rebellion on "the Lie" (drauga). It names no evil spirit and says nothing of resurrection or judgment.⁵¹

So Shaked's timing problem is real but not total. A Persian belief that the dead would come back to life was known to a Greek writer by the fourth century BC, about two centuries before Daniel. The Younger Avesta's Zamyad Yasht also has the formula "when the dead will rise, when life and immortality will come".⁵² No outside evidence dates it, but Bremmer, who doubts Persian influence, calls it "the first and only Avestan text which undeniably mentions resurrection" and dates it "presumably" to the Achaemenid period, before 330 BC.⁴³ What is late is the developed scheme: the three-thousand-year ages, the resurrection worked by the saviour Saoshyant, and the ordeal of molten metal in the Bundahishn. The four ages of metal, often compared with Daniel 2, first appear in the Zand-i Wahman Yasn, whose original commentary its translator E. W. West placed "in the latter part of the reign of" Khusrau I, who ruled from AD 531 to 579, "or very shortly afterwards".⁵³

Does the shape match?

Where the timing allows borrowing, the next question is whether the Jewish beliefs look Persian. On the three points that define the Persian scheme, they do not.

The evil power. In Zoroastrian theology the evil spirit is not God's creature. The Bundahishn opens with Ohrmazd in "endless light" and Ahriman, "with backward understanding and desire for destruction," already in the abyss.⁵³ Every pre-Christian Jewish text instead has God create or permit the evil power (Part 4). Isaiah 45:7, in the oracle that names Cyrus, puts it bluntly: "I form the light and create darkness. I make peace and create calamity. I am Yahweh, who does all these things."¹ Boyce herself matched the verse with Zarathustra's question in Yasna 44.5, "What craftsman made light and darkness?", and judged that Second Isaiah "consciously rejected" Zoroastrian dualism.³⁸ If she is right, the one biblical text that answers Persia answers it by refusing a second creator.
Who is raised, and to what. In the Bundahishn the ordeal saves everyone: "Then all men will pass into that melted metal and will become pure".⁵³ Daniel 12:2 raises "many", some "to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt."¹ Daniel's wording comes from Isaiah, not from Persia (Part 2).
Angels. The Zoroastrian Amesha Spentas are personified qualities. Plutarch's list begins with gods "of Good Thought, the second of Truth, the third of Order".⁵⁰ The Jewish archangels are messengers with Hebrew names built on El, "God" (Part 3).

The timing does not settle the question either way. Judah was ruled by Persia from 539 to 332 BC. The first Jewish texts with a judgment of the dead come from the third century BC, after Persian rule had ended, and the oldest of them, the Book of the Watchers, is itself a reading of Isaiah 65-66 (Part 2). The Maccabean martyrdoms gave the belief its urgency, but not its birth.

Two borrowings should be conceded. The demon Asmodaeus in Tobit has an Iranian name: Jes Asmussen in the Encyclopaedia Iranica derives it from Avestan aēšma daēva, "demon of wrath".⁵⁴ And the Hebrew pardes, "park" (Nehemiah 2:8), comes from Old Persian; it became "paradise" for the abode of the blessed only later.⁵⁵ A Persian demon's name in a Jewish story set in Assyria is what contact looks like. It is also very different from adopting a theology.

Part 6: Development or progressive revelation?

What the doctrine claims

Christians did not invent "progressive revelation" to escape modern criticism. The New Testament opens one of its letters with it: "God, having in the past spoken to the fathers through the prophets at many times and in various ways, has at the end of these days spoken to us by his Son."¹ On life after death in particular, it concedes that the earlier light was dim. Christ "abolished death, and brought life and immortality to light through the Good News."¹ The prophets "sought and searched diligently" for what they foretold, and "many prophets and righteous men desired to see the things which you see, and didn't see them."¹¹

The two classic Protestant statements of the doctrine come from Princeton. B. B. Warfield, the leading defender of biblical inerrancy in his day, wrote that Scripture embodies "in their own growth, the record of the steady advance of this gracious revelation through definite stages from its first faint beginnings to its glorious completion in Jesus Christ."⁵⁶ Geerhardus Vos, professor of biblical theology at Princeton Seminary from 1894, called revelation "the interpretation of redemption", which "must, therefore, unfold itself in instalments as redemption does."⁵⁷

Both men also said what the doctrine forbids, and this is what makes it testable. Warfield: "the OT revelation of God is not corrected by the fuller revelation which follows it, but only perfected, extended and enlarged." His image is "a chamber richly furnished but dimly lighted; the introduction of light brings into it nothing which was not in it before."⁵⁸ Vos: "The organic progress is from seed-form to the attainment of full growth; yet we do not say that in the qualitative sense the seed is less perfect than the tree."⁵⁷

What each account predicts

The doctrine and the borrowing hypothesis make different predictions. Both expect late, clear statements. They part company on four questions.

Does the later teaching contradict the earlier, or extend it? Progressive revelation forbids correction. Borrowing allows it.
Does the later teaching have seeds in the earlier texts? Vos's "seed-form" requires them. Borrowing does not.
Does the new teaching come in the earlier texts' own language, or with foreign vocabulary? Organic growth predicts Hebrew built on Hebrew. Borrowing predicts loanwords and foreign names.
Does the change track foreign contact, or the internal reading of scripture? Borrowing predicts that new ideas appear when and where Jews met Persians, in Persian shape. Internal growth predicts that they appear as readings of earlier Israelite texts.

A purely naturalistic account of development without borrowing, in which Israel's thinkers worked out their own ideas over time, makes the same predictions as progressive revelation on questions 2 to 4. The difference between those two is not something the history can settle; it turns on whether God speaks at all, a question for other articles. What the history can settle is whether the ideas were imported.

What the evidence shows

The table applies the four tests to each of the later beliefs this article has traced.

Later belief	First clear Jewish text	Seed in older texts	Datable Persian parallel before the Jewish text?	Persian word in the Jewish text?
Judgment of the dead	1 Enoch 22, 3rd century BC	Isaiah 66:24	No outside witness; the Gathic bridge is undated	No
Bodily resurrection	Daniel 12:2, c. 165 BC; 2 Maccabees 7	Isaiah 26:19; Ezekiel 37; 1 Samuel 2:6	Yes: Theopompus, 4th century BC: men "will live in a future life"	No; the words are Isaiah's
Resurrection of all people	1 Enoch 51, date disputed	Daniel 12:2 ("many")	Probably: Yasht 19, "presumably" Achaemenid (Bremmer), though no outside witness dates it; Shaked thinks this idea was "moulded by contact with Iran"³⁹⁴³	No
A chief of evil spirits	Jubilees 10, mid 2nd century BC	Job 1-2; Zechariah 3	Yes: Aristotle, 4th century BC, two principles	No; satan, mastemah and belial are Hebrew
Two spirits of light and darkness	Community Rule, c. 100 BC	Isaiah 45:7, which makes both God's	Yes: Aristotle	No
Named archangels	Daniel 8-12; Tobit	Unnamed angels and seraphim	No	No; the names are Hebrew
A demon with a proper name	Tobit 3:8	Shedim, se'irim, Azazel	Undated (Avestan Aēšma)	Yes: Asmodaeus
"Paradise" for the abode of the blessed	Late Second Temple texts	The garden of Eden	No	Yes: pardes, but only as "park" in the Hebrew Bible

Counted over these eight beliefs: all eight have a seed in older Israelite texts; three have a Persian parallel that an outside witness dates before the first Jewish text, and a fourth, the resurrection of all people, probably has one in Yasht 19; and two carry a Persian word, both at the edges of the doctrine (a demon's name and a garden word). So the timing allows borrowing for half of these beliefs. None of the beliefs at the centre, resurrection, judgment, Satan and the angels, is expressed in Persian vocabulary. The central Jewish texts are, in their own words, readings of earlier Hebrew scripture: Daniel of Isaiah, 1 Enoch of Isaiah 65-66, Jubilees of Genesis and Exodus.

On the first test, extension or correction, the record is mostly extension, with one real tension. The Chronicler kept Samuel; Jubilees kept Mastema under God; Daniel built on Isaiah rather than replacing it. The tension is Job 14:12 and Ecclesiastes 9:5, which say the dead do not wake and "don't know anything". Collins notes that in Job 14:12 "the possibility of resurrection is denied".¹⁴ A Christian reading has to treat these as true descriptions of death from the human side. Job's words come from a sufferer who later confesses, "I have uttered that which I didn't understand", and Ecclesiastes limits itself to what a man sees "under the sun".¹¹ That is a defensible reading, but it is a reading. A skeptic who takes Job 14:12 as Israel's settled belief will see Daniel 12 as a reversal, not an extension.

Objections and responses

"Daniel 12 is the only clear resurrection text in the Hebrew Bible, so ancient Israel had no afterlife doctrine." Agreed on the facts. Collins calls Daniel 12:2 "the only generally accepted reference to resurrection in the Hebrew Bible", and Johnston, a conservative, finds no punishment after death anywhere in it.¹⁴³ But the New Testament makes the same point: Christ "brought life and immortality to light".¹ A late, clear doctrine is what progressive revelation predicts. It would count against the Bible only if the later doctrine contradicted the earlier texts, which is the question Part 6 tests.

