Month: October 2026

The destruction of the Temple removed the institution around which Judaism had been organised: the priesthood, the sacrifices and the pilgrim feasts. What replaced it was a religion of study, built by Pharisaic sages who had learned their traditions by…

Between Pompey’s entry into Jerusalem in 63 BCE and the crushing of Simon bar Kokhba in 135 CE, Judaea moved from Hasmonean independence to client kingship, then to direct Roman rule, two catastrophic wars, and finally to the loss of…

In the last two centuries of the Second Temple, Judaism was a field of competing schools. Each had its own view of scripture, fate, purity, the Temple and the end of days, and each took its own position toward the…

Alexander’s conquest of the Levant in 332 BCE drew the small temple-state of Judea into the Greek world. Over the next three centuries the Persian pattern of a priestly community under a tolerant empire broke down. In its place came…

The half-century between the fall of Jerusalem to Nebuchadnezzar and the conquest of Babylon by Cyrus the Great is the point where the history of Israel meets the history of Iran. The Judaism that came back from Babylon was not…

Between about 1000 and 586 BCE the highland tribes of chapter 29 became first a kingdom, then two rival kingdoms, and finally a single surviving Judah whose priests and scribes wrote the core of the Hebrew Bible. This is the…

The books of Genesis to Joshua tell Israel’s founding story. The patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob receive the promise of the land. Seventy souls go down to Egypt. After 430 years of sojourn and bondage, Moses leads some 600,000 men…

Part 4 turns from Iran to the small highland people whose god became the God of three world religions. The scholarly literature in the library agrees on one starting point. Israelite religion did not arrive from outside Canaan as a…

When the last mithraea of the West were destroyed, Mithra did not disappear. In the Iranian world his name passed into a new universal religion, Manichaeism, which carried it from Mesopotamia to Central Asia. His festivals survived the Arab conquest…

The relation of Mithraism to early Christianity is the most argued question in the study of the Roman cult. The ancient Christian writers did not deny the likeness of the rites. They explained it as demonic forgery, and in the…