A standalone piece

Most of the world’s scriptures come to us at one remove — laws set down by later hands, narratives written about a founder, sayings remembered and arranged by disciples. The Gathas are different, and the difference is their glory. They are seventeen hymns in the oldest layer of the Avesta, and the tradition holds them to be the words of Zarathustra himself: not a code, not a story about him, but him — a single human being, speaking in the first person, three and a half thousand years ago, thinking aloud toward God.[^1] Set aside for a moment everything about their age and their influence. What remains is one of the most intimate and searching voices in all of religious literature.

The poems

The Gathas are genuine poetry — composed in Old Avestan in a tight syllabic meter, like the oldest hymns of the Rigveda, and meant to be chanted.[^2] They sit at the very center of the Yasna, the chief Zoroastrian act of worship, and they have been recited there, daily, for some three thousand years — an unbroken thread of human voices carrying these particular words across the whole span of recorded history.[^3] They are short, dense, and demanding; they reward slow reading and resist quick translation. And through their difficulty, again and again, a person comes through.

The searching

The most famous of the Gathas is a hymn built almost entirely of questions. Zarathustra stands and asks Ahura Mazda, plainly, to tell him the truth of things: Who fixed the path of the sun and the stars? Who but you holds the earth below and the sky from falling? Who set the waters and the plants in their places? Who yoked swiftness to the wind and the clouds? What craftsman made light and made darkness? What craftsman made sleep and waking?[^4] It is theology done not as assertion but as wonder — a man flinging questions at the cosmos and addressing them, with startling directness, to its maker. He is not reciting answers he already holds. He is asking, the way a person asks who genuinely needs to know.

That posture — the seeker rather than the authority — runs through the hymns. Zarathustra speaks to Mazda the way one speaks to someone present: he praises, he petitions, he argues, he wants to understand. The Good Mind, Vohu Manah, and Truth, asha, are not abstractions to him but companions he reaches for. The Gathas read less like a creed than like a record of one mind’s encounter with the divine, caught in the act.

The human being

What makes the voice unforgettable is that it is not always serene. In one hymn Zarathustra cries out from the middle of failure: To what land shall I turn? Where shall I go? He is rejected, driven from his community, a teacher with almost no followers, unprotected and alone — and he says so, to God, without disguising the despair.[^5] There are few moments in ancient scripture so nakedly human: not a triumphant founder but a man near the end of his rope, holding on to his conviction precisely because everything else has fallen away.

Another hymn opens with one of the most moving images in the tradition — the Lament of the Ox-Soul. The soul of the living world, figured as the patient ox, cries up to Mazda against the cruelty and violence done to it, and asks: who will protect me? whom have you appointed to care for me? The divine assembly answers that the one appointed is Zarathustra — and Zarathustra, hearing it, protests his own weakness, a man without power or armies, possessing only the sacred word.[^6] It is a vision of a prophet who is chosen not for his strength but in spite of his frailty, charged with the care of creation itself.

The choice

At the heart of the Gathas lies the vision that would shape everything Zoroastrian after them. In one celebrated passage Zarathustra describes two primal spirits, or two mentalities — twins, met at the beginning — who confronted a choice, and chose: the one taking the way of life and truth, the other the way of the Lie. And the point of the image is not cosmic machinery but human freedom: every person, like those first spirits, stands before the same choice and must make it.[^7] The dignity of the human being, in Zarathustra’s vision, is precisely this — that the moral order of the universe runs through the free decisions of ordinary people, that each of us is a genuine participant in the contest between truth and falsehood. Few ideas in the history of religion place so much weight, so early, on the freedom and responsibility of the individual soul.

The difficulty, and the mystery

The Gathas are famously hard to translate. The Old Avestan is archaic and terse, the syntax knotted, the imagery compressed; the great translators — Bartholomae, Insler, Humbach, Boyce — diverge from one another line by line, and honest scholars admit that some verses may never fully yield their meaning.[^8] This is not a defect. It is the texture of a genuinely ancient voice that has come an immense distance to reach us, and still keeps something of itself in reserve. Reading the Gathas is a little like hearing speech across a great gulf of time: the words come broken and luminous, and the effort of listening is part of what they ask.