"Theopompus shows that Persians believed in a life after death before Daniel, so borrowing is the simplest explanation." The timing is real, and this article concedes it. A Persian belief that men "will live in a future life and be immortal" was known to a Greek writer about two centuries before Daniel.⁴⁸ Collins grants that "it is reasonable to suppose that foreign influence played a part".¹⁴ But timing allows borrowing; it does not show it. Theopompus says nothing of graves opening, of judgment, or of who is raised, and the Magi he describes exposed their dead. Daniel's words come from Isaiah. Shaked's own test is "definite correspondence in details", and the details of Daniel 12 are Isaiah's.³⁹

"Whether Israel borrowed or worked the ideas out itself, the result is the same: human development, with no need for revelation." That is fair, and this article does not claim the history proves revelation. A purely human development inside Israel predicts much the same evidence as progressive revelation does. What the history can settle is narrower: the central beliefs were not imported from Persia, and the later texts build on the earlier ones. Whether God spoke through that process depends on other evidence, above all on whether Jesus rose, which is argued in The Resurrection Belief: Event or Process? and the other resurrection articles.

"1 Chronicles 21:1 contradicts 2 Samuel 24:1." It changes the agent. Samuel says God incited David; Chronicles says satan did.¹¹ The Book of Job shows how both can be true at once: the adversary acts, and God permits and uses the act.¹ A reader may find that harmonisation strained, and the change is real development. But the Chronicler kept the older account in the same canon, and his satan, like Job's, acts inside God's purpose. It is not an independent evil power.

"Job 14:12 and Ecclesiastes 9:5 deny any life to come, and Daniel 12 reverses them." This is the strongest objection, and Part 6 states it plainly. The Christian answer is that Job and Ecclesiastes frame their speakers as limited: Job admits he spoke of "things too wonderful for me, which I didn't know", and the same chapter of Job asks, "If a man dies, will he live again?"¹¹ That answer works if the books are read as wholes. It does not work if a single verse is taken as Israel's creed.

"The light and darkness dualism of the Dead Sea Scrolls is plainly Iranian." It is the closest parallel in Jewish literature, and some borrowing of imagery is possible. But the scrolls make both spirits God's creatures: "it is He who created the spirits of Light and Darkness".²⁸ In Zoroastrian theology the evil spirit is not Ohrmazd's creation.⁵³ Even if the imagery was borrowed, the theology was not. Shaked's warning applies: "The similarity in structure ... does not by itself require the assumption of influence."³⁹

"The rabbis themselves admitted that the names of the angels came from Babylon." They did, and the admission should be taken seriously.²⁵ It dates the custom of naming angels to the exile. It does not show borrowing of the angels themselves, which appear all through the older texts, and the names are Hebrew compounds with El, "God".

"Josephus describes the Pharisees' belief in Greek terms, so the influence was Greek." Josephus wrote for Greek readers, and Steve Mason argues that he "added to the list a Jewish theory of resurrection by appropriating for it the language of reincarnation."²² Greek ideas of an immortal soul do appear in Jewish writings of the period, such as the Wisdom of Solomon. But the belief that divided Pharisees from Sadducees was the raising of the body, which Greek philosophy generally rejected.

"If God was revealing these truths, why did he wait so long?" Warfield admitted the difficulty: "It may be difficult to obtain from Scripture a clear account of why God chose thus to give this revelation of His grace only progressively".⁵⁶ Vos's answer is that revelation explains redemption, so it "must, therefore, unfold itself in instalments as redemption does."⁵⁷ On this view the full doctrine of resurrection waits for the resurrection it explains. A skeptic will not find that answer compelling unless he already grants the resurrection of Jesus, and this article cannot settle that.

Issues and unanswered questions

The date of the Gathas. If Zoroaster lived about 1000 BC and the Gathas already teach a judgment of the soul at the "bridge of the separator", then Persian individual judgment is centuries older than any Jewish statement of it. No outside evidence fixes the Gathas' date, and scholars disagree over what they teach about resurrection.
The date of the Book of the Watchers. If its judgment scene was written in the late fourth century BC, it falls close to the end of Persian rule. Nickelsburg dates it before Daniel, but the exact century is open.
James Barr's 1985 article was not read directly. It is quoted here through later scholars who cite it, because no open copy was found. Its full argument may strengthen or qualify the points taken from it.
The dates of the biblical books shape the sequence. On the traditional dates, Daniel wrote in the sixth century BC at the Persian court, before any datable Persian witness to resurrection. On the critical dates, Isaiah 24-27 may be post-exilic. This article has used the critical dates where they make its case harder.
Yasht 19's date. The Younger Avesta's formula "when the dead will rise" is probably older than the critical date of Daniel; Bremmer places it "presumably" in the Achaemenid period. If so, a Persian text spoke of the dead rising before any Jewish text did on the critical dating. The argument against borrowing then rests on shape and vocabulary, not on timing.
Later rabbinic parallels. Many close parallels between Jewish and Zoroastrian end-time details, such as the soul lingering near the body for three days, come from the Talmudic period, when Jews lived in Sasanian Persia. Which way those borrowings ran is a separate question this article does not settle.

Verdict

The critics are right that belief in resurrection, a judgment of the dead, named angels, and Satan as the leader of evil spirits became clear late in Israel's history. The Hebrew Bible's Sheol is a shadowy place without reward or punishment, and the first resurrection text that nearly all scholars accept is Daniel 12:2.

The claim that these beliefs were borrowed from Zoroastrianism does not survive a close look. Three things count against it. The Jewish texts are, in their own words, readings of earlier Hebrew scripture. No Jewish text before Christianity adopts the one feature that defines Persian dualism, an evil power God did not make. And most of the Persian end-time scheme is known only from books written down a thousand years after Daniel. Persian ideas were in the air, a Persian demon's name entered a Jewish story, and the timing allowed more borrowing than the texts show. The best reading of the evidence is development from within, which is what Christians mean by progressive revelation. What may have come from Persia is at the edges: a demon's name, perhaps the light-and-darkness imagery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and perhaps, as Shaked argues, the widening of resurrection from "many" to all people.

The weakest point in that verdict is Job 14 and Ecclesiastes 9. A reader who takes them as Israel's settled belief will see Daniel 12 as a reversal.

