Zoroastrian Influences upon Judaism

"And the Lord said to Satan, 'The Lord rebuke you, O Satan! The Lord who has chosen Jerusalem rebuke you! Is not this a brand plucked from the fire?'" - Zechariah 3:2

"The Babylonian Captivity had exposed the Jews to the Zoroastrian pantheon, with its good gods headed by Ahura Mazda ('God of Light') and it bad god headed by Ahura Manah or Ahriman ('God of Darkness'). This led to the belief that the prolonged overlordship that outlasted the captivity was the fault of the bad gods, rebel messengers who has refused to obey Yahweh's orders. "Alternative versions of the seraphs' original disobedience were postulated, the most popular being that they were the sons of the gods who had sired the giants by illegally recreating with mortal women. Such rebels had to have a leader, and since the concept of a divine antagonist, a Jewish Ahriman, had been assimilated before there was any speculation as to the antagonist's identity, he was simply styled the Enemy (ha-stan). The first reference to the Enemy as a male in Jewish mythology was made by Zechariah in 520 BCE." - William Harwood, Mythologies Last Gods: Yahweh and Jesus

"After the Exile of the Jewish people and later through contacts with Jews of the Diaspora in many parts of the Mediterranean world, Zoroastrian concepts influenced Jewish thought. Certain ideas about last things, salvation, and Satan (the Evil One) stem from Zoroastrianism." - Ninian Smart, The Religious Experience of Mankind

"The old Persian faith was an abstract and subtle religion, offering many new ways of looking at divinity and the idea of the holy. Its influence upon the minds of Jewish scribes and rulers, men like Nehemiah and Ezra, was probably greater than surviving evidence can show. There are, however, numerous hints of this influence in the Old Testament. The 'Spirit of God', for example, that moves on the face of the waters in the opening of Genesis is a most remarkable idea...Yet in surviving Persian writings the idea of a 'spirit of god' is a common one." - John Romer, Testament

"The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me; he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed..." - Isaiah 61:1 (Deutero-Isaiah 5th C. B.C.E.)

"Similarly, some of the optimistic Persian notions of the afterlife seem to have entered into the later Books of the Prophets in the Bible. A rare view of the traditional Israelite afterlife (the afterlife is not often mentioned in older biblical writings) is briefly glimpsed in the tale of Saul's meeting with the dead Prophet Samuel, who is 'called up' by the Witch of Endor (1 Samuel 28:7-21) from a kind of Hades; it is a shadowy survival." - John Romer, Testament

"The king said to her, 'Have no fear; what do you see?' And the woman said to Saul, 'I see a god coming up out of the earth.' He said to her, 'What is his appearance?' And she said, 'An old man is coming up; and he is wrapped in a robe.' And Saul knew that it was Samuel, and he bowed with his face to the ground, and did obeisance." - 1 Samuel 28:13-14

"But in the Book of Isaiah, which was certainly compiled after the Babylonian exile, a full-blown theory of death and resurrection is implicit throughout, a forerunner of one of the major themes of the New Testament." - John Romer, Testament

"Thy dead shall live, My corpses shall arise, Awake and sing Ye dwellers of the dust, For a dew of light is thy dew And the earth shall bring forth the shades." - Isaiah 26:19

"The authors of Enoch ca. 150 BCE) [adapted] the physical Gehenna to the mythology of Zarathustra to produce an Essene/Pharisee purgatory, identical with the Christian Hell except for the lack of permanence. Prior to Jesus, the Essenes had pictured Gehenna as a monstrous torture chamber that sinners needed to endure as the only method of cleansing them of their sins and making them fit for the afterlife of the saints. It was not...the suffering through which a sinner was purified, but rather exposure to the sacred power of Fire. Zarathustra did not quite deify Fire, but he saw it as an aspect of the divinity of Ahura Mazda." - William Harwood, Mythologies Last Gods: Yahweh and Jesus

"Their spirits are going to be thrown into a blazing furnace. They are going to be wretched in their immense agony, and into darkness and chains and burning flames...you will have no peace....We have been tortured and destroyed and not hoped to see life from day to day." - 1 Enoch 98:3, 103:7-10

The Second Day of Creation:

" 'On the second day God brought forth four creations, the firmament, Hell, fire, and the angels. ' "

" '...Hell has seven divisions, one beneath the other. They are called Sheol, Abadon, Beer Shatat, Tit ha-Yawah, Sha'are Mawet, Sha'are Zalmawet, and Gehenna. It requires three hundred years to traverse the height, or the width, or the depth of each division, and it would take six thousand three hundred years to go over a tract of land equal in extent to the seven divisions. Each of the seven divisions in turn has seven subdivisions, and in each compartment there are seven rivers of fire and seven of hail. The width of each is one thousand ells, its depth one thousand, and its length three hundred, and they flow one from the other, and are supervised by ninety thousand angels of destruction. There are, besides, in every compartment seven thousand caves, in every cave there are seven thousand crevices, and in every crevice seven thousand scorpions. Every scorpion has three hundred rings, and in every ring seven thousand pouches of venom, from which flow seven rivers of deadly poison. If a man handles it, he immediately bursts, every limb is torn from his body, his bowels are cleft asunder, and he falls upon his face. There are also fire different kinds of fire in Hell. One devours and absorbs, another devours and does not absorb, while the third absorbs and does not devour, and there is still another fire, which neither devours nor absorbs, and furthermore a fire which devours fire. There are coals big as mountains, and coals big as hills, and coals as large as the Dead Sea, and coals like huge stones, and there are rivers of pitch and sulpher flowing and seething like live coals.' " - Willis Barnstone, The Other Bible, pg. 19