Religions with steppe and desert origins - Zoroastrianism and Judaism

Iran, also known as Persia, is located in the middle of dry land and is 4.5 times the size of Japan. In the 7th century BC, Zoroastrian noted the regular cycle of day and night and used the struggle between the good god of light, Ahula Mazda, and the evil god of darkness to illustrate nature and society. In the end, the God of Light won and the Final Judgment was conducted. This is the basic doctrine of Zoroastrianism.

The cycle of day and night is repeated, and Zoroastrianism sees this as a fierce struggle of the gods. It can be said that Zoroastrianism is the religion of the steppe. Subsequently, Zoroastrianism became the state religion of the Achaemedian and Sassanid dynasties established by the Persians. For 1,000 years before the formation of Islam, Zoroastrianism was the core religion of West Asia.

In the Palestinian Jewish society living on the periphery of the desert, the suffering experience of being a "babylonian prisoner" (586-538 BC) has shaped outstanding prophets such as Isaiah and Jeremiah, who are very authoritative. These prophets made a pact with jehovah, the one God they believed, and on the basis of this covenant was Judaism. Jehovah and the God of Christianity, allah of Islam, etc. belong to the absolute one God, which can be said to be the god of the desert. The Jews were a commercial people with a wide range of activities and contact with a large number of different civilizations. Thus, Judaism absorbed ideas from the desert and steppe, such as the idea of "homogeneous revenge" in Mesopotamia and the idea of the Last Judgment of Zoroastrianism in Iran and Central Asia. It is well known that later Christianity and Islam emerged under the influence of Judaism.