Sources

1.
World English Bible. 2020. A public-domain modern English translation of the Bible with the Apocrypha. Every quotation of the Bible, Tobit, the Wisdom of Solomon and 2 Maccabees in this article comes from it.
1. 1a.
  Book Genesis, chapter 37, verse 35: “All his sons and all his daughters rose up to comfort him, but he refused to be comforted. He said, “For I will go down to Sheol to my son, mourning.” His father wept for him.” ↩
2. 1b.
  Book Psalms, chapter 6, verse 5: “For in death there is no memory of you. In Sheol, who shall give you thanks?” ↩ ↩
3. 1c.
  Book Psalms, chapter 115, verse 17: “The dead don’t praise Yah, nor any who go down into silence,”. ↩
4. 1d.
  Book Psalms, chapter 88, verse 10: “Do you show wonders to the dead? Do the departed spirits rise up and praise you? Selah.” ↩
5. 1e.
  Book Ecclesiastes, chapter 9, verse 5: “For the living know that they will die, but the dead don’t know anything, neither do they have any more a reward; for their memory is forgotten.” Verse 10: “Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might; for there is no work, nor plan, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in Sheol, where you are going.” ↩
6. 1f.
  Book Isaiah, chapter 14, verse 9: “Sheol from beneath has moved for you to meet you at your coming. It stirs up the departed spirits for you, even all the rulers of the earth. It has raised up from their thrones all the kings of the nations.” ↩
7. 1g.
  Book 1 Samuel, chapter 28, verse 13: “The king said to her, “Don’t be afraid! What do you see?” The woman said to Saul, “I see a god coming up out of the earth.”” Verse 15: “Samuel said to Saul, “Why have you disturbed me, to bring me up?” Saul answered, “I am very distressed; for the Philistines make war against me, and God has departed from me, and answers me no more, by prophets, or by dreams. Therefore I have called you, that you may make known to me what I shall do.”” Verse 19: “Moreover Yahweh will deliver Israel also with you into the hand of the Philistines; and tomorrow you and your sons will be with me. Yahweh will deliver the army of Israel also into the hand of the Philistines.”” ↩
8. 1h.
  Book Deuteronomy, chapter 18, verse 11: “or a charmer, or someone who consults with a familiar spirit, or a wizard, or a necromancer.” ↩
9. 1i.
  Book Deuteronomy, chapter 26, verse 14: “I have not eaten of it in my mourning, neither have I removed any of it while I was unclean, nor given of it for the dead. I have listened to Yahweh my God’s voice. I have done according to all that you have commanded me.” ↩
10. 1j.
  Book Isaiah, chapter 8, verse 19: “When they tell you, “Consult with those who have familiar spirits and with the wizards, who chirp and who mutter,” shouldn’t a people consult with their God? Should they consult the dead on behalf of the living?” ↩
11. 1k.
  Book 1 Samuel, chapter 2, verse 6: ““Yahweh kills and makes alive. He brings down to Sheol and brings up.” ↩
12. 1l.
  Book Deuteronomy, chapter 32, verse 39: ““See now that I myself am he. There is no god with me. I kill and I make alive. I wound and I heal. There is no one who can deliver out of my hand.” ↩
13. 1m.
  Book Psalms, chapter 16, verse 10: “For you will not leave my soul in Sheol, neither will you allow your holy one to see corruption.” ↩
14. 1n.
  Book Psalms, chapter 49, verse 15: “But God will redeem my soul from the power of Sheol, for he will receive me. Selah.” ↩
15. 1o.
  Book Psalms, chapter 73, verse 24: “You will guide me with your counsel, and afterward receive me to glory.” ↩
16. 1p.
  Book Genesis, chapter 5, verse 24: “Enoch walked with God, and he was not found, for God took him.” ↩
17. 1q.
  Book 2 Kings, chapter 2, verse 11: “As they continued on and talked, behold, a chariot of fire and horses of fire separated them; and Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven.” ↩
18. 1r.
  Book Job, chapter 14, verse 13: ““Oh that you would hide me in Sheol, that you would keep me secret until your wrath is past, that you would appoint me a set time and remember me!” Verse 14: “If a man dies, will he live again? I would wait all the days of my warfare, until my release should come.” ↩ ↩
19. 1s.
  Book Job, chapter 14, verse 12: “so man lies down and doesn’t rise. Until the heavens are no more, they will not awake, nor be roused out of their sleep.” ↩
20. 1t.
  Book Isaiah, chapter 26, verse 19: “Your dead shall live. Their dead bodies shall arise. Awake and sing, you who dwell in the dust; for your dew is like the dew of herbs, and the earth will cast out the departed spirits.” ↩
21. 1u.
  Book Ezekiel, chapter 1, verse 2: “In the fifth of the month, which was the fifth year of King Jehoiachin’s captivity,”. Chapter 29, verse 17: “It came to pass in the twenty-seventh year, in the first month, in the first day of the month, Yahweh’s word came to me, saying,”. ↩
22. 1v.
  Book Ezekiel, chapter 37, verse 11: “Then he said to me, “Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel. Behold, they say, ‘Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost. We are completely cut off.’” Verse 12: “Therefore prophesy, and tell them, ‘The Lord Yahweh says: “Behold, I will open your graves, and cause you to come up out of your graves, my people; and I will bring you into the land of Israel.” ↩
23. 1w.
  Book Isaiah, chapter 66, verse 24: “They will go out, and look at the dead bodies of the men who have transgressed against me; for their worm will not die, nor will their fire be quenched, and they will be loathsome to all mankind.” ↩
24. 1x.
  Book Daniel, chapter 12, verse 3: “Those who are wise will shine as the brightness of the expanse. Those who turn many to righteousness will shine as the stars forever and ever.” ↩
25. 1y.
  Book Isaiah, chapter 52, verse 13: “Behold, my servant will deal wisely. He will be exalted and lifted up, and will be very high.” Chapter 53, verse 11: “After the suffering of his soul, he will see the light and be satisfied. My righteous servant will justify many by the knowledge of himself; and he will bear their iniquities.” ↩
26. 1z.
  Book Daniel, chapter 12, verse 2: “Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth will awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.” ↩
27. 1aa.
  Book 2 Maccabees, chapter 7, verse 9: “When he was at the last gasp, he said, “You, miscreant, release us out of this present life, but the King of the world will raise us who have died for his laws up to an everlasting renewal of life.”” Verse 11: “and nobly said, “I got these from heaven. For his laws’ sake I treat these with contempt. From him, I hope to receive these back again.”” Verse 14: “Being near to death he said this: “It is good to die at the hands of men and look for the hope which is given by God, that we will be raised up again by him. For as for you, you will have no resurrection to life.”” ↩
28. 1ab.
  Book Acts, chapter 23, verse 8: “For the Sadducees say that there is no resurrection, nor angel, nor spirit; but the Pharisees confess all of these.” ↩
29. 1ac.
  Book Mark, chapter 12, verse 18: “Some Sadducees, who say that there is no resurrection, came to him. They asked him, saying,”. Verse 26: “But about the dead, that they are raised, haven’t you read in the book of Moses about the Bush, how God spoke to him, saying, ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’?” Verse 27: “He is not the God of the dead, but of the living. You are therefore badly mistaken.”” ↩
30. 1ad.
  Book Genesis, chapter 3, verse 24: “So he drove out the man; and he placed cherubim at the east of the garden of Eden, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to guard the way to the tree of life.” ↩
31. 1ae.
  Book Genesis, chapter 28, verse 12: “He dreamed and saw a stairway set upon the earth, and its top reached to heaven. Behold, the angels of God were ascending and descending on it.” ↩
32. 1af.
  Book Joshua, chapter 5, verse 14: “He said, “No; but I have come now as commander of Yahweh’s army.” Joshua fell on his face to the earth, and worshiped, and asked him, “What does my lord say to his servant?”” ↩
33. 1ag.
  Book Isaiah, chapter 6, verse 2: “Above him stood the seraphim. Each one had six wings. With two he covered his face. With two he covered his feet. With two he flew.” Verse 6: “Then one of the seraphim flew to me, having a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with the tongs from off the altar.” ↩
34. 1ah.
  Book 1 Samuel, chapter 16, verse 14: “Now Yahweh’s Spirit departed from Saul, and an evil spirit from Yahweh troubled him.” ↩
35. 1ai.
  Book 1 Kings, chapter 22, verse 21: “A spirit came out and stood before Yahweh, and said, ‘I will entice him.’” Verse 22: “Yahweh said to him, ‘How?’ He said, ‘I will go out and will be a lying spirit in the mouth of all his prophets.’ He said, ‘You will entice him, and will also prevail. Go out and do so.’” ↩
36. 1aj.
  Book Deuteronomy, chapter 32, verse 17: “They sacrificed to demons, not God, to gods that they didn’t know, to new gods that came up recently, which your fathers didn’t dread.” ↩
37. 1ak.
  Book Leviticus, chapter 17, verse 7: “They shall no more sacrifice their sacrifices to the goat idols, after which they play the prostitute. This shall be a statute forever to them throughout their generations.’” ↩
38. 1al.
  Book Leviticus, chapter 16, verse 8: “Aaron shall cast lots for the two goats: one lot for Yahweh, and the other lot for the scapegoat.” ↩
39. 1am.
  Book Isaiah, chapter 34, verse 14: “The wild animals of the desert will meet with the wolves, and the wild goat will cry to his fellow. Yes, the night creature shall settle there, and shall find herself a place of rest.” ↩
40. 1an.
  Book Habakkuk, chapter 3, verse 5: “Plague went before him, and pestilence followed his feet.” ↩
41. 1ao.
  Book Judges, chapter 13, verse 18: “Yahweh’s angel said to him, “Why do you ask about my name, since it is incomprehensible?”” ↩
42. 1ap.
