Did Daniel get his ideas from another religion?

Perhaps you've heard a claim that the Bible borrows from other religions.

For instance, Daniel 12 tells us about coming the resurrection of the dead.  Yet, the popular culture (and sometimes academic) myth is that Persian Zoroastrianism influenced this belief. 

I asked Grok about this, already knowing the answer.  However, I was surprised how thorough it was.  It's a shame that anyone still believes in this myth today.

Here's what it said:

The “Daniel got resurrection from the Magi” claim is common in popular writing and still appears in some academic work. It is much weaker than it sounds once you look at the sources, the Hebrew Bible’s own trajectory, and the actual differences between the two systems.

Daniel 12:2 is the first explicit statement of a dual, individual, eschatological resurrection in the Hebrew Bible: many who sleep in the dust wake, some to everlasting life, some to shame and contempt. That does not mean the idea dropped in from Persia. Several lines of evidence cut the other way.

1. The Zoroastrian evidence is later and less clear than the slogan implies.

The oldest Zoroastrian layer, the Gathas, does not clearly teach bodily resurrection. Edwin Yamauchi’s judgment is still useful: there is no certain affirmation of resurrection by Zarathustra in the Gathas.

Clearer language appears in the Younger Avesta (especially Yasht 19: the dead will rise, existence made brilliant, no more aging or decay). Dating those hymns is contested. Many put them in or after the Achaemenid period. The full, systematic picture—Saoshyant raising the dead over 57 years, bodies reconstituted from the elements, cosmic renovation (frashokereti)—is spelled out in Pahlavi books written in the 9th–10th centuries AD. Those books preserve older tradition, but they are not 6th-century BC textbooks sitting on Daniel’s desk.

Greek writers (Theopompus, 4th century BC) report that the Magi believed people would live again and be immortal. That is a second-hand report of some Magian belief in revivification. It is not the later, detailed Zoroastrian system, and it does not prove Jews borrowed the doctrine of Daniel 12.

2. The Hebrew Bible already had the raw materials.

Daniel 12 does not appear in a vacuum. It reads like a tightening of language already in Israel’s Scriptures:

• Deuteronomy 32:39: “I kill and I make alive.”
• 1 Samuel 2:6 (Hannah): “The LORD kills and brings to life; he brings down to Sheol and raises up.”
• Individual raisings: Elijah (1 Kings 17), Elisha (2 Kings 4; 13:21).
• Hosea 6:1–2 and 13:14 (8th century): revive, raise up, ransom from Sheol.
• Isaiah 26:19: “Your dead shall live; their bodies shall rise. You who dwell in the dust, awake and sing for joy.”
• Ezekiel 37: dry bones live (national in context, but the imagery is bodily and was later read that way).
• Job 19:25–27.

Daniel 12:2 uses the same cluster as Isaiah 26:19—sleep, dust, awaking. John Day and others have traced a literary line Hosea → Isaiah 26–27 → Daniel 12. That is inner-biblical development, not an Avestan loan.

Even if one dates Isaiah 24–27 late, the conceptual soil (God as the one who gives life, Sheol as not the last word, justice for the faithful dead) is older than the Persian period.

3. The two doctrines do not match closely.

Parallels are real. Dependence is not thereby proved.

• Burial vs. exposure. Daniel’s dead sleep in the dust of the earth. Jewish practice is burial. Zoroastrian practice treats the corpse as polluting (nasu) and exposes it so it will not defile earth, fire, or water. Later Pahlavi texts then have the elements give the body back (bones from earth, blood from water, hair from plants). The “awakening from dust/sleep” metaphor fits Jewish graves; it is foreign to Magian funerary logic. Scholars noticed this mismatch more than a century ago.
• Who rises, and why. Daniel 12 is selective (“many”) and moral: everlasting life vs. shame. It answers theodicy—faithful sufferers and apostates will not stay in the same condition. Classic Zoroastrian expectation is universal resurrection followed by purification and cosmic renewal. Different problem, different shape.
• Theology. Jewish resurrection sits inside exclusive Yahwism and covenant. Zoroastrian eschatology sits inside a dualistic cosmos (Ahura Mazda vs. Angra Mainyu) and a savior figure (Saoshyant) who is not in Daniel 12. Jewish writers consistently refuse an independent evil principle (see Isaiah 45:7). Adaptation would have to be so thorough that “influence” starts to mean little more than “they both thought about the end.”

4. Contact does not equal borrowing.

Jews lived under Persian rule. They did not live as theological sponges. Ezra–Nehemiah stress separation, Torah, and distinct identity. There is no contemporary Jewish text that says, “We learned this from the Magi.” Shared ancient Near Eastern concerns (justice after death, national restoration, God’s power over Sheol) can produce similar language without one religion copying the other’s system.

Some specialists have even suggested the traffic could run the other way in later centuries, or that both traditions drew on older Near Eastern stock. Parallels are easy; a documented channel of transmission for this doctrine is not.

5. Why the myth persists.

It is tidy. Daniel is often dated to the 2nd century BC; Persia is earlier; therefore Persia must be the source. That chronology is not required if one takes Daniel’s own setting seriously, and even on a late date the Hebrew precursors still exist. The claim also fits an older history-of-religions habit: treat Israel as a late borrower rather than as a people whose own Scriptures already speak of the God who kills and makes alive.

Jon Levenson and others have argued that resurrection grew out of Israel’s own convictions: YHWH as life-giver, the land promise, covenant fidelity, and the intolerable thought that the wicked and the martyrs share the same dust forever. Daniel 12 is a crystallization of that trajectory, not an import stamp.

None of this requires pretending there are no similarities. It does require distinguishing resemblance from derivation. Daniel 12 stands in the line of Isaiah 26, Hosea, and the older confession that the LORD brings down to Sheol and raises up. That is a better account of the text than the popular Zoroastrian-origin story.