In order to understand the significance of a potential identification of the audience with the “prophet-founder” Moses, it is important to identify the ways in which the texts articulate this character. Using Schneider’s method of “verbing the character,” it is possible to identify some of the ways in which the literary figures of Moses and Zarathustra are constructed through their presentation as subject-actors and objects acted upon. Before turning to an analysis of the data, it is important to observe the difficulty of comparing these characters as independent conceptions. There seems to be little question that philological evidence places the composition of the Old Avestan texts in a time and place away from any potential communities of worship dedicated to YHWH. The reverse, unfortunately, is far from established. The earliest reasonable date available to put to the composition of the Torah appears to be the translation of the texts into Greek in the latter half of the first millennium BCE. The presence of Mazda-worshippers across the Achaemenid Persian empire by this time would seem to make contact almost inevitable. Like the absence of autochthonous temple-building culture and depictions of the Deity, it seems very reasonable to assume that some