  Book Daniel, chapter 10, verse 13: “But the prince of the kingdom of Persia withstood me twenty-one days; but, behold, Michael, one of the chief princes, came to help me because I remained there with the kings of Persia.” Verse 20: “Then he said, “Do you know why I have come to you? Now I will return to fight with the prince of Persia. When I go out, behold, the prince of Greece will come.” Verse 21: “But I will tell you that which is inscribed in the writing of truth. There is no one who holds with me against these but Michael your prince.” ↩
43. 1aq.
  Book Tobit, chapter 3, verse 8: “because that she had been given to seven husbands, and Asmodaeus the evil spirit killed them, before they had lain with her. And they said to her, “Do you not know that you strangle your husbands? You have had already seven husbands, and you haven’t borne the name of any one of them.” Chapter 12, verse 15: “I am Raphael, one of the seven holy angels which present the prayers of the saints and go in before the glory of the Holy One.”” ↩
44. 1ar.
  Book 1 Samuel, chapter 29, verse 4: “But the princes of the Philistines were angry with him; and the princes of the Philistines said to him, “Make the man return, that he may go back to his place where you have appointed him, and let him not go down with us to battle, lest in the battle he become an adversary to us. For with what should this fellow reconcile himself to his lord? Should it not be with the heads of these men?” ↩
45. 1as.
  Book 1 Kings, chapter 11, verse 14: “Yahweh raised up an adversary to Solomon: Hadad the Edomite. He was one of the king’s offspring in Edom.” Verse 23: “God raised up an adversary to him, Rezon the son of Eliada, who had fled from his lord, Hadadezer king of Zobah.” ↩
46. 1at.
  Book Numbers, chapter 22, verse 22: “God’s anger burned because he went; and Yahweh’s angel placed himself in the way as an adversary against him. Now he was riding on his donkey, and his two servants were with him.” ↩
47. 1au.
  Book Job, chapter 1, verse 6: “Now on the day when God’s sons came to present themselves before Yahweh, Satan also came among them.” Verse 12: “Yahweh said to Satan, “Behold, all that he has is in your power. Only on himself don’t stretch out your hand.” So Satan went out from the presence of Yahweh.” ↩ ↩
48. 1av.
  Book Zechariah, chapter 3, verse 1: “He showed me Joshua the high priest standing before Yahweh’s angel, and Satan standing at his right hand to be his adversary.” Verse 2: “Yahweh said to Satan, “Yahweh rebuke you, Satan! Yes, Yahweh who has chosen Jerusalem rebuke you! Isn’t this a burning stick plucked out of the fire?”” ↩
49. 1aw.
  Book 2 Samuel, chapter 24, verse 1: “Again Yahweh’s anger burned against Israel, and he moved David against them, saying, “Go, count Israel and Judah.”” ↩ ↩
50. 1ax.
  Book 1 Chronicles, chapter 21, verse 1: “Satan stood up against Israel, and moved David to take a census of Israel.” ↩ ↩
51. 1ay.
  Book Genesis, chapter 3, verse 1: “Now the serpent was more subtle than any animal of the field which Yahweh God had made. He said to the woman, “Has God really said, ‘You shall not eat of any tree of the garden’?”” Verse 14: “Yahweh God said to the serpent, “Because you have done this, you are cursed above all livestock, and above every animal of the field. You shall go on your belly and you shall eat dust all the days of your life.” ↩
52. 1az.
  Book Wisdom of Solomon, chapter 2, verse 24: “but death entered into the world by the envy of the devil, and those who belong to him experience it.” ↩
53. 1ba.
  Book Revelation, chapter 12, verse 9: “The great dragon was thrown down, the old serpent, he who is called the devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world. He was thrown down to the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him.” ↩
54. 1bb.
  Book Genesis, chapter 3, verse 15: “I will put hostility between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring. He will bruise your head, and you will bruise his heel.”” ↩
55. 1bc.
  Book Isaiah, chapter 45, verse 7: “I form the light and create darkness. I make peace and create calamity. I am Yahweh, who does all these things.” ↩
56. 1bd.
  Book Hebrews, chapter 1, verse 1: “God, having in the past spoken to the fathers through the prophets at many times and in various ways,”. Verse 2: “has at the end of these days spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom also he made the worlds.” ↩
57. 1be.
  Book 2 Timothy, chapter 1, verse 10: “but has now been revealed by the appearing of our Savior, Christ Jesus, who abolished death, and brought life and immortality to light through the Good News.” ↩ ↩ ↩
58. 1bf.
  Book 1 Peter, chapter 1, verse 10: “Concerning this salvation, the prophets sought and searched diligently. They prophesied of the grace that would come to you,”. ↩
59. 1bg.
  Book Matthew, chapter 13, verse 17: “For most certainly I tell you that many prophets and righteous men desired to see the things which you see, and didn’t see them; and to hear the things which you hear, and didn’t hear them.” ↩
60. 1bh.
  Book Job, chapter 42, verse 3: “You asked, ‘Who is this who hides counsel without knowledge?’ therefore I have uttered that which I didn’t understand, things too wonderful for me, which I didn’t know.” ↩ ↩
61. 1bi.
  Book Ecclesiastes, chapter 1, verse 3: “What does man gain from all his labor in which he labors under the sun?” ↩
2.
Counted with the article's script research/lexical-counts.ts over the Westminster Leningrad Codex as tagged with Strong's numbers by the Open Scriptures Hebrew Bible (morphhb). Sheol (Strong's 7585) occurs 66 times in 64 verses. Rephaim in the sense "shades of the dead" (7496) occurs 8 times: Isaiah 14:9, 26:14, 26:19; Job 26:5; Proverbs 2:18, 9:18, 21:16; Psalm 88:10. The output is in research/lexical-counts.out. ↩ ↩
3.
Johnston, Philip S. Shades of Sheol: Death and Afterlife in the Old Testament. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press. 2002. A full study of death and the dead in the Old Testament by an evangelical Old Testament scholar. It counts and sorts every reference to Sheol, reviews the burial archaeology and the cult-of-the-dead debate, and finds only a faint hope beyond death before Daniel. Its conservatism makes its minimal reading of Sheol hard to dismiss as hostile.
1. 3a.
  Page 72: “about one hundred references to the underworld”. Page 73: “the Hebrew Bible never indicates any form of punishment after death”. Page 85: “an infrequent theme and an unwelcome fate”. ↩ ↩
2. 3b.
  Page 84: “Most importantly, the psalmist asserts his own redemption from Sheol (v. 16), clearly distinguishing himself from those for whom there is no such redemption.” Johnston's verse number is the Hebrew one; it is Psalm 49:15 in English. ↩
3. 3c.
  Page 168: “hypothetical reconstruction without any textual evidence is hazardous”. ↩
4. 3d.
  Page 238: “If, then, the influence of other faiths was secondary, what were the primary factors in the emergence of Israelite belief in resurrection? Put simply, it was Israel's God and Israel's experience.” “Various psalmists and other writers recoil from the thought of Sheol, but a few express a real if imprecise hope of some form of continued communion with God beyond death.” ↩
4.
Segal, Alan F. Life After Death: A History of the Afterlife in the Religions of the West. New York: Doubleday. 2004. A survey of afterlife beliefs from Mesopotamia and Egypt to Judaism, Christianity and Islam by a Jewish historian of religion at Barnard College. It is the standard statement of the developmental view: Sheol is morally neutral, resurrection becomes literal only in Daniel, and Persian and Greek ideas shaped the change.
1. 4a.
  Page 136: “And, like the Greek Hades, it was neither a place of reward nor of punishment inherently, merely the final destination where the dead go.” ↩
2. 4b.
  Page 261: “Metaphorical here, resurrection becomes absolutely literal in Daniel 12.” ↩
5.
Bloch-Smith, Elizabeth. “Judahite Burial Practices and Beliefs about the Dead.” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series 123. Sheffield: JSOT Press. 1992. A catalogue and analysis of Iron Age burials in Judah and the surrounding region, read against the biblical texts on the dead. The author argues that Judahites fed and consulted their dead and that the biblical bans reflect a later policy of the Jerusalem authorities; that last step is disputed.
1. 5a.
  Page 23: “proliferation of the bench tomb, the definitive Judahite form of burial by the eighth century BCE, began in the tenth century BCE.” Page 44: “As will be argued below, Judahites believed in life after death.” Page 49: “Lamps, bowls and jugs were the most common ceramic forms”. ↩
6.
Waaler, Erik. “A Revised Date for Pentateuchal Texts? Evidence from Ketef Hinnom.” Tyndale Bulletin 53(1):29-55. 2002. A reassessment of the date of the two silver amulets from a Ketef Hinnom tomb that carry the priestly blessing, using the tomb's pottery and the wear on the amulets. It argues for an earlier date than the excavator's.
1. 6a.
  Page 31, note 14, quoting Barkay: “It is unlikely that burial caves continued to be cut into the rock by wealthy families after the Babylonian conquest, therefore our caves must have been hewn and used before that date”. Page 32: “If this was the case, the amulets could have been made in the first half of the seventh century (700-650 BC).” ↩
7.
Lewis, Theodore J. “Cults of the Dead in Ancient Israel and Ugarit.” Harvard Semitic Monographs 39. 1989. A study of the Ugaritic and biblical evidence for rites directed to the dead. Lewis argues for a real Israelite cult of the dead that normative Yahwism opposed, and concedes that much of the case is inferred from the laws against it.
1. 7a.
  Page 120: “Once again we are left with a strong circumstantial case that the tradition concerning Absalom's monument may reflect a cult of the dead in ancient Israel.” ↩
8.
