Judea was a vassal state of the Persian Empire (much as it later was to the Roman Empire, just without the persecution). Cyrus the Great was the Persian King who released the Jews from captivity in Persia, and is explicitly named in Ezra as the one who did so. Of all of the assorted concordances between Biblical history and external history, the identification of Koresh with Cyrus is one of the most firmly established.
Cyrus was either personally a Zoroastrian or a person who allowed Zoroastrianism to become the state religion of Persia. Zoroastrianism is non-conversionary, and most of the Zoroastrian rulers were relatively tolerant.
The geopolitical intrigue you're speaking of is irrelevant to whether or not there was a religious quid-pro-quo. There is no positive evidence of this in any case with which I am familiar (I minored in Near East religious history), and if anything, the arguments are much stronger for either syncretism due to spread of ideas or to common ideas sprouting in multiple places at similar times (like how Newton and Leibnitz both thought of Calculus at the same time).
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2007-02-05 03:38 pm (UTC)Judea was a vassal state of the Persian Empire (much as it later was to the Roman Empire, just without the persecution). Cyrus the Great was the Persian King who released the Jews from captivity in Persia, and is explicitly named in Ezra as the one who did so. Of all of the assorted concordances between Biblical history and external history, the identification of Koresh with Cyrus is one of the most firmly established.
Cyrus was either personally a Zoroastrian or a person who allowed Zoroastrianism to become the state religion of Persia. Zoroastrianism is non-conversionary, and most of the Zoroastrian rulers were relatively tolerant.
The geopolitical intrigue you're speaking of is irrelevant to whether or not there was a religious quid-pro-quo. There is no positive evidence of this in any case with which I am familiar (I minored in Near East religious history), and if anything, the arguments are much stronger for either syncretism due to spread of ideas or to common ideas sprouting in multiple places at similar times (like how Newton and Leibnitz both thought of Calculus at the same time).