Persian theology.

Thirdly, we are still further warranted in admitting the antiquity
of the Zoroastrian system as including the resurrection theory,
when we consider the internal harmony and organic connection of
parts in it; how the doctrines all fit together, and imply each
other, and could scarcely have existed apart. Men were the
creatures of Ormuzd. They should have lived immortally under his
favor and in his realm. But Ahriman, by treachery, obtained
possession of a large portion of them. Now, when, at the end of
the fourth period into which the world course was divided by the
Magian theory, as Theopompus testifies, Ormuzd overcomes this
arch adversary, will he not rescue his own unfortunate creatures
from the realm of darkness in which they have been imprisoned?
When a king storms an enemy's castle, he delivers from the
dungeons his own soldiers who were taken captives in a former
defeat. The expectation of a great prophet, Sosiosch, to come and
vanquish Ahriman and his swarms, unquestionably appears in the
Avesta itself.30 With this notion, in inseparable union, the
Parsee tradition, running continuously back, as is claimed, to a
very remote time, joins the doctrine of a general resurrection; a
doctrine literally stated in the Vendidad,31 and in many other
places in the Avesta,32 where it has not yet been shown to be an
interpolation, but only supposed so by very questionable
constructive inferences. The consent of intrinsic adjustment and
of historic evidence would, therefore, lead to the conclusion that
this was an old Zoroastrian dogma. In disproof of this conclusion
we believe there is no direct positive evidence whatever, and no
inferential argument cogent enough to produce conviction.

There are sufficient reasons for the belief that the doctrine of a
resurrection was quite early adopted from the Persians by the
Jews, not borrowed at a much later time from the Jews by the
Parsees. The conception of Ahriman, the evil serpent, bearing
death, (die Schlange Angramainyus der voll Tod ist,) is
interwrought from the first throughout the Zoroastrian scheme. In
the Hebrew records, on the contrary, such an idea appears but
incidentally, briefly, rarely, and only in the later books. The
account of the introduction of sin and death by the serpent in the
garden of Eden dates from a time subsequent to the commencement of
the Captivity. Von Bohlen, in his Introduction to the Book of
Genesis, says the narrative was