Schmidt, Brian B. “Israel's Beneficent Dead: The Origin and Character of Israelite Ancestor Cults and Necromancy.” DPhil thesis, University of Oxford. 1992. The Oxford doctoral thesis behind Schmidt's book of the same main title. It re-examines the Syrian, Ugaritic and biblical evidence and argues that Israelite ancestor cult and necromancy were not ancient West Semitic inheritances but late developments under Mesopotamian influence.
1. 8a.
  Page 401: “the widely accepted notion that ancestor cults and necromancy comprised West Semitic indigenous practices spanning some two millennia and that they were embraced in both the domestic and royal societal domains is unfounded.” ↩
9.
From the Hebrew text tagged with Strong's numbers (see the Sheol note): Psalm 49:16 (Hebrew numbering; 49:15 in English) ki yiqqacheni, "for he will take me"; Psalm 73:24 ve-achar kavod tiqqacheni, "and afterward take me to glory"; Genesis 5:24 ki laqach oto Elohim, "for God took him"; 2 Kings 2:10 luqqach, Elijah "taken". All four use the verb laqach (Strong's 3947). ↩
10.
Levenson, Jon D. Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel: The Ultimate Victory of the God of Life. New Haven: Yale University Press. 2006. A study by a Harvard scholar of the Hebrew Bible arguing that resurrection grew from roots deep in Israel's own scriptures: Sheol as the fate of those who die unfulfilled, God as the one who restores life, and the promise of a restored people. It is the strongest scholarly case for the maximal reading.
1. 10a.
  Page 73: “he is therefore not asserting the absurd notion that God will forever spare him from death. Rather, Rosenberg argues, he is expressing his faith that, 'You [God] will not let your faithful servant die an untimely, evil death.'” On Psalm 16:10. Levenson adopts Rosenberg's reading. ↩
2. 10b.
  Page 78: “In sum, the biblical Sheol is the prolongation of the unfulfilled life. There is no equivalent prolongation of the fulfilled life precisely because it is fulfilled.” ↩
3. 10c.
  Page 200: “Whether in the vision of national restoration in Ezekiel 37, the ambiguous revival of the dead in Isaiah 26, or the clear prediction of resurrection with judgment in Daniel 12, resurrection does not simply vindicate the justice of God. It also fulfills the promise to Israel of the God of life.” ↩
11.
Oswalt, John N. “The Book of Isaiah, Chapters 1-39.” New International Commentary on the Old Testament. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. 1986. A conservative evangelical commentary that defends Isaiah's authorship. It reports the range of dates proposed for Isaiah 24-27 and names the reason the late dates were chosen.
1. 11a.
  Page 441: “Ultimately, it is the theology, especially the references to resurrection (25:8; 26:19), that have caused many to opt for a date later than the seventh century.” “the attempt to date materials on the basis of theology is extremely tenuous and often betrays a distinctly circular flavor.” ↩ ↩
12.
Milik, J. T. The Books of Enoch: Aramaic Fragments of Qumrân Cave 4. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1976. The first edition of the Aramaic Enoch manuscripts from Qumran, with dates for each copy from its handwriting.
1. 12a.
  Page 5: “The dates of the 4QEn manuscripts are spread over the second and first centuries B.C.” ↩
13.
Nickelsburg, George W. E. Resurrection, Immortality, and Eternal Life in Intertestamental Judaism and Early Christianity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. expanded edition. 2006. The classic study of Jewish resurrection texts, first published in 1972. In the new introduction the author, now the leading commentator on 1 Enoch, corrects his own chronology: the Book of the Watchers is older than Daniel.
1. 13a.
  Page 5: “As I should have known at the time, the Enochic Book of the Watchers (1 Enoch 1-36), which I would treat in chapter 5, antedates the Book of Daniel.” ↩ ↩
2. 13b.
  Page 5: “Much later, my work on 1 Enoch led me to conclude that Dan 12:2 probably reflects the interpretation of Isaiah 65–66 in 1 Enoch 24:2–27:5. This conclusion upsets the chronological aspect of my typology according to which belief in resurrection grew out of the circumstances of the Antiochan persecution”. ↩
14.
Collins, John J. “Daniel: A Commentary on the Book of Daniel.” Hermeneia. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. 1993. The standard critical commentary on Daniel, by a leading scholar of Jewish apocalyptic. It dates the book to the 160s BC and includes an excursus on the origins of resurrection belief that weighs foreign influence against Israelite roots.
1. 14a.
  Pages 391-392: “there is virtually unanimous agreement among modern scholars that Daniel is referring to the actual resurrection of individuals from the dead, because of the explicit language of everlasting life. This is, in fact, the only generally accepted reference to resurrection in the Hebrew Bible.” ↩ ↩
2. 14b.
  Page 392: “The language echoes Isa 26:19”. ↩
3. 14c.
  Page 392: “does not address the form of the resurrection (contrast the explicit emphasis on the body in 2 Maccabees 7”. ↩
4. 14d.
  Page 392: “The language of sleeping and awaking is used elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible for death and resurrection (Jer 51:39, 57; Job 14:12; the possibility of resurrection is denied in each case).” ↩
5. 14e.
  Page 396: “Because several of Israel’s neighbors had well-developed doctrines of the afterlife for many centuries before the Jews, it is reasonable to suppose that foreign influence played a part.” “Resurrection was an integral part of Zoroastrianism, attested in the Avesta and also by the Greek writer Theopompus.” “Although Persian influence on the Jewish belief was accepted as obvious by an earlier generation of scholars, the popularity of this view has waned considerably. There is no evidence of Persian motifs in such crucial Jewish passages as Daniel 12 and I Enoch 22. At most, the metaphorical use of resurrection for the restoration of the Jewish nation after the Exile (Ezekiel 37; Isaiah 26) may have been prompted indirectly by acquaintance with the Persian belief.” ↩ ↩
15.
The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament in English, vol. 1: Apocrypha. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Edited by R. H. Charles. 1913. The standard English edition of its day, with introductions by specialists; James Moffatt introduces and translates 2 Maccabees.
1. 15a.
  Page 128: “Jason’s work may be dated, therefore, roughly after 130 B. C.; the epitome probably falls not later than the first half of the first century B.C.” ↩
16.
The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament in English, vol. 2: Pseudepigrapha. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Edited by R. H. Charles. 1913. The companion volume of Pseudepigrapha; G. Buchanan Gray introduces and translates the Psalms of Solomon.
1. 16a.
  Page 625: “THE Psalms of Solomon are a collection of eighteen Psalms which were written, according to the theory (see below) now generally accepted, in the middle of the first century B.C.” Page 634, verse Psalms of Solomon 3:12: “But they that fear the Lord shall rise to life eternal”. ↩
17.
Puech, Émile. “Qumrân Grotte 4 XVIII: Textes hébreux (4Q521-4Q528, 4Q576-4Q579).” Discoveries in the Judaean Desert 25. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1998. The official edition of 4Q521, the Qumran poem that has God "revive the dead", with its date from the handwriting.
1. 17a.
  Page 5: “dans le premier quart du 1er siècle, entre 100 et 80”. The handwriting of the copy, "in the first quarter of the first century [BC], between 100 and 80". Puech adds that the manuscript is a copy, not the original, so the poem itself is older. ↩
18.
Cohen, Shaye J. D. From the Maccabees to the Mishnah. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press. 3rd edition. 2014. A standard textbook history of Judaism from the Maccabean revolt to the Mishnah by a Harvard historian.
1. 18a.
  Page 212: “The Mishnah (“repetition” or “teaching”) is the first rabbinic book, written in Hebrew and edited around 200 CE.” “widely assumed to have been Rabbi Judah the Patriarch”. ↩
19.
Charles, R. H. The Book of Enoch or 1 Enoch. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 2nd edition. 1912. The classic English translation of 1 Enoch from the Ethiopic, with an introduction on each section's teaching. His early date for the Similitudes (chapters 37-71) is now a minority view; no copy of them was found at Qumran.
1. 19a.
  Page 47, verse 1 Enoch 22:3-4: “These hollow places have been created for this very purpose, that the spirits of the souls of the dead should assemble therein, yea that all the souls of the children of men should assemble here”. “And these places have been made to receive them till the day of their judgement”. Page 49, verse 1 Enoch 22:13: “but their spirits shall not be slain in the day of judgement nor shall they be raised from thence.” ↩
2. 19b.
  Page cv, Introduction: “form the highest order”. “the spirits which went forth from the souls of the giants, who were the children of the fallen angels and the daughters of men.” Of the seven archangels named in 1 Enoch 20; the demons are those of 1 Enoch 15-16. ↩
3. 19c.
  Page 137, verse 1 Enoch 69:6: “And the third was named Gadreél: he it is who showed the children of men all the blows of death, and he led astray Eve”. “Gadreél is evidently a Satan as he led astray Eve.” Page cv, Introduction: “who appear to belong to a counter kingdom of evil ruled by a chief called Satan”. Charles on the Satans of the Similitudes, 1 Enoch 40:7 and 53:3. ↩ ↩
20.
From the Hebrew text tagged with Strong's numbers (see the Sheol note). Daniel 12:2 reads ve-rabbim mi-yeshenei admat 'afar yakitsu; Isaiah 26:19 reads hakitsu ve-rannenu shokhnei 'afar. The verb "awake" (qyts, 6974) and the noun "dust" ('afar, 6083) stand in the same verse only in these two places, by the script's check of every verse. Daniel 12:2 ends le-dir'on 'olam, "to everlasting abhorrence"; the noun (1860) occurs elsewhere only in Isaiah 66:24, ve-hayu dera'on le-khol basar. Daniel 12:3's ha-maskilim ("the wise") and matsdiqei ha-rabbim ("who make the many righteous") match Isaiah 52:13 yaskil 'avdi ("my servant shall act wisely") and Isaiah 53:11 yatsdiq tsaddiq 'avdi la-rabbim ("my righteous servant shall make the many righteous"). ↩
