What you can say is that there appears to be a change in the way that the Jews conceived of their God at about the time that Cyrus allowed the temple to be rebuilt. This may be connected to Zoroastrianism, or may simply be a result of cultural change as a result of a lenghty period of enforced separation form the previous ideas of Yahweh - no temple, no sacrifices, no battle against other tribes.
with all due respect, i don't think this is an either/or, but a both/and. i don't think that Judaism is an offshoot of Zoroastrianism (though i might be inclined to argue that it might descend in some part from Egyptian monotheism under Akhenaten), but i think the influence of Zoroastrianism on post-exile Judaism is pretty clear, and that the way was cleared for that influence by the period of separation from the normal tribal context of Israel.
Certainly the religion was reorganised and the theology of Judaism changed, but that does not necessitate that those changes were taken from Zoroastrianism, or indeed that Judaism was "recreated".
i think that's a bit hard to swallow. People X live in Land Y for a time, and during that time Religion X comes to look a lot more like Religion Y than it did previously, but that's just coincidence? i'm not buying it.
please keep in mind that i'm not arguing that it "restarted" during the Exile, but to say that Persian religion wasn't a really major influence on Judaism is a bit of a stretch.
re: Metatron and God
IMHO, Metatron is to God like the Borg Queen is to the Borg Collective or Nyarlathotep is to Azathoth - the receptacle of the whole's sense of itself as a single entity. it functions as a face and a sense of identity for an entity too vast and expansive to have either.
no identity can contain Infinity/Eternity, because identity is necessarily defined by boundaries. God is everything, everywhere, and everywhen, and thus, when taken as a whole, no one thing and no one time and no one place in particular. and yet, at the same time, God is said to have and speaks and acts as if God has an identity, a sense of self, and acts in such a way as to make God-self "appear" in a particular time and place. thus, Metatron.
Metatron is the part of God that thinks of God-self as a person. as such, it's limited in time and space and must have defined boundaries. in concept, it's like the biggest finite number that there could ever be. as such, it's not the same as God, but in a sense it's the closest any finite thing could be to being God.
if that makes any sense.
re: the general topic
i strongly recommend Gustav Davidson's A Dictionary of Angels: Including the Fallen Angels as a general reference work on the topic. |
