The Bible underneath it

The Beliefs That Arrived Late

Heaven and hell, a devil at war with God, the dead rising: the Bible shows them developing over centuries. The Book of Mormon has them in 600 BC.

The argument

A common argument says Christianity is man-made because it borrowed its biggest ideas from Zoroastrianism, the religion of ancient Persia. That claim goes further than the evidence. But it is built on something scholars do agree on, and that part matters a great deal for the Book of Mormon.

In the Hebrew Bible, a devil at war with God, a heaven and hell for the dead, and a resurrection at the end of time show up late, mostly after the Jews came home from exile in Babylon. The Book of Mormon has all of them, fully formed, in a family that left Jerusalem around 600 BC, before that exile.

1. The satan who worked for God

In Hebrew, ha-satan means “the accuser.” With that article, the word appears in only two books of the Hebrew Bible, Job and Zechariah. In both, he is a member of God’s heavenly court.

You can watch the change happen inside the Bible itself. The same story, David taking a census of Israel, is told twice. In the earlier telling, God makes David do it. In the later retelling, written after the exile, the role has been handed to Satan.

The contradictions page treats this pair as a contradiction. It is also a timeline. Many scholars read the later writer as uncomfortable with God causing the harm, and as handing it to a satan figure. (In Chronicles the word has no article, so it may be a name or simply “an adversary.”)

2. Everyone went to Sheol

For most of the Hebrew Bible, the dead, good and bad alike, go to Sheol, a shadowy place under the earth. The King James Version usually translates it “the grave” or “hell,” which hides how little it resembles the hell of later Christianity. There is no reward there, and no punishment either.

3. The resurrection arrives last

Biblical scholars widely agree that the first clear statement of a resurrection of the dead in the Hebrew Bible is in the last chapter of Daniel. Daniel is generally dated to around 165 BC, because its visions describe the persecution under the Greek king Antiochus IV in detail and then stop being accurate: Daniel 11:45 has him die in the land of Israel, but he died in Persia in 164 BC.

4. Where the ideas came from is debated

This is where the borrowing argument goes too far. The idea that Judaism borrowed these beliefs from Persia during and after the exile is a real scholarly theory, defended by experts like the historian of Zoroastrianism Mary Boyce. It is also seriously disputed.

So set Persia aside. Whether these ideas came from Persia, from Greece, or grew inside Judaism on their own, the Hebrew Bible shows them arriving late. That part is not in dispute, and it is all the next section needs.

5. The Book of Mormon has them in 600 BC

The Book of Mormon opens “in the commencement of the first year of the reign of Zedekiah” (1 Nephi 1:4), dated in the Church’s own edition to about 600 BC. Lehi’s family leaves Jerusalem before its destruction in 586 BC, before the Jews lived under Persia, and centuries before Daniel. Here is what his sons preach, within a few decades of leaving.

What is true on the other side

• Latter-day Saints have a real answer. The Church teaches that the gospel, Satan and the resurrection included, was known from Adam onward: “And thus the Gospel began to be preached, from the beginning” (Moses 5:58). On that view, the Old Testament is thin on these ideas because “many plain and precious things” were taken out of it (1 Nephi 13:28), and the Book of Mormon preserves what was lost.
• FAIR argues that ideas are older than their first surviving text. Its guidance on alleged anachronisms begins with “look hard at the historical context” and notes there are few truly new ideas under the sun. That is fair: a belief can exist before anyone writes it down.
• There are earlier hints. Isaiah 26:19 speaks of the dead living again. A minority of scholars date it before the exile; most date that section after it, and some read the verse as national restoration. The question is open.

The common rebuttals

“The Bible lost these teachings. The Book of Mormon restored them.”

Then the losses should run backward through time, with the oldest texts the fullest. The Bible shows the opposite. The census story did not lose Satan; the later version added him. The ideas thicken as the centuries go on, which is what growth looks like, not loss.

“Revelation can teach a prophet things before anyone else knows them.”

It could. But revelation would not need to arrive in the phrasing of the King James translators of 1611, quoting a New Testament book that would not be written for seven hundred years. “Lake of fire and brimstone” is not an idea that happened to come early. It is a sentence that came from a specific book.

“Ezekiel already had resurrection, long before Daniel.”

Ezekiel tells you what his vision means: “these bones are the whole house of Israel.” It is the nation coming back from exile, not individuals rising from their graves. It is a vivid picture on the way to the later belief, which is the point.

What this means

None of this proves Christianity was copied from Persia. That claim is weaker than it is usually made to sound. What it shows is that these beliefs have a history you can trace through the Bible: a prosecutor in God’s court becoming God’s enemy, a shadowy grave becoming heaven and hell, a hope for the nation becoming a promise to every person.

A book written in 600 BC should not know how that history turns out. The Book of Mormon knows it in the words of 1611.

Which points to when it was actually written.