Why they endure

The Gathas matter for many reasons — their antiquity, their theology, their influence on the religions that came after. But the reason they move people has nothing to do with any of that. It is that, across three and a half thousand years, you can still hear in them a single human being thinking honestly toward God: asking what he does not know, admitting where he is afraid, insisting on the choice between truth and the Lie, and praising, through all of it, the Wise Lord he could not stop addressing. Most founders are remembered. Zarathustra can still be heard. That is the rarest thing a scripture can offer, and the Gathas offer it on every page.

Notes

[^1]: On the Gathas as the seventeen hymns attributed to Zarathustra himself, composed in Old (Gathic) Avestan and forming the oldest layer of the Avesta, see Mary Boyce, A History of Zoroastrianism, vol. 1 (Leiden: Brill, 1975), and Helmut Humbach et al., The Gāthās of Zarathushtra and the Other Old Avestan Texts (Heidelberg: Winter, 1991).

[^2]: On the syllabic meter of the Gathas and their kinship with the metrical hymns of the Rigveda, see Humbach, The Gāthās of Zarathushtra.

[^3]: On the placement of the Gathas within the Yasna liturgy and their continuous recitation, see Boyce, Zoroastrians: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices (London: Routledge, 1979).

[^4]: Paraphrasing the series of questions to Ahura Mazda in Yasna 44 (the Ushtavaiti Gatha); cf. the translations in Stanley Insler, The Gāthās of Zarathustra (Acta Iranica 8, 1975), and Humbach, The Gāthās of Zarathushtra.

[^5]: Paraphrasing the lament of the rejected and unprotected prophet in Yasna 46 (the opening of the Spentamainyu group); see Insler, The Gāthās of Zarathustra, and Boyce, A History of Zoroastrianism, vol. 1.

[^6]: On the Lament of the Ox-Soul (Geush Urvan) and the appointment of Zarathustra in Yasna 29, see Boyce, A History of Zoroastrianism, vol. 1, and Insler, The Gāthās of Zarathustra.

[^7]: Paraphrasing the passage on the two primal spirits and the choice in Yasna 30 (the Ahunavaiti Gatha); on its centrality to Zoroastrian ethics and the doctrine of free will, see Boyce, Zoroastrians, and Prods Oktor Skjærvø, The Spirit of Zoroastrianism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011).

[^8]: On the notorious difficulty of translating the Gathas and the divergences among the major translators (Bartholomae, Insler, Humbach, Boyce), see the introductions to Insler, The Gāthās of Zarathustra, and Humbach, The Gāthās of Zarathushtra.

A standalone piece

For five centuries, the finest minds of Greece and Rome looked back toward Zoroaster and saw the same thing: a figure standing at the very dawn of the world, ancient almost beyond reckoning. And these were not credulous men. Xanthus of Lydia, the first Greek ever to write his name, placed him thousands of years before Xerxes. Eudoxus — among the greatest mathematicians antiquity produced — and Aristotle himself set him six thousand years before Plato. Hermippus, who claimed to have read the Magian books, and Plutarch, the master biographer, reckoned five thousand years before the fall of Troy. Pliny, charting the origins of human knowledge, placed Moses “many thousand years after Zoroaster.” And Diogenes Laertius gathered their voices into one.

They quarreled over the number. They never once quarreled over the verdict. Whether the count ran to six thousand years or five, every authority who weighed the question reached for the same superlative — older than Moses, older than any sage of their own world, a teacher already immemorial when history itself was young. Search the entire classical record, and you will not find a single voice that called him recent.

This was the judgment of the ancient world, rendered with one accord across five hundred years and a dozen hands: that Zarathustra was old when the world was young. What follows is the evidence behind that verdict — and the reason it turns out to be not merely an ancient opinion, but very likely the truth.

