is the basic idea of Magian religion, for it contains implicitly the conception of the world-historical struggle between Good and Evil, with the power of Evil prevailing in the middle period, and the Good finally triumphant on the Day of Judgment. This moralization of history is common to Persians, Chaldees, and Jews. But with its coming, the idea of the localized people ipso facto vanished and the genesis of Magian nations without earthly homes and boundaries was at hand. The idea of the Chosen People emerged.[1] But it is easy to understand that men of strong blood, and in particular the great families, found these too spiritual ideas repugnant to their natures and harked back to the stout old tribal faiths. According to Cumont's researches the religion of the Persian kings was polytheistic and did not possess the Haoma sacrament — that is, it was not wholly Zoroastrian. The same is true of most of the kings of Israel, and in all probability also of the last Chaldean Nabu-Nabid (Nabonidus), whose overthrow by Cyrus and his own subjects was in fact made possible by his rejection of the Marduk faith. And it was in the Captivity that circumcision and the (Chaldean) Sabbath were first acquired, as rites, by the Jews.
The Babylonian exile, however, did set up an important difference between the Jews and the Persians, in respect, not of the ultimate truths of conscious piety, but of all the facts of actuality and consequently men's inward attitude to these facts. It was the Yahweh believers who were permitted to go home and the adherents of Ahuramazda who allowed them to do so. Of two small tribes that two hundred years before had probably possessed equal numbers of fighting men, the one had taken possession of a world — while Darius crossed the Danube in the north, his power extended in the south through eastern Arabia to the island of Sokotra on the Somali coast[2] — and the other had become an entirely unimportant pawn of alien policy.
This is what made one religion so lordly, the other so humble. Let the student read, in contrast to Jeremiah, the great Behistun inscription[3] of Darius — what a splendid pride of the King in his victorious god! And how despairing are the arguments with which the Israelite prophets sought to preserve intact
- ↑ For Chaldeans and Persians there was no need to trouble here about proof — they had by their God conquered the world. But the Jews had only their literature to cling to, and this accordingly turned to theoretical proof in the absence of positive. In the last analysis, this unique national treasure owes its origin to the constant need of reacting against self-depreciation. [For example, the repeated restatement of the date of the Messiah's advent in the successive works of the age of the prophets. — Tr.]
- ↑ Glaser, Die Abessinier in Arabien und in Afrika (1895), p. 114. Glaser is convinced that Abyssinian, Pehlevi, and Persian cuneiform inscriptions of the highest importance await discovery there.
- ↑ The inscription and sculptures of Behistun (on an almost inaccessible cliff in the Zagros range on the Baghdad-Hamadan road) were reinvestigated by a British Museum expedition in 1904; see The Inscription of Darius the Great at Behistun (London, 1907). "Thus saith Darius the King. That what I have done I have done altogether by the grace of Ahuramazda. Ahuramazda and the other gods that be, brought aid to me. For this reason did Ahuramazda and the other gods that be bring aid to me because I was not hostile nor a liar nor a wrongdoer, neither I nor my family, but according to Rectitude have I ruled" (A. V. Williams Jackson, Persia Past and Present). — Tr.
