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vermontsavant
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22 Mar 2020, 8:40 am

Persia conquered Judea in 539bc.

Some people have asserted that Judaism changed and borrowed from Zoroastrianism and that a lot of Jewish theology post dates the Persian conquest.

This also ZA has had a huge impact on Christianity as well being that Christianity,particularly so to because ZA had a belief in resurection of the dead,heavan vs. hell and what not,belief in an enemy or adversary.

Was there a Jewish belief in an afterlife or resurection of the dead pre dating 539bc?

It seems there is evidence that ZA impacted Judaism which of coarse is the main influence of Christianity.

So how much impact has ZA had on our modern western culture in general?Maybe a lot.


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techstepgenr8tion
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22 Mar 2020, 11:12 am

Really interesting coincidence - I'm diving into Jason Reza Jiorjani's 'Prometheus and Atlas' where he takes a look at all kinds of existentialist and postmodernist thinkers including Kant, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, gets into Feyerabend, Focault, and Derrida's critiques of positivism, discusses the failure of Cartesian dualism and how a need to underpin it as a fundamental truth of our culture has been held onto so dogmatically (ie. reductive materialism) because the promises of progress that our culture is built on are underwritten by the the 'spectral' was something purely built on superstition that was properly exorcised by the Enlightenment. As far as I understand he takes a Zoroastrian-type approach and I've heard that Joseph B Peterson, the scholar whose been translating most of the Renaissance books of ceremonial magic and grimoires (his translation of the Key of Solomon is taken as authoritative) is also now a practicing Zoroastrian.

With respect to the flow of the bible and what I've seen of the historical evidence - I've seen that there were scraps of some of the more well known non-Torah books in proto form before this point but what I don't know for sure is whether the Hebrews had angled toward monotheism or henotheistic honor of one deity yet for some particular reason. I do know that the two cultures that came up with the seven day week, at the same time, were the Babylonians and Hebrews (hooda thunk!), the mazaloth (Hebrew zodiac) seems to map onto what the Babylonians had, and they had the same months - even months named after Babylonian deities. What I have to laugh about is how Christian 'end is nigh' broadcasts from the 90's and early 2000's used to focus on blood moons hitting Hebrew holy days like pass over or feast of tabernacles was a sign of end times and it seems they were reading the script backward - ie. the holidays were most likely coordinated to blood moons.

As far as whether Cyrus the Great sent Ezra out to preach the new history of the Jewish people while Zerubbabel built the 2nd temple and whether Cyrus the Great might have been doing the equivalent of neoliberal nation-building in his day - hard to tell. Admittedly I haven't dug much deeper into this one, there could be more historical qualifiers or disqualifiers, but I think it's accepted that for much of early history the Canaanite people were polytheists, their primary deity was El but El was the head of a pantheon rather than alone. Did the 1177 bronze age collapse drive them into something more practical and miltaristic, like toward monotheism? Someone else here whose dug into the history more might be able to spot the transition better between polytheism and monotheism but I can say with certainty that both the Babylonians and Persians had significant cultural impacts and with the Babylonian astrology/astronomy it was a lasting symbolic one.


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vermontsavant
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22 Mar 2020, 12:13 pm

techstepgenr8tion wrote:
Really interesting coincidence - I'm diving into Jason Reza Jiorjani's 'Prometheus and Atlas' where he takes a look at all kinds of existentialist and postmodernist thinkers including Kant, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, gets into Feyerabend, Focault, and Derrida's critiques of positivism, discusses the failure of Cartesian dualism and how a need to underpin it as a fundamental truth of our culture has been held onto so dogmatically (ie. reductive materialism) because the promises of progress that our culture is built on are underwritten by the the 'spectral' was something purely built on superstition that was properly exorcised by the Enlightenment. As far as I understand he takes a Zoroastrian-type approach and I've heard that Joseph B Peterson, the scholar whose been translating most of the Renaissance books of ceremonial magic and grimoires (his translation of the Key of Solomon is taken as authoritative) is also now a practicing Zoroastrian.