The chronographers

The classical figures for Zoroaster’s age, gathered, form a remarkable chorus. Xanthus of Lydia, writing in the fifth century BCE and the earliest Greek to name him, set him six thousand years before Xerxes’ crossing into Greece.[^1] Eudoxus of Cnidus and Aristotle — cited together by later authors — placed him six thousand years before the death of Plato.[^2] Hermippus of Smyrna, who professed to have studied the Zoroastrian books themselves, and Plutarch, in his account of Persian religion, gave five thousand years before the Trojan War.[^3] Pliny the Elder gathered these reckonings into his survey of the origins of knowledge, and added the pointed note that the Jewish learning he traced to Moses arose “many thousand years after Zoroaster.”[^4] Diogenes Laertius, opening his great history of philosophy, collected the whole tradition.[^5]

A word of honesty makes this stronger, not weaker. These figures — six thousand years, five thousand years — are not calendar measurements; they are schematic numbers, drawn from a cosmological sense of vast world-ages, and they should not be cited as though anyone had counted the years. But notice what the variation reveals: the authorities disagreed on the figure precisely because none of them was reading a date off a record. What they agreed on, with one voice and no exception, was the verdict — that Zoroaster belonged to a remote and fabulous antiquity. The disagreement over the number is itself the proof that the consensus on his ancientness was independent and genuine, not copied from a single source. They arrived at the same conviction by different roads.

The wider testimony

Beyond the chronographers, the whole weight of classical reference treats Zoroaster as the ancient archetype. Herodotus, in the fifth century BCE, described the Magi — his priesthood — as a fixture of the Persian and Median world.[^6] Plato named “Zoroaster son of Oromazes” as the fountainhead of the Magian lore taught to the Persian princes.[^7] Theopompus, in the fourth century BCE, recorded the actual Zoroastrian doctrine — the two spirits, the cosmic ages, the final renovation — as the teaching of an established and venerable tradition.[^8] Diodorus Siculus ranked him among the great lawgivers of remote times.[^9] Strabo described his priesthood and its rites as an ancient institution of the Persian world.[^10] Not one of these treated Zoroaster as a recent teacher; every one assumed his deep antiquity as a settled fact of the world they knew.

And the regard outlived antiquity itself. The Neoplatonists revered a body of oracles they attributed to Zoroaster as primordial wisdom; the Renaissance Platonists — Gemistus Pletho, Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola — placed him at the very head of the prisca theologia, the most ancient theology from which all later wisdom was thought to descend.[^11] For more than two thousand years, the West’s verdict on Zoroaster’s antiquity never wavered.

The Iranian reckoning

The tradition’s own reckoning agrees on the substance, if not on the fabulous Greek figures. The Zoroastrian Religious Era, used by the Zoroastrian assemblies, places Zarathustra’s calling at 1738 BCE; the Middle Persian Bundahishn, by its reckoning of “258 years before Alexander,” brings him to about 589 BCE.[^12] Iranian memory, like Greek and Roman testimony, located him deep in the past.

The anchor: his own words

Here is what raises the verdict of the ancient world above mere ancient opinion. Zoroaster left his own hymns, the Gathas, and they can be dated by a measure the ancients did not possess: language. The Gathas are composed in Old Avestan, a tongue so archaic that it is a near-twin of the oldest layer of Rigvedic Sanskrit, and they depict a world that is pre-urban and pastoral — herders and cattle, tribal raids, no cities and no empire.[^13] Language this old and a society this early place Zarathustra, on the reckoning of modern linguists, in the second millennium BCE — roughly 1500–1000 BCE, or earlier.[^14]

This is the quiet vindication of the ancient verdict. The Greeks and Romans had no way to read the age of the Gathas; they reached their conviction of Zoroaster’s vast antiquity by reputation and tradition alone. And yet, when the one tool they lacked — historical linguistics — is finally applied, it lands in the same territory: deep, second-millennium antiquity. The ancient world believed he was immensely old; the evidence of his own archaic words shows that, in substance, it was right.

The verdict, and the proof

So the case stands in two layers, and they reinforce each other. The classical world was virtually unanimous, across five centuries and every kind of authority — historian, philosopher, naturalist, biographer — that Zoroaster was a figure of remote antiquity, older than Moses and older than any sage of the West; that is genuine, citable testimony to his perceived age, and the schematic figures only confirm how independent and unforced the consensus was. And beneath that testimony lies the harder evidence: the archaic language of his own Gathas, which places him in the second millennium BCE on grounds the ancients never knew.

The opinion and the evidence converge. Zarathustra was reckoned ancient by everyone who looked back at him from the classical world — and the language of his own hymns says they were right to. He was, as nearly as the record allows us to say, old when the world was young.

Notes

[^1]: On Xanthus of Lydia as the earliest Greek to name Zoroaster and to give a figure of vast antiquity, see Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, Prologue 1.2, and the discussion in Albert de Jong, Traditions of the Magi (Leiden: Brill, 1997).

