more
undoubtedly omnipotent than Ahura, to establish a universal rule.

The interesting inquiry remains, how far the Jewish religion was
modified by its contact with the Persian. The laws of purity in the
Jewish priestly code find a close parallel in the Vendidad; but with
the Israelites the notion of religious purity existed, and was worked
out in considerable detail, as we see from Deuteronomy, before the
exile, and therefore long before the period of the Vendidad. The
belief in the resurrection, found among the Jews after the exile, and
not before it, has been maintained by many to be a loan from Persia,
where the belief in future reward and punishment was a settled thing
from the time of Zarathustra. But the Jews do not appear to have
grasped this belief all at once or fully formed. They arrived at it
gradually, many Old Testament scholars affirm, and by spiritual
inferences timidly put forth at first, from their own religious
consciousness. A belief which the Jewish religion was capable of
producing of itself need not, without clearer evidence than we
possess, be regarded as borrowed. We are not on much surer ground
when we come to ask whether the angels and demons of Judaism are
connected with those of Persia. This belief also arises naturally in
Judaism, where God came to be thought of as very high and very
inaccessible, and intermediate beings were therefore needed. Some of
the figures of the Jewish spirit-world are, no doubt, due to Persia;
the Ashmodeus of the book of Tobit is a Persian figure. Later Judaism
is like Parsism in arranging the heavenly beings in a hierarchy, and
assigning to the chief angels special functions in the administration
of God's kingdom, and still more so when the upper hierarchy is
confronted by a lower one with a great adversary and father of lies
at its head. But this takes place long after the Persian contact.

The Persian deities had, as a rule, too little legend to enable them
to be received in other countries. Ahura does not travel. Anaitis is
thought to have passed into Greece, changing her name to Aphrodite,
but also to the severer Artemis; but she is perhaps not original in
Persia. The Persian god best known in other lands was Mithra, the
sun-god and god of wisdom. He was a favourite with the Roman armies
in the early empire, and representations of him as a hero in the act
of slaying a bull in a cave have been found in many lands. There were
also mysteries connected with hi