The kernel of the prophetic teachings is already Magian. There is _one_ god--be he called Yahweh, Ahuramazda or Marduk-Baal--who is the principle of good, and all other deities are either impotent or evil. To this doctrine there attached itself the hope of a Messiah, very clear in Isaiah, but also bursting out everywhere during the next centuries, under pressure of an inner necessity. It is the basic idea of Magian religion, for it contains implicitly the conception of the world-historical struggle between Good and Evil, with the power of Evil prevailing in the middle period, and the Good finally triumphant on the Day of Judgment. This moralization of history is common to Persians, Chaldees, and Jews. But with its coming, the idea of the localized people _ipso facto_ vanished and the genesis of Magian nations without earthly homes and boundaries was at hand. The idea of the Chosen People emerged.[331] But it is easy to understand that men of strong blood, and in particular the great families, found these too spiritual ideas repugnant to their natures and harked back to the stout old tribal faiths. According to Cumont’s researches the religion of the Persian kings was polytheistic and did not possess the Haoma sacrament--that is, it was not wholly Zoroastrian. The same is true of most of the kings of Israel, and in all probability also of the last Chaldean Nabu-Nabid (Nabonidus), whose overthrow by Cyrus and his own subjects was in fact made possible by his rejection of the Marduk faith. And it was in the Captivity that circumcision and the (Chaldean) Sabbath were first acquired, as rites, by the Jews. The Babylonian exile, however, did set up an important difference between the Jews and the Persians, in respect, not of the ultimate truths of conscious piety, but of all the facts of actuality and consequently men’s inward attitude to these facts. It was the Yahweh believers who _were permitted_ to go home and the adherents of Ahuramazda who _allowed_ them to do so. Of two small tribes that two hundred years before had probably possessed equal numbers of fighting men, the one had taken possession of a world--while Darius crossed the Danube in the north, his power extended in the south through eastern Arabia to the island of Sokotra on the Somali coast[332]--and the other had become an entirely unimportant pawn of alien policy.