Written by In 539 BCE, Babylon fell to Cyrus the Great.
The Babylonian account credited Marduk.
The Hebrew prophet credited Yahweh.
And within approximately nineteen years, Darius the Great began carving an enormous royal proclamation into the cliffs of Behistun.
There, in stone, the Persian king named Ahura Mazda as the divine source of his kingship.
And he identified the Lie as the force behind rebellion and deception.
This was not a modern theological reconstruction.
Not a late medieval manuscript.
Not an interpretation invented by Diesel the Magus.
This was the Persian Empire speaking in its own words, in the same historical generation.
Isaiah proclaimed that Yahweh alone was God.
Darius proclaimed that Ahura Mazda gave him kingship.
And Zarathustra’s older Gathic tradition had already asked the Wise Lord who was the Father of cosmic Truth-Order.
The Hebrew text, the Babylonian cylinder, and the Persian carving now stand before us.
Three witnesses to the religious claims surrounding the rise of Persia.
The question is no longer whether Iranian divine language existed somewhere in the distant past.
It was present in the imperial world that transformed Jewish history.
And it was carved into the mountain for future generations to read.
The name Jealous demands exclusive credit.
The stone demands that we examine the evidence.