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>The Zoroastrians believe that since the first couple committed the carnal sin in thought, word and deed, both they and their descendants became tainted for ever. In spite ofthe fact that the Bundahishn dates only to a time when their forebears first migrated from Iran to India in the ninth century, the text is thought to be based on a now lost Zend original of great antiquity
>In many ways the creation story presented in the Bundahishn might be compared directly with the story ofthe Fall of Man found in the Book of Genesis. Yet even more remarkable is the knowledge that, in some Persian teachings, Angra Mainyu is known as 'the old serpent having two feet' words that immediately conjured an image of Belial, the Watcher with a 'visage like a viper' found in the Testament of Amram
>I would not be the first person to spot the obvious comparisons between the Persian and Hebrew accounts of the Fall of Man. As early as 1888 C. Staniland Wake, in his ground-breaking work, Serpent-Worship and Other Essays, admitted, after discussing the similarities between the two quite separate myths, that:
>"The Persian account of the fall and its consequences agrees so closely with the Hebrew story when stripped of its figurative language that we cannot doubt that they reftr to the same legend, and the use of figurative language in the latter may well lead us to believe that it was of later date than the former [i.e. the Bundahishn]."
>There is every reason to believe that the Judaic concept of the Fall of Man, the Serpent of Temptation and the fall of the angels derive either directly or indirectly from Zoroastrian or pre-Zoroastrian sources. The serpent of the Bundahishn is Angra Mainyu, who is therefore the figurative form of the daevas (or fallen ahuras) who seduce humanity at the time of the Fall, just as the Serpent of Temptation is the personification of Belial, Shemyaza or Azazel, the names given to the leader of the Watchers in Enochian and Dead Sea religious literature
