Dobroruka - Persian Influence on Daniel and Jewish Apocalyptic Literature

This work presents my long-term thoughts and research on the theme of Second Temple Judaism and some aspects of Zoroastrianism that may have helped shape the former. Like so many things from each person’s youth, as a student and then a junior researcher I took for granted some of these aspects as ‘obvious’ facts, which needed only to be bound together. As I grew older and gathered more primary and secondary literature (that have also become exponentially larger since the 1990s), I discovered that what I regarded as answers were, in fact, questions. This made the work even more pleasant to do, but whatever ‘influence’ I thought was obvious then proved to be just another problem to be tracked down and investigated (to be fair enough, more than three generations of scholars adopted the same procedure, even in their mature days; but then again not all that glitters is gold). My assumptions became more modest, and despite the title of this book, it is about ‘parallels’ rather than ‘influence’ that we will be talking about most of the time. I insist that this is for the better, at least for me: giving away some preconceptions made me better, and I never ceased to look after whatever Zoroastrianism could have in common with Second Temple Judaism.

 

That being said, as an ‘introduction’ to a work such as this book, many distinct approaches could be tried. I have chosen to follow the route of the six most relevant issues in the guise of sections or chapters.

 

This means that this introduction will present the most pressing issues all in one piece but divided in several subsections. This allows some freedom to go back and forth between specific literature, epistemological problems and personal doubts that together weave the cloth of which this book is the result. This format was not chosen for fancy reasons, or because it was ordered. I rather felt I should try to present matters in that format so as not to become enmeshed in the subtleties of Iranian studies that are of scarce interest to the average reader or the commonplaces of Einfluß-Studien regarding the possible relations between Persia and Second Temple Judaism.

 

London: T&T Clark, 2022. – 265 p.

ISBN: HB: 978-0-5672-0505-6

ePDF: 978-0-5677-0528-0

 

Foreword James H. Charlesworth 

Acknowledgements 

Abbreviations 

Introduction: A review of some issues related to this research topic 

Conclusion: Towards a great future 

Bibliography 

Index of passages