It is clear that not only did they accept a cosmogony from the Babylonians, but they were influenced by the lore of the Zoroastrian Persians, with whom, as with the monotheists or pantheists of Babylon, they would have grounds of sympathy. It is an open question whether their special hostility to images does not date from the time of Persian contact. [369] Concerning the restoration, it has been argued that only a few Jewish exiles returned to Jerusalem "both under Cyrus and under Dareios"; and that, though the temple was rebuilt under Dareios Hystaspis, the builders were not the Gola or returned exiles, but that part of the Judahite population which had not been deported to Babylon. [370] The problem is obscure; [371] but, at least, the separatist spirit of the redacted narratives of Ezra and Nehemiah (which in any case tell of an opposite spirit) is not to be taken as a decisive clue to the character of the new religion. For the rest, the many Jews who remained in Babylon or spread elsewhere in the Persian Empire, and who developed their creed on a non-local basis, were bound to be in some way affected by the surrounding theology. And it is tolerably certain that not only was the notion of angels derived by the Jews from either the Babylonians or the Persians, but their rigid Sabbath and their weekly synagogue meetings came from one or both of these sources. That the Sabbath was an Akkado-Babylonian and Assyrian institution is now well established (G. Smith, Assyrian Eponym Canon, 1875, p. 20; Jastrow, Relig. of Bab. and Assyria, p. 377; Sayce, Hib. Lect. p. 76, and in Variorum Teacher's Bible, ed. 1885, Aids, p. 71). It was before the fact was ascertained that Kuenen wrote of the Sabbath (i, 245) as peculiar to Israel. The Hebrews may have had it before the Exile; but it was clearly not then a great institution; and the mention of Sabbaths in Amos (viii, 5) and Isaiah (i, 13) is one of the reasons for doubting the antiquity of those books. The custom of synagogue meetings on the Sabbath is post-exilic, and may have arisen either in Babylon itself (so Wellhausen, Israel, p. 492) or in imitation of Parsee practice (so Tiele, cited by Kuenen, iii, 35). Compare E. Meyer, Gesch. des Alt. iii (1901), § 131. The same alternative arises with regard to the belief in angels, usually regarded as certainly Persian in origin (cp. Kuenen, iii, 37; Tiele, Outlines, p. 90; and Sack, Die altjüdische Religion, 1889, p. 133). This also could have been Babylonian (Sayce, in Var. Bible, as cited, p. 71); even the demon Asmodeus in the Book of Tobit, usually taken as Persian, being of Babylonian derivation (id.). Cp. Darmesteter's introd. to Zendavesta, 2nd ed. ch. v. On the other hand, the conception of Satan, the Adversary, as seen in 1 Chr. xxi, 1; Zech. iii, 1, 2, seems to come from the Persian Ahriman, though the Satan of Job has not Ahriman's status.