“Sacrifice and offering thou wouldst not
(Thou hast furnished me this body)—
In whole burnt offerings and sin offerings thou delighted not:
Then said I (in that chapter of the book it is written for me),
‘Lo, I come to do thy will, O God.’”
The sentence preserved by Eusebius, however, shows that his attitude toward sacrifices was not merely to “lift” from men (Heb. x. 9, ἀναιρεῖ) the burden of sacrifice, but to denounce it as an offering to the devil. “Unless ye cease from sacrificing, the Wrath shall not cease from you.”
In this sentence “the Wrath” (ἡ ὀργή) is clearly a personification. It does not in the same form occur elsewhere in the Bible. Matthew and Mark report John the Baptist as speaking of “the impending wrath,” and Paul occasionally gives “Wrath” a quasi-personification (e. g., “children of Wrath,” Eph. ii. 1–3). These expressions, and the “destroyer” Abaddon or Apollyon, of Revelations ix. and (xii. 12) the devil “in great temper” (θυμὸν), all show that the Jewish mind had become familiar with the idea of a dark and evil power quite detached from official relation to Jahveh, no longer “the wrath of God” executing divine judgments, but organized Violence, eager to afflict mankind as the creation of his enemy.
In the “Wisdom of Solomon” (xviii.) there is a complete picture of the two opposing Destroyers. The divine destroyer (“thine Almighty Word”) leaps down with his sword and slays the firstborn of Egypt; the antagonist Destroyer begins the same kind of work among the Israelites in Egypt, but Moses by prayer and the “propitiation of incense” sets himself “against the Wrath” and overcomes him,—“not with physical strength, nor force of arms, but with a word.” The incense used by Moses to put the demon to flight recalls the “perfume” used by Tobit, on the advice of the angel, to put to flight Asmodeus; and Asmodeus is notoriously the Persian Aêshma, a name meaning “Wrath,” who occupies so large space in the Parsî scriptures.[5] The especial antagonist of Aêshma “of the wounding spear,” is Sraosha, “the incarnate Word, a mighty-speared god.” (Farvardin Yast, 85.) As Moses overcomes “the Wrath” “with a word,” Zoroaster is given a form of words to conquer Aêshma (“Praise to Armaîti, the propitious!”) and the Vendîdâd says, “The fiend becomes weaker and weaker at every one [repetition] of those words.” The Zamyâd Yast says, “The Word of falsehood smites, but the Word of truth shall smite it.” Aêshma is the child of Ahriman, the Deceiver of the World, and a Parsî would recognize him in the declaration ascribed to Jesus, “The devil is a liar and so is his father.” (John viii. 44.)
That Jesus regarded the whole realm of evil as absolutely antagonistic to the Good is reflected in the epistle “To the Hebrews.” There his mission is to abolish the devil (ii. 14), which is very different from abolishing death (2 Tim. i. 10). For a long time the devil was suppressed in the “Lord’s Prayer,” but in that brief collection of Talmudic ejaculations the only original thing is, “Deliver us from the evil one.” In the Clementine Homilies Jesus is quoted as having said, “The evil one is the tempter,” and “Give not a pretext to the evil one.” Nay, the single clause preserved in Matthew, that it is an enemy that sows tares,—these being as much parts of nature as corn,—is a sentence that divides the Ahrimanic creation from the Ahuramazdean creation as clearly and profoundly as anything ascribed to Zoroaster.
Theological harmonists have for centuries been at work on the contrarious doctrines of all scriptures, and even among the Parsîs some kind of metaphysical alliance has taken place between the Kingdoms of Good and Evil. Devout Christians find it quite consistent that one person of the trinity should say, “I create good and I create evil,” and another person of the trinity should say of natural evil, “An enemy hath done this.” But no such harmony existed in the Jerusalem of Jesus. Under a teaching that symbolized the deity as the Sun, shining alike on the thankful and thankless, individually, desiring no sacrifices, and concentrating human effort against the forces of evil in nature, in society—the evil principle—Jahveh falls like lightning from heaven. Like “the blameless man” of the “Wisdom of Solomon,” Jesus “sets himself against the Wrath,” however sanctified as the Wrath of God, and sees all sacrifices as eucharists of the Adversary. He not only repudiates the name “Jahveh,” but tells the official agents of Jahvism that their god is his devil. (John viii. 44).