[^2]: On Eudoxus of Cnidus and Aristotle placing Zoroaster six thousand years before Plato, see Diogenes Laertius, Lives, Prologue 1.8, and Pliny, Natural History 30.3.

[^3]: On Hermippus of Smyrna and Plutarch giving five thousand years before the Trojan War, see Pliny, Natural History 30.4, and Plutarch, On Isis and Osiris 46–47 (369d–e).

[^4]: On Pliny gathering these reckonings and placing the Mosaic/Jewish learning “many thousand years after Zoroaster,” see Pliny, Natural History 30.2–4, 30.11. (Pliny himself regarded “magic” as fraudulent; the chronological priority of Zoroaster over Moses is nonetheless what he states.)

[^5]: Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, Prologue 1.1–9.

[^6]: Herodotus, Histories 1.101, 1.131–132.

[^7]: Plato, Alcibiades I 122a.

[^8]: On Theopompus recording the Zoroastrian dualism and the renovation, see Theopompus, FGrHist 115 F64–65, preserved via Plutarch, On Isis and Osiris 47 (370b–c).

[^9]: Diodorus Siculus, Library of History 1.94.

[^10]: Strabo, Geography 15.3.13–15.

[^11]: On the Neoplatonist Chaldean Oracles attributed to Zoroaster and the Renaissance placement of him at the head of the prisca theologia (Pletho, Ficino, Pico della Mirandola), see the scholarship on late-antique and Renaissance Platonism; and de Jong, Traditions of the Magi, on the Greek reception.

[^12]: On the Zoroastrian Religious Era date of 1738 BCE and the Bundahishn‘s reckoning of c. 589 BCE, see the Zoroastrian liturgical chronology and the Bundahishn.

[^13]: On the archaic Old Avestan of the Gathas (a near-twin of the oldest Rigvedic Sanskrit) and their pre-urban pastoral world, see Mary Boyce, A History of Zoroastrianism, vol. 1 (Leiden: Brill, 1975), and Helmut Humbach et al., The Gāthās of Zarathushtra (Heidelberg: Winter, 1991).

[^14]: On the second-millennium linguistic dating of Zarathustra (c. 1500–1000 BCE or earlier), see Boyce, A History of Zoroastrianism, vol. 1; cf. the Encyclopædia Britannica entry “Zarathushtra” (“born 2nd millennium BCE”).

A standalone piece

The claim that Zoroastrianism is the first monotheistic religion is made often, and it is made loosely as often as not. There is a strong, defensible version of it, and there is an overreaching one — and the difference is worth drawing carefully, because the defensible version is a genuinely major claim that holds, while the overreaching one collapses under a single good objection. This piece makes the case in its defensible form: that Zoroastrianism is, very plausibly, the first developed and enduring ethical monotheism in human history — and marks the lines that keep that claim standing.

Two questions, not one

“First monotheistic religion” is really two claims folded together, and an honest case has to answer both, each on the right evidence. There is the question of whether it was first — a matter of date. And there is the question of whether it was monotheism — a matter of doctrine. A claim about Zoroastrianism’s priority lives or dies on getting both right, and on not confusing the evidence for one with the evidence for the other.

The monotheism: the theology of the Gathas

Begin with the doctrine, because it is the heart of the matter. In the Gathas — his own hymns — Zarathustra proclaims Ahura Mazda, the “Wise Lord,” as the one supreme God: uncreated, the creator of all things, the wholly good, the source of the cosmic and moral order (asha).[^1] Mazda is not first among many gods; he is the deliberate, exalted center of Zarathustra’s vision, the maker of light and darkness, the one to whom worship and ethical allegiance are owed. This is a worked-out monotheistic theology with a moral demand at its core — the call to align oneself with truth against the Lie — and that ethical center is what makes it distinctive.[^2]

