And his good deed shall be recompensed to him.
But in the Zoroastrian religion men and women render assistance and encouragement to the gods, and we find the chief deity, Ahura Mazda, saying to Zoroaster concerning the Fravashis, or souls, of holy men and women: “Do thou proclaim, O pure Zoroaster, the vigor and strength, the glory, the help and the joy, that are in the Fravashis of the faithful ... do thou tell how they came to help me, how they bring assistance unto me.... Through their brightness and glory, O Zoroaster, I maintain that sky there above.” Favardîn Yast, 1, 2.) As Frederick the Great said, “a king is the chief of subjects,” so with Zoroaster Ahura Mazda is the chief of the faithful; or, as Luther said, “God is strong, but he likes to be helped.”
The similitude in Proverbs xx. 27 is especially important in our inquiry:
The spirit of man is the lamp of Jahveh,
Searching all the chambers of the body.
The word for “spirit” here is Nishma, which occurs in but one other instance in the Bible, namely, in Job xxvi. 4. Job asks:
To whom hast thou uttered words?
And whose spirit came forth from thee?
This chapter of Job (xxvi.) is closely related to Proverbs viii. and ix., both in thought and phraseology: the Rephaim, or phantoms, the “pillars,” the ordering of earth and clouds, the boundary on the deep; and there is an allusion to “the confines of Light and Darkness,” which point to the domains of Wisdom and Dame Folly. Job and the proverbialist surely got these ideas from the same source, and also the word nishma, translated “spirit,” which throughout the Old Testament is ruach, save in the two texts indicated. But there is no text in the Bible where ruach, spirit, or soul, is associated with light like the nishma of the proverb, and in Job nishma evidently means a superhuman spirit. Now there is a Chaldean word, nisma, which in the Persian Bundahis appears as nismô, and is translated by West, “living soul.” The ordinary word for soul in the Parsi scriptures seems to be rûbân, and West regards the two words as meaning the same thing, the breath, or soul, basing this on the following passage of the Bundahis, representing the separation of the first mortal into the first human pair, Mâshya and Mâshyoi:
“And the waists of both were brought close, and so connected together that it was not clear which is the male and which the female, and which is the one whose living soul (nismô) of Aûharmazd (God) is not away (lacking). As it is said thus: ‘Which is created before, the soul (nismô) or the body? And Aûharmazd said that the soul is created before, and the body after, for him who was created; it is given unto the body to produce activity, and the body is created only for activity; hence the conclusion is this, that the soul (rûbân) is created before and the body after. And both of them changed from the shape of a plant into the shape of man, and the breath (nismô) went spiritually into them, which is the soul (rûbân).”[9]