21.
Josephus, Flavius. The Wars of the Jews. Translated by William Whiston. 1737. The Jewish War, written in the 70s AD by a Jewish priest and general; its account of the three Jewish schools is the main non-Christian description of the Pharisees and Sadducees.
1. 21a.
  Book 2, chapter 8, section 14: “They say that all souls are incorruptible, but that the souls of good men only are removed into other bodies,--but that the souls of bad men are subject to eternal punishment.” “They also take away the belief of the immortal duration of the soul, and the punishments and rewards in Hades.” Whiston's numbering; War 2.162-166 in the standard numbering. ↩
22.
Mason, Steve. “Flavius Josephus on the Pharisees: A Composition-Critical Study.” Studia Post-Biblica 39. Leiden: Brill. 1991. A close study of every passage in which Josephus describes the Pharisees, reading each in the setting of his own writing.
1. 22a.
  Page 169: “It would appear, then, that at a time when many different views of the afterlife were circulating in the Greco-Roman world, Josephus added to the list a Jewish theory of resurrection by appropriating for it the language of reincarnation.” ↩ ↩
23.
Grossberg, David M. “Is there a Doctrine of Heresy in Rabbinic Literature?” TheGemara.com. 2018. A short essay drawn from the author's book on heresy in early rabbinic literature (Mohr Siebeck, 2017), reading Mishnah Sanhedrin 10:1 against its manuscripts and parallels.
1. 23a.
  “Printed editions of the Mishnah often read, אין תחיית המתים מן התורה, “There is no resurrection of the dead from the Torah. ” Early manuscripts do not include this phrase.” Grossberg's note on the text, which he cites from MS Kaufmann. ↩
24.
Sefaria. Isaiah 26:19, 66:24, Daniel 12:1-3, Ezekiel 37, Hosea 6:2 and 13:14, and Mishnah Sanhedrin 10:1, Hebrew and English. 2026. The Mishnah text in Hebrew with the William Davidson English translation.
1. 24a.
  Book Mishnah Sanhedrin, chapter 10, verse 1: “And these are the exceptions, the people who have no share in the World-to-Come, even when they fulfilled many mitzvot: One who says: There is no resurrection of the dead derived from the Torah”. ↩
25.
Sefaria. Jerusalem Talmud Rosh Hashanah 1:2 and Genesis Rabbah 48:9, Hebrew and English. 2026. Two rabbinic texts, from the third to fifth centuries AD, recording Resh Lakish's saying that the names of the angels came up from Babylon. The Yerushalmi is in Heinrich Guggenheimer's translation.
1. 25a.
  Book Jerusalem Talmud Rosh Hashanah, chapter 1, verse 2: “Rebbi Simeon ben Laqish said, also the names of angels were in their hands from Babylonia. Originally, there flew to me one of the Seraphim; Seraphim standing over Him. From then on, but the man Gabriel; but your lord Michael.” ↩
2. 25b.
  Book Genesis Rabbah, chapter 48, verse 9: “Rabbi Ḥanina said: The names of the months ascended from Babylon. Reish Lakish said: The names of the angels, Mikhael, Refael, and Gavriel, as well.” ↩ ↩
26.
Counted with research/lexical-counts.ts (see the Sheol note). The noun satan (Strong's 7854) occurs 27 times in 23 verses. Seventeen carry the article, ha-satan: fourteen in Job 1-2 and three in Zechariah 3:1-2. Ten lack it: Numbers 22:22 and 22:32 (the angel of the LORD); 1 Samuel 29:4 (David); 2 Samuel 19:22 (Abishai); 1 Kings 5:4, 11:14, 11:23 and 11:25 (enemies of Solomon); Psalm 109:6 (an accuser at a trial); and 1 Chronicles 21:1. English verse numbers are given; the Hebrew numbering of 2 Samuel 19 and 1 Kings 5 is one higher. ↩ ↩
27.
Charles, R. H. The Book of Jubilees, or the Little Genesis. London: Adam and Charles Black. 1902. The classic English translation of Jubilees, a retelling of Genesis and early Exodus from the second century BC, with Charles's notes. The notes track where Jubilees moves to the evil prince Mastema an act the older text gives to God.
1. 27a.
  Pages 80-81, verses Jubilees 10:8-9, 11: “And the chief of the spirits, Mastêmâ, came and said: “ Lord, Creator, let some of them remain before me, and let them hearken to my voice, and do all that I shall say unto them”. “And He said: “ Let the tenth part of them remain before him, and let nine parts descend into the place of condemnation.”” “and a tenth part of them we left that they might be subject before Satan on the earth.” ↩
2. 27b.
  Page 80, note on 10:8: “As a common noun it is found twice in Hos. ix. 7, 8 in the sense of “enmity.”” ↩
3. 27c.
  Pages 120-121, verse Jubilees 17:16: “And the prince Mastêmâ came and said before God, “ Behold, Abraham loves Isaac his son, and he delights in him above all things else; bid him offer him as a burnt-offering on the altar”. ↩
4. 27d.
  Page 120, note on 17:16: “Here as elsewhere (cf. xlviii. 2, 17) our author attributes to Mastêmâ the conduct which he deems unworthy of God but which is ascribed to Him by Gen. xxii. 1.” ↩
5. 27e.
  Page 250, verse Jubilees 48:2-3: “what prince Mastêmâ desired to do with thee when thou wast returning into Egypt on the way when thou didst meet him at the lodging-place. 3. Did he not with all his power seek to slay thee”. Page 252, note on 48:17: “Here again our author attributes to the immediate agency of Mastêmâ the action which Exod. xiv. 8 assigns to Yahweh.” ↩
28.
Vermes, Geza. The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English. New York: Allen Lane/Penguin Press. 1998. The most widely used one-volume English translation of the non-biblical Dead Sea Scrolls, by an Oxford scholar who worked on them from the 1950s.
1. 28a.
  Page 101, Community Rule, 1QS III 17-21: “He has created man to govern the world, and has appointed for him two spirits in which to walk until the time of His visitation: the spirits of truth and injustice.” “All the children of righteousness are ruled by the Prince of Light and walk in the ways of light, but all the children of injustice are ruled by the Angel of Darkness and walk in the ways of darkness.” ↩
2. 28b.
  Page 101, Community Rule, 1QS III 24-25: “But the God of Israel and His Angel of Truth will succour all the sons of light. For it is He who created the spirits of Light and Darkness and founded every action upon them”. ↩ ↩
3. 28c.
  Page 177, War Scroll, 1QM XIII 10-12: “But Belial, the Angel of Malevolence, Thou hast created for the Pit; his [rule] is in Darkness and his purpose is to bring about wickedness and iniquity.” "Angel of Malevolence" renders the Hebrew mal'akh mastemah, the word from which Jubilees names Mastema. ↩
29.
Day, Peggy L. “An Adversary in Heaven: śāṭān in the Hebrew Bible.” Harvard Semitic Monographs 43. Atlanta: Scholars Press. 1988. A study of every use of satan in the Hebrew Bible. Day argues that the word names a role, adversary or legal accuser, and that the Hebrew Bible has no single figure called Satan.
1. 29a.
  Page 5: “this study differs from previous studies in that it sees no Satan in the Hebrew Bible.” Page 149: “as a proper name, but rather employs it as an indefinite common noun”. Of 1 Chronicles 21:1. Page 42: “professional accusers”. Day finds no evidence that "professional accusers" existed in the early Persian administration. ↩
30.
Pagels, Elaine. The Origin of Satan. New York: Random House. 1995. A history by a Princeton scholar of early Christianity of how Satan became the enemy figure of Jewish sects and the Gospels, and of how that figure was turned against opponents. It does not discuss Zoroastrianism.
1. 30a.
  Page 42: “Here the satan terrifies and harms a person but, like the angel of death, remains an angel, a member of the heavenly court, God's obedient servant.” Page 44: “his role begins to change from that of God's agent to that of his opponent”. Page 179: “This split cosmology, radically revising earlier monotheism”. ↩
31.
Kelly, Henry Ansgar. Satan: A Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2006. A history of the figure of Satan from the Hebrew Bible to the church fathers by a UCLA scholar of medieval literature and religion. Kelly argues that the biblical Satan is God's accuser and that the fallen-rebel Satan is a later reading, and he weighs and sets aside Persian influence.
1. 31a.
  Page 5: “However, the idea of Zoroastrian influence on the evolution of Satan is in limited favor among scholars today, not least because the satan figure is always subordinate to God in Hebrew and Christian representations, and Angra Mainyu does not function as an accuser or prosecutor. Moreover, the literary sources for Persian dualism are late. Of course, influence from this direction cannot be totally discounted”. ↩
32.
Hamilton, Victor P. “Satan.” David Noel Freedman (ed.), The Anchor Bible Dictionary, vol. 5, 985-989. New York: Doubleday. 1992. The standard reference dictionary's article on Satan, by an evangelical Old Testament scholar, covering every Hebrew use of the word and its later development.
1. 32a.
  Page 987: “Setting aside 1 Chr 21:1 and Ps 109:6, one observes that the earliest evidence for satan as a personal name appears in Jub. 23:29 and Assum. Mos. 10:1, both of which date to the period of the pogroms of Antiochus IV against Jews in Palestine (ca. 168 B.C.).” ↩
2. 32b.
  Page 988: “More than likely, exposure to Persian religion and its Zoroastrian-based dualism provided some of the stimulus for the more pervasive demonology in these Jewish writings.” “The evidence is slim to nonexistent. Books of the OT that would be expected to show most awareness of Persian religion—Nehemiah, for example—are conspicuously silent about it.” ↩
33.
Page, Sydney H. T. Powers of Evil: A Biblical Study of Satan and Demons. Grand Rapids: Baker. 1995. A conservative evangelical study of what the Old and New Testaments say about Satan and demons, text by text. It concedes that the Old Testament's Satan is undeveloped and argues for continuity rather than borrowing.
