In striking contrast to the mild and humane character of Cyrus stands that of the licentious and revengeful David, a "man after God's own heart."
"As for the heads of those that compass me about, let the mischief of their own lips cover them."
"Let burning coals fall upon them: let them be cast into the fire; into deep pits, that they rise not up again."(109)
"Happy shall he be that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones."(110)
109) Psalms cxl.
110) Ibid., cxxxvii.
No one I think can read the Avestas without being impressed by the prominence there given to the subjects of temperance and virtue. In their efforts to purify religion, and in the attempts to return to their more ancient faith, the disciples of Zoroaster, as early as eight hundred years before Christ, had adopted a highly spiritualized conception of the Deity. They had taught in various portions of Asia Minor the doctrine of one God, a dual entity by means of which all things were created. They taught also the doctrine of a resurrection and that of the immortality of the soul. It was at this time that they originated, or at least propounded, the doctrine of hell and the devil, a belief exactly suited to the then weakened mental condition of mankind, and from which humanity has not yet gained sufficient intellectual and moral strength to free itself. This Persian devil, which had become identified with winter or with the absence of the sun's rays, was now Aryhman, or the "powers of darkness," and was doubtless the source whence sprang the personal devil elaborated at a later age by Laotse in China.
As the Jews had no writings prior to the time of Ezra or Jeremiah, it is now believed that many of the doctrines incorporated in their sacred books were borrowed from Persian, Indian, and Egyptian sources. Resurrection from the dead, or the resurrection of the body, was for hundreds of years prior to the birth of Christ an established article of Egyptian and Persian faith, while spiritual regeneration, symbolized by the outward typification of "being born again," was the beginning of a new life and an admission to the heavenly state.
In the Khordah Avesta we have the following concerning the doctrine of the resurrection and that of future rewards and punishments.
"I am wholly without doubt in the existence of the good Mazdaycinian faith, in the coming of the resurrection and the later body, in the stepping over the bridge Chinvat, in an invariable recompense of good deeds and their reward, and of bad deeds and their punishment."