Zoroastrian Influence on Judaism, Christianity, and Greek Philosophy

The question of Zoroastrian influence on Second Temple Judaism has occupied historians of religion since at least the late 19th century, motivated by a cluster of theological developments that appear, or intensify markedly, in Jewish literature only after the Babylonian exile and the subsequent two centuries of Achaemenid Persian rule over Judea, from Cyrus's decree of 539/538 BCE permitting the Jewish return until Alexander's conquest in 332 BCE: a heightened cosmic dualism pitting God against a increasingly personified, quasi-independent adversary figure (Satan, whose role expands considerably between the Hebrew Bible's comparatively minor Satan of Job and the fully developed adversarial figure of later apocalyptic literature), a developed angelology and demonology organizing spiritual beings into structured hierarchies, and a doctrine of individual bodily resurrection and final judgment that appears only in the latest strata of the Hebrew Bible, most explicitly in Daniel 12:2 (widely dated by scholars to the 2nd century BCE, during the Maccabean crisis) rather than in earlier biblical texts.