Ezra was the one who lead the major influx of Jews back to Judea under Cyrus - others dribbled back and forth, and certainly Persia remained hugely important (basically until the Sassanid empire fell to the Caliphate) in Jewish thought and religion - the main stream of Jewish law follows the Babylonian Talmud (and not the Jerusalem Talmud) after all...
Cambyses and Darius were guided more by their own megalomania than by religious fervor - they would tend to set up Zoroastrianism as a state religion of the newly conquered vassals, but they weren't exactly trying to stomp out the other religions.
The city-state model for religions tends to be more accurate as a descriptor for those worldviews which posit a pantheon. The Pre-Zoroastrian Mesopotamians, non-Abrahamic Canaanites and the Greeks are more alike in this than they are different (although there are some substantial differences in societal organization).
As for simultaneous development, it certainly is possible that multiple people experience the same singular transformative event, and then go on to process it in different ways - consider that the monotheistic Amon-worship in Egypt roughly dates to about the same time period as the Exodus... Was there a cross-fertilization? Sounds likely to me, although we'll never know for certain.
Now, I do challenge the differentiation between E and J worship - that's based on the Documentary Hypothesis, which is not a particularly effective one (see the scholarly challenges to it here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Documentary_hypothesis#Debates_on_the_hypothesis) for instance) - there's no external evidence for these hypothesized groups, and given that there IS a tremendous record of the various splinter groups (like essenes etc), the lack of external evidence should be viewed as determinative.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2007-02-05 10:30 pm (UTC)Cambyses and Darius were guided more by their own megalomania than by religious fervor - they would tend to set up Zoroastrianism as a state religion of the newly conquered vassals, but they weren't exactly trying to stomp out the other religions.
The city-state model for religions tends to be more accurate as a descriptor for those worldviews which posit a pantheon. The Pre-Zoroastrian Mesopotamians, non-Abrahamic Canaanites and the Greeks are more alike in this than they are different (although there are some substantial differences in societal organization).
As for simultaneous development, it certainly is possible that multiple people experience the same singular transformative event, and then go on to process it in different ways - consider that the monotheistic Amon-worship in Egypt roughly dates to about the same time period as the Exodus... Was there a cross-fertilization? Sounds likely to me, although we'll never know for certain.
Now, I do challenge the differentiation between E and J worship - that's based on the Documentary Hypothesis, which is not a particularly effective one (see the scholarly challenges to it here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Documentary_hypothesis#Debates_on_the_hypothesis) for instance) - there's no external evidence for these hypothesized groups, and given that there IS a tremendous record of the various splinter groups (like essenes etc), the lack of external evidence should be viewed as determinative.