1. 33a.
  Page 11: “It appears that the concept of Satan was not well developed in the Old Testament period”. Page 28: “There is no metaphysical dualism here. Unmistakably, Satan is subject to Yahweh's will.” ↩
2. 33b.
  Page 15: “In all probability, these verses from the Wisdom of Solomon represent the earliest example of the identification of the serpent with Satan that has survived.” Page 16: “Thus, it is highly unlikely that the author of Genesis 3 thought that the serpent was an instrument of Satan.” ↩
34.
Heiser, Michael S. The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible. Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press. 2015. A popular study by an evangelical Hebrew Bible scholar that reads the Old Testament's divine council, the serpent and the sons of God as real supernatural beings.
1. 34a.
  Page 57: “The satan in Job 1-2 is not a villain. He's doing the job assigned to him by God.” ↩
2. 34b.
  Page 82: “Since we know that we are not dealing with a mere animal in Genesis 3, but rather a divine being that is cast as creaturely, the description that this figure in the garden was an 'anointed guardian cherub' makes sense.” ↩
35.
Josephus, Flavius. Antiquities of the Jews. Translated by William Whiston. 1737. Josephus's history of the Jews from creation to the war with Rome, finished in AD 93-94. Its retelling of Genesis 3 shows how a first-century Jewish writer read the serpent.
1. 35a.
  Book 1, chapter 1, section 4: “the serpent, which then lived together with Adam and his wife, shewed an envious disposition, at his supposal of their living happily”. “He also deprived the serpent of speech, out of indignation at his malicious disposition towards Adam.” ↩
36.
Shaked, Shaul. “Eschatology i. In Zoroastrianism and Zoroastrian Influence.” Encyclopaedia Iranica 8. 1998. The encyclopedia's survey of Zoroastrian end-time beliefs, layer by layer, by a leading Iranist of the Hebrew University. It closes with the case for Persian influence on Judaism and states that case's chief difficulty.
1. 36a.
  Section Eschatology in the Gāθās: “It is not quite clear whether the idea of resurrection is already expressed in the Gāθās.” ↩
2. 36b.
  Section Zoroastrian influence: “There was no doctrine of Jewish eschatology up to the end of the Old Testament period—neither individual judgment nor universal judgment.” “All these appear rather abruptly in Jewish writings that were composed during the last two centuries B.C.E.” “that displays such great resemblance to the complex of Persian ideas, cannot be a coincidence and must be explained as a result of contact between the two cultures.” “The strong dualistic character of Jewish eschatology seems also to suggest the likelihood of a borrowing from Iran.” ↩
3. 36c.
  Section Zoroastrian influence: “The basic problem about proving it lies in the fact that, as we have seen above, the main ideas of Zoroastrian eschatology are only known to us in their fully developed form from the Pahlavi sources, and these are much more recent than the earliest Jewish writings which contain eschatological ideas.” ↩
37.
Boyce, Mary. Zoroastrians: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. 1979. A history of Zoroastrianism from its origins to modern times by the leading British historian of the religion. It is the clearest statement of the strong-influence view, with an early date for Zoroaster that most Iranists now reject.
1. 37a.
  Page 1: “has probably had more influence on mankind, directly and indirectly, than any other single faith”. Page 18: “It is only possible therefore to hazard a reasoned conjecture that Zoroaster lived some time between 1700 and 1500 B.C.” Page 29: “Zoroaster was thus the first to teach the doctrines of an individual judgment, Heaven and Hell, the future resurrection of the body, the general Last Judgment, and life everlasting for the reunited soul and body.” ↩
38.
Boyce, Mary. “A History of Zoroastrianism, vol. 2: Under the Achaemenians.” Handbuch der Orientalistik. Leiden: Brill. 1982. The second volume of Boyce's standard history, on Zoroastrianism under the Persian kings and its contacts with the Jews. It is the fullest case for early and deep Zoroastrian influence on Judaism, and it concedes that Second Isaiah rejected Persian dualism.
1. 38a.
  Page 195: “A demonology also steadily evolved, until in the Jewish apocalyptic literature of the Parthian period Satan is conceived, like Anra Mainyu, as a cosmic force, an essentially evil being who leads his wicked hordes to trouble mankind.” “thus came in time to influence Judaism deeply.” ↩
2. 38b.
  Page 46: “the demand in Y 44.5.1-3: ‘What craftsman made light and darkness?’ is matched by Is, 45.7”. Page 195: “Zoroastrian dualism, consciously rejected, it seems, by Second Isaiah”. The OCR prints "Is," for "Is." and drops the opening quotation mark before "I am Yahweh". ↩
39.
Shaked, Shaul. “Iranian Influence on Judaism: First Century B.C.E. to Second Century C.E.” W. D. Davies and Louis Finkelstein (eds.), The Cambridge History of Judaism, vol. 1: Introduction; The Persian Period, 308-325. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1984. The Cambridge History's chapter on the question, by the same Iranist. It sets out a method for proving influence and applies it to dualism, angels, demons and eschatology, conceding Iranian shaping on some points and Jewish roots on others.
1. 39a.
  Page 316: “The similarity in structure, on the other hand, does not by itself require the assumption of influence. Unless one can show definite correspondence in details which would be unlikely to develop in the two cultures on their own”. Page 323: “It can however be shown that certain eschatological themes were partly available in biblical verses which could be developed in an eschatological sense; and thus the process must have been one by which an existing tradition was adapted to express a new mood, rather than an alien tradition arbitrarily grafted.” “The idea of a general resurrection of the whole of mankind, in which all people will be put to judgement in their physical bodies for deeds performed while they were alive, seems to have been moulded by contact with Iran. An earlier idea (Isa. 26: 19; Dan. 12: 2-3) seems to have envisaged a selective resurrection — and that idea may or may not have been originally Jewish.” ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩
40.
Sciré, Mary. “A Greater Role for Zoroastrianism in Judaism and Christianity.” Master's thesis, University of Maryland. 2012. A master's thesis that argues for more Zoroastrian influence than most scholars allow, and quotes at length the main critics, among them James Barr.
1. 40a.
  Note 94: “The system of the Amesha Spentas is often taken to have been part of the model upon which Hebrew angelology developed. But the names and functions of the Amesha Spentas, and the nature of the entities as revealed by him, are very far removed from what counted as angels in most stages of Judaism. The Jewish angel develops from the side of being a man sent by God”. “The more developed angelology of Enoch may come closer to the Iranian style”. “Neither the total structure of the Enochic angelology, nor the style of the names, shows great similarity to the system of the Amesha Spentas.” Sciré quotes James Barr, "The Question of Religious Influence: The Case of Zoroastrianism, Judaism, and Christianity," Journal of the American Academy of Religion 53 (1985), p. 222. ↩
41.
Wright, N. T. The Resurrection of the Son of God. London: SPCK. 2003. A large historical study of resurrection belief in the ancient world, Jewish and pagan, by a leading New Testament scholar. Its chapters on Israel weigh the Zoroastrian hypothesis and list its proponents and opponents.
1. 41a.
  Page 124: “The first account, which remains popular in some quarters despite being regularly refuted, attempts to trace the emergence of Israelite belief in resurrection to ancient Zoroastrianism”. Page 125: “This proposal has been debated for well over a century, hampered not least by our radical uncertainty (because of the lateness of the primary sources) as to what ancient Zoroastrianism actually consisted of.” “John Day has pointed out that since Daniel, the main biblical exponent of the doctrine, is clearly echoing not only Isaiah but also Hosea, this takes the stream of thought back behind any likely influence from Persia; and that, when Ezekiel speaks of the dead being raised from their graves, this cannot be related to Zoroastrianism, since the Persians exposed, rather than buried, their dead.” “But the emerging Israelite belief in resurrection was not dualistic.” ↩
42.
Herodotus. The Histories. Translated by A. D. Godley. 1920. The Greek historian's account of the Persian empire, written about 430 BC, the earliest outside description of Persian religious custom.
1. 42a.
  Book 1, section 140: “how the dead bodies of Persians are not buried before they have been mangled by birds or dogs.” “That this is the way of the Magi, I know for certain; for they do not conceal the practice. But this is certain, that before the Persians bury the body in earth they embalm it in wax.” ↩
43.
Bremmer, Jan N. The Rise and Fall of the Afterlife. London: Routledge. 2002. Lectures by a Dutch historian of Greek religion on the afterlife in Greece, Israel and early Christianity. Its chapter on resurrection tests the Zoroastrian hypothesis against the current dating of the Avesta and rejects it for Jewish resurrection belief.
1. 43a.
  Page 48: “an interest in resurrection is clearly not attested in the Old Avesta”. Page 49: “seems to suggest a spiritual rather than”. Page 50: “There thus is little reason to derive Jewish ideas about resurrection from Persian sources. Their origin(s) may well lie in intra-Jewish developments.” ↩
2. 43b.