Here the honest calibration belongs, and it strengthens the claim rather than weakening it. Zoroastrian monotheism is best described as monotheistic-leaning, not the bare, exclusive monotheism of later Judaism and Islam. Zarathustra’s system keeps the Amesha Spentas — the “Bounteous Immortals,” understood as aspects or emanations of Ahura Mazda — and the yazatas, lesser beings worthy of veneration; and it sets against Mazda an opposing principle, Angra Mainyu, the hostile spirit.[^3] This is why scholars sometimes speak of Zoroastrianism as an “ethical dualism within a monotheistic frame.” But the dualism is not a dualism of two equal gods: Ahura Mazda is supreme and uncreated, and the evil spirit is a derivative, doomed adversary destined for defeat at the renovation. So the precise and defensible description is that Zoroastrianism is the first developed ethical monotheism — its own distinctive structure, with one supreme God at the center, an ethical cosmos, and a destined triumph of good. That is a particular and powerful kind of monotheism, not a watered-down version of someone else’s.[^4]

The early external corroboration

The doctrine is not known only from the late Zoroastrian texts. Greek observers recorded it centuries before the Avesta was committed to writing. Theopompus of Chios, in the fourth century BCE, preserved through Plutarch, set down the Zoroastrian theology — Ahura Mazda (Oromazes) as the supreme good power, light against darkness, and the final renovation in which evil is destroyed.[^5] Strabo described the Magi’s worship and their sacred fire.[^6] This external attestation matters for the case: it shows the monotheistic-leaning, ethical, Mazda-centered theology was an established Persian teaching in the Persian and Hellenistic periods, not a late retrojection — answering the standard objection that the doctrine cannot be dated early because its scriptures are late.

The first: the antiquity of Zarathustra

Now the dating question, which decides the word “first.” The load-bearing evidence here is the language of the Gathas themselves. They are composed in Old Avestan, a tongue so archaic it is a near-twin of the oldest Rigvedic Sanskrit, and they depict a pre-urban, pastoral, Bronze-Age world — cattle-herding, tribal, without cities or empire.[^7] Language and society this old place Zarathustra, on the linguists’ reckoning, in the second millennium BCE, roughly 1500–1000 BCE or earlier — and the Iranian tradition’s own reckoning (1738 BCE) falls squarely within that window.[^8] The Greek testimony reinforces the picture from the outside: the entire classical tradition regarded Zoroaster as immensely ancient, far older than Moses or any Greek — testimony to his perceived antiquity, even where its specific figures are schematic.[^9]

If Zarathustra belongs to the second millennium BCE, then his developed ethical monotheism predates the crystallization of exclusive Israelite monotheism — which the biblical scholarship places in the exilic and post-exilic period, the sixth century BCE and after — by something close to a thousand years.[^10]

The one earlier contender, and why the claim still holds

Honesty requires naming the one possible earlier rival: Atenism, the cult of the sun-disk promoted by the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten around 1350 BCE, which elevated the Aten to exclusive worship and is sometimes called the first monotheism.[^11] Three things keep it from displacing Zoroastrianism’s claim. It was arguably monolatry — the exclusive worship of one god without denying others — rather than a fully articulated monotheism. It was bound to one king’s will and imposed from the throne. And it was short-lived: it collapsed almost immediately after Akhenaten’s death, and Egypt returned to its traditional gods, leaving no enduring tradition.[^12] So the airtight form of the claim is precise: Zoroastrianism is the first developed, enduring ethical monotheism — the first to articulate a full monotheistic theology and to survive as a living faith for millennia. Atenism was neither developed in that sense nor enduring; it was a brilliant, brief experiment that died with its pharaoh.

The line that keeps it honest: first is not source

One distinction must be held, because it is exactly where the strong claim is tempted into an indefensible one. “First monotheism” is not the same as “the source of all later monotheism.” Zoroastrianism being the earliest developed ethical monotheism does not, by itself, mean that Judaism’s monotheism — or Christianity’s or Islam’s — descended from it. The scholarship on ancient Israelite religion (Mark S. Smith, Thomas Römer) documents Israelite monotheism emerging on its own West-Semitic track, from the worship of Yahweh among the gods, through monolatry, to the exclusive monotheism of the exile.[^13] That is an internal development with its own logic. The defensible claim is one of priority in time — Zoroastrianism got there first, by a wide margin — not of paternity over everything that followed. (The genuine Zoroastrian influence on the later traditions lies elsewhere, and more specifically: in the eschatology and dualism — heaven and hell, the final judgment, the adversary, the savior, the renovation of the world — which is a strong and separate case, not the same as claiming Zoroastrianism authored their monotheism.)[^14]