With respect to the flow of the bible and what I've seen of the historical evidence - I've seen that there were scraps of some of the more well known non-Torah books in proto form before this point but what I don't know for sure is whether the Hebrews had angled toward monotheism or henotheistic honor of one deity yet for some particular reason. I do know that the two cultures that came up with the seven day week, at the same time, were the Babylonians and Hebrews (hooda thunk!), the mazaloth (Hebrew zodiac) seems to map onto what the Babylonians had, and they had the same months - even months named after Babylonian deities. What I have to laugh about is how Christian 'end is nigh' broadcasts from the 90's and early 2000's used to focus on blood moons hitting Hebrew holy days like pass over or feast of tabernacles was a sign of end times and it seems they were reading the script backward - ie. the holidays were most likely coordinated to blood moons.

As far as whether Cyrus the Great sent Ezra out to preach the new history of the Jewish people while Zerubbabel built the 2nd temple and whether Cyrus the Great might have been doing the equivalent of neoliberal nation-building in his day - hard to tell. Admittedly I haven't dug much deeper into this one, there could be more historical qualifiers or disqualifiers, but I think it's accepted that for much of early history the Canaanite people were polytheists, their primary deity was El but El was the head of a pantheon rather than alone. Did the 1177 bronze age collapse drive them into something more practical and miltaristic, like toward monotheism? Someone else here whose dug into the history more might be able to spot the transition better between polytheism and monotheism but I can say with certainty that both the Babylonians and Persians had significant cultural impacts and with the Babylonian astrology/astronomy it was a lasting symbolic one.
Very interesting


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naturalplastic
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22 Mar 2020, 12:47 pm

That is my understand of it.

Zorastrianism is the world's first revealed religion. It was essentially monotheistic. Except that it had two gods instead of one:a god of good and god of evil.

It had angels and devils, heaven and hell, and future day of judgment. Stuff later appropriated into Christianity, and inherited from Christianity by Islam.

The folktale of the baby Jesus being visited by "the Magi" is interesting. "Magi" is what the ancient Persian called their Zorastrian priests. And in the Roman catacombs there were graffiti pictures drawn of the three guys presenting gifts to the baby Jesus, and they each wear the proper head gear of Persian priests. I have often thought that maybe the story was some distorted memory of an actual event. Maybe the young adolescent Jesus sat at the feet of Persian priests and absorbed some of their teachings, and later incorporated it into his own ministry.



Last edited by naturalplastic on 22 Mar 2020, 2:27 pm, edited 1 time in total.

vermontsavant
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22 Mar 2020, 1:49 pm

naturalplastic wrote:
That is my understand of it.

Zorastrianism is the world's first revealed religion. It was essentially monotheistic. Except that it had two gods instead of one:a god of good and god of evil.

It had angels and devils, heaven and hell, and future day of judgment. Stuff later appropriated into Christianity, and inherited from Christianity by Islam.

The folktale of the baby Jesus being visited by "the Magi" is interesting. "Magi" is what the ancient Persian called their Zorastrian priests. And in the Roman catacombs there were graffiti pictures drawn of the three guys presenting gifts to the baby Jesus, and they each wear the proper head gear of Persian priests. I have also thought that maybe the story was some distorted memory of an actual event. Maybe the young adolescent Jesus sat at the feet of Persian priests and absorbed some of their teachings, and later incorporated it into his own ministry.
Many people say the Abrahamic religions barrowed from Zoroastrianism,mainly Judaism after the Persian conquest and Christianity and Islam are offshoots of Judaism,there all Abrahamic religions.

ZA had the evil god that may have evolved into Lucifer or satan as an adversary,in early Judaism,they had "satan" which meant accuser (from the word accusation "sietnah") ,he worked for god and went around accusing those who did wrong.It wasn't until later that satan came to mean adversary or enemy and was connnected with Lucifer.


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techstepgenr8tion
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22 Mar 2020, 3:54 pm

Something I forgot to mention earlier - some people claim that Akhenaten and his solar disc monotheism might have also influenced Judaism to some degree (AMORC seems to buy into this) but I don't know how much solid evidence there would be, for example I've heard it's an open question whether the Egyptian captivity and exodus ever happened and that far more likely it was a post-Babylonian/Persian invention. To convince people even of that day of such a story, assuming it never happened, probably would have required a negative political disposition between the Egyptians and Hebrews.


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