  Page 48: “the first and only Avestan text which undeniably mentions resurrection is Yast 19, a hymn of the Young Avesta that presumably dates from the time of the Achaemenids.” ↩ ↩
44.
Yamauchi, Edwin M. Persia and the Bible. Grand Rapids: Baker. 1996. A survey of the Persian empire's contacts with the Bible by an evangelical historian of the ancient Near East (first published 1990). Its chapter on Zoroastrianism weighs each claim of borrowing against the dates of the Persian texts.
1. 44a.
  Page 460: “But the Jewish devil, who is subordinate to Yahweh, is not like the primordial Ahriman, who is equal in power to Ohrmazd. The strongest evidence for an Iranian influence upon Jewish religion is the probable derivation of the demon Asmodeus in the book of Tobit from the Iranian Aeshma daeva.” ↩
45.
Malandra, William W. “Zoroaster ii. General Survey.” Encyclopaedia Iranica. Jul 20, 2009. The encyclopedia's survey of what is known of Zoroaster's life, date and teaching, by a specialist in Old Iranian religion.
1. 45a.
  Section Date: “Controversy over Zaraθuštra’s date has been an embarrassment of long standing to Zoroastrian studies. If anything approaching a consensus exists, it is that he lived ca. 1000 BCE give or take a century or so, though reputable scholars have proposed dates as widely apart as ca.1750 BCE and “258 years before Alexander.”” ↩
46.
MacKenzie, D. N. “Bundahišn.” Encyclopaedia Iranica 4:547-551. 1989. The encyclopedia's article on the Bundahishn, the Pahlavi compilation that holds the fullest Zoroastrian account of creation and of the end, by a leading Middle Persian philologist. It dates the book's last redaction and its manuscripts.
1. 46a.
  Section Authorship and compilation: “it is impossible to say even approximately at what date the first compilation was made.” “is known to have been active about A.D. 880.” Of Zadspram, whom the final redactor Farrbay names as a contemporary. ↩
47.
Hoffmann, Karl. “Avestan Language i. The Avestan Script.” Encyclopaedia Iranica 3:47-62. 1987. The encyclopedia's account of the alphabet in which the Avesta was written down, by a leading Avestan philologist.
1. 47a.
  “The earliest manuscript dates from A.D. 1288.” “It is generally considered that the Avestan script dates to the Sasanian period (224-651 A.D.).” “suggests that it may have been invented already by the fourth century A.D., perhaps even under Šāpūr II (310-379 A.D.).” ↩
48.
Diogenes Laertius. “Lives of Eminent Philosophers, vol. 1.” Loeb Classical Library. London: Heinemann. Translated by R. D. Hicks. 1925. A third-century AD compilation of the lives of Greek philosophers. Its prologue preserves what Aristotle, Theopompus and other fourth-century BC writers reported of the Persian Magi, the earliest datable outside evidence for Persian belief in two opposed powers and in a life after death.
1. 48a.
  Page 11, section Prologue 8: “Aristotle in the first book of his dialogue On Philosophy declares that the Magi are more ancient than the Egyptians; and further, that they believe in two principles, the good spirit and the evil spirit, the one called Zeus or Oromasdes”. ↩
2. 48b.
  Page 11, section Prologue 9: “The last-named author says that according to the Magi men will live in a future life and be immortal, and that the world will endure through their invocations.” The "last-named author" is Theopompus, in the eighth book of his Philippica. Hicks notes on the same page that "The testimony of Theopompus, who wrote in the fourth century, to the Zoroastrian doctrine of immortality is regarded by J. H. Moulton as specially important". ↩ ↩
49.
Diogenes Laertius. Βίοι καὶ γνῶμαι τῶν ἐν φιλοσοφίᾳ εὐδοκιμησάντων. Edited by R. D. Hicks. 1925. The Greek text of the same Loeb edition, as digitised by the Perseus Project.
1. 49a.
  Section Prologue 9: “ὃς καὶ ἀναβιώσεσθαι κατὰ τοὺς Μάγους φησὶ τοὺς ἀνθρώπους καὶ ἀθανάτους ἔσεσθαι”. "Who [Theopompus] also says that according to the Magi men will come back to life and be immortal." Anabiōsesthai is the future of anabioō, "return to life". ↩
50.
Plutarch. “Isis and Osiris.” Moralia, vol. 5, Loeb Classical Library. Translated by Frank Cole Babbitt. 1936. An essay of about AD 100 on Egyptian religion that, in chapters 46-47, reports Persian teaching about Oromazes and Areimanius, partly on the authority of Theopompus.
1. 50a.
  Section 47: “Theopompus says that, according to the sages, one god is to overpower, and the other to be overpowered, each in turn for the space of three thousand years, and afterward for another three thousand years they shall fight and war, and the one shall undo the works of the other, and finally Hades shall pass away; then shall the people be happy, and neither shall they need to have food nor shall they cast any shadow.” ↩
2. 50b.
  Section 47: “Oromazes created six gods, the first of Good Thought, the second of Truth, the third of Order, and, of the rest, one of Wisdom, one of Wealth, and one the Artificer of Pleasure in what is Honourable.” ↩
51.
Kent, Roland G. “Old Persian: Grammar, Texts, Lexicon.” American Oriental Series 33. New Haven: American Oriental Society. 1950. The standard edition and translation of the Old Persian royal inscriptions, including Darius I's at Behistun (about 520 BC).
1. 51a.
  Section DB 4.33-40: “These are the provinces which became rebellious. The Lie made them rebellious”. “protect thyself vigorously from the Lie; the man who shall be a Lie-follower, him do thou punish well”. ↩
52.
Darmesteter, James. “The Zend-Avesta, Part II.” Sacred Books of the East 23. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1883. The standard nineteenth-century English translation of the Younger Avestan hymns. Yasht 19, the Zamyad Yasht, is the only Younger Avestan text with an explicit raising of the dead.
1. 52a.
  Page 290, section Yasht 19.11: “when the dead will rise, when life and immortality will come, and the world will be restored at its wish”. ↩
53.
West, E. W. “Pahlavi Texts, Part I: The Bundahis, Bahman Yast, and Shâyast lâ-Shâyast.” Sacred Books of the East 5. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1880. The standard English translation of the Bundahishn and the Zand-i Wahman Yasn (Bahman Yast), the Pahlavi books that hold the fully developed Zoroastrian end-time scheme.
1. 53a.
  Page 4, section Bundahishn 1.2-3: “which they call ‘endless light,’”. “with backward understanding and desire for destruction”. Of Aharman (Ahriman), who is in the abyss of darkness from the beginning while Ohrmazd is in endless light; he is not Ohrmazd's creation. ↩ ↩
2. 53b.
  Page 126, section Bundahishn 30.20: “Then all men will pass into that melted metal and will become pure”. ↩
3. 53c.
  Page liv, Introduction: “in the latter part of the reign of”. “or very shortly afterwards”. West's hypothesis for when the original commentary of the Bahman Yast, with its tree of metal branches, was written: late in the reign of Khusrau I (AD 531-579). ↩
54.
Asmussen, Jes P. “Aēšma.” Encyclopaedia Iranica 1:479-480. 1983. The encyclopedia's article on the Avestan demon of wrath, which defends the derivation of the name Asmodaeus from it.
1. 54a.
  “Outside the Iranian world, Aēšma occurs in the Talmud as ʾšmdʾy and in the Book of Tobit as Asmodaios (variant of Codex B: Asmódaus), both from Av. *aēšmō.daēva-.” ↩
55.
Panaino, Antonio. “Paradise.” Encyclopaedia Iranica. 2022. The encyclopedia's article on the word and idea of paradise in Iran, which traces Greek paradeisos and Hebrew pardes to an Old Iranian word for a walled garden.
1. 55a.
  Section General premises: “But all these terms, starting from the Greek one, ultimately derive from an Old Iranian stem”. “It is clear that, in some religious traditions such as the Jewish and Western Christian ones, the eschatological meaning of the word Paradise derived from the idealized image of such a physical garden”. ↩
56.
Warfield, Benjamin B. Revelation and Inspiration. New York: Oxford University Press. 1927. The first volume of Warfield's collected works, opening with his encyclopedia article "The Biblical Idea of Revelation" (1915), the classic Reformed statement of how revelation came in stages.
1. 56a.
  Page 11: “the Scriptures are explicit, tracing for us, or rather embodying in their own growth, the record of the steady advance of this gracious revelation through definite stages from its first faint beginnings to its glorious completion in Jesus Christ.” ↩
2. 56b.
  Page 11: “It may be difficult to obtain from Scripture a clear account of why God chose thus to give this revelation of His grace only progressively; or, to be more explicit, through the process of a historical development.” ↩
57.
Vos, Geerhardus. Biblical Theology: Old and New Testaments. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. 1948. The founding textbook of Reformed biblical theology, from Vos's lectures at Princeton Seminary. It explains why revelation unfolds in stages and what kind of growth it allows.
1. 57a.
  Page 14: “Revelation is the interpretation of redemption; it must, therefore, unfold itself in instalments as redemption does.” ↩ ↩
2. 57b.
  Page 15: “The organic progress is from seed-form to the attainment of full growth; yet we do not say that in the qualitative sense the seed is less perfect than the tree.” ↩
58.
Warfield, Benjamin B. “Trinity.” James Orr (ed.), The International Standard Bible Encyclopaedia, vol. 5. Chicago: Howard-Severance. 1915. The encyclopedia article on the Trinity by the Princeton theologian best known for his defence of biblical inerrancy. In it he states the rule that later revelation enlarges earlier revelation without correcting it.
1. 58a.
  Page 3014: “The OT may be likened to a chamber richly furnished but dimly lighted; the introduction of light brings into it nothing which was not in it before; but it brings out into clearer view much of what is in it but was only dimly or even not at all perceived before.” “Thus the OT revelation of God is not corrected by the fuller revelation which follows it, but only perfected, extended and enlarged.” ↩