The case, assembled

So the claim, in the form that holds: Zoroastrianism is, very plausibly, the first developed and enduring ethical monotheism known to human history. The monotheism rests on the theology of the Gathas — Ahura Mazda as the one supreme, uncreated creator, with an ethical cosmos at the center — calibrated honestly as monotheistic-leaning rather than strict, which is its own distinctive and powerful form. The priority rests on the antiquity of those same Gathas, placed by their archaic language in the second millennium BCE, with the whole classical tradition testifying to Zarathustra’s vast perceived age. Theopompus and Plutarch corroborate the doctrine from the outside, centuries before the Avesta was written. The one earlier contender, Atenism, was brief and arguably monolatrous, and left no living tradition. And the claim stops, honestly, at priority in time — not at being the source of every monotheism that came after.

That is a major claim, and it stands: the earliest developed, enduring monotheistic faith we know of, by the better part of a thousand years. It does not need the overreach — “the source of all monotheism,” “the first religion of any kind” — to be remarkable. The defensible version is remarkable enough, and unlike the overreach, it survives the first serious objection.

Notes

[^1]: On Ahura Mazda in the Gathas as the one supreme, uncreated creator and source of asha, see Mary Boyce, A History of Zoroastrianism, vol. 1 (Leiden: Brill, 1975), and Helmut Humbach et al., The Gāthās of Zarathushtra (Heidelberg: Winter, 1991).

[^2]: On the ethical core of Zarathustra’s theology — the alignment with truth (asha) against the Lie (druj) — see Boyce, A History of Zoroastrianism, vol. 1, and the companion piece on Zoroastrian ethics.

[^3]: On the Amesha Spentas as aspects/emanations of Ahura Mazda, the yazatas, and the opposing spirit Angra Mainyu, see Boyce, Zoroastrians: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices (London: Routledge, 1979).

[^4]: On the scholarly characterization of Zoroastrianism as a monotheism with an ethical-dualist structure (one supreme uncreated God, a derivative and doomed adversary), see Boyce, Zoroastrians, and Prods Oktor Skjærvø, The Spirit of Zoroastrianism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011); the precise classification (monotheism vs. dualism) is itself discussed in the scholarship.

[^5]: On Theopompus, preserved via Plutarch, attesting the dualism and the renovation, see Theopompus, FGrHist 115 F64–65; Plutarch, On Isis and Osiris 46–47 (369d–370c); and Albert de Jong, Traditions of the Magi (Leiden: Brill, 1997).

[^6]: Strabo, Geography 15.3.13–15, on the Magi and the sacred fire.

[^7]: On the archaic Old Avestan of the Gathas and their Bronze-Age pastoral setting, see Boyce, A History of Zoroastrianism, vol. 1, and Humbach, The Gāthās of Zarathushtra.

[^8]: On the second-millennium linguistic dating and the Zoroastrian Religious Era reckoning of 1738 BCE, see Boyce, A History of Zoroastrianism, vol. 1, and the Zoroastrian liturgical chronology.

[^9]: On the classical testimony to Zoroaster’s vast (perceived) antiquity, see Diogenes Laertius, Lives, Prologue 1.2; Pliny, Natural History 30.3–4; Plutarch, On Isis and Osiris 46–47 — with the figures understood as schematic.

[^10]: On the exilic and post-exilic crystallization of exclusive Israelite monotheism, see Mark S. Smith, The Origins of Biblical Monotheism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), and Thomas Römer, The Invention of God (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015).

[^11]: On Atenism under Akhenaten (c. 1353–1336 BCE) and its characterization as monotheism or monolatry, see Jan Assmann, Moses the Egyptian (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), and standard treatments of the Amarna period.

[^12]: On the suppression of the Aten cult after Akhenaten’s death and Egypt’s return to traditional religion, see Erik Hornung, Akhenaten and the Religion of Light (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999).

[^13]: On the internal West-Semitic development of Israelite monotheism — from Yahweh among the gods, through monolatry, to exilic monotheism — see Mark S. Smith, The Early History of God, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), and The Origins of Biblical Monotheism; and Römer, The Invention of God.

[^14]: On the distinct (and strong) case for Zoroastrian influence on later eschatology and dualism — as opposed to the origin of monotheism — see Norman Cohn, Cosmos, Chaos and the World to Come (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), and Shaul Shaked, “Iranian Influence on Judaism.”