Francesca Stavrakopoulou

So the Hebrew Bible is a collection of different texts and traditions.

It wasn't written beginning with Genesis and all the way through.

It's a process of reinvention the whole time.

And throughout this whole period, Yahweh's prioritisation is becoming such that he becomes a god that doesn't look anything like the Yahweh of the first half of the Iron Age.

He's pretty much on his own.

He has some kind of desensitized, if you like, gods who have now become angels or kind of messengers.

his family he's lost his household he's he's lost his kind of his collaborators his colleagues it's terribly lonely I think for Yahweh which is why you then get stories saying he goes up to finds Abraham in Iraq and says hey do you want to be my friend

Zoroastrianism is the name that's given to a religious system.

It's named after one of its key teachers at around this time, around the 5th century BCE, although it has much earlier traditions.

And at its heart is the deity Ahura Mazda, a deity that on the surface looks like really kind of liberal and tolerant.

This is a god who's like welcomes in the gods of all other peoples and kind of all those deities and their profiles and their kind of portfolios are collapsed

into that of Ahura Mazda.

So he is known as the god of heaven.

He is the god who created heaven and earth.

It looks very fluffy and very nice.

It's actually massively imperial.

Ahura Mazda is a very colonial form of god.

It colonises other people's deities, other people's traditions and takes them on.

But it may well be that Ahura Mazda and Zoroastrianism of the 5th century, 4th century onwards is a big influence

in the reshaping, reworking of Yahweh worship, particularly because... Because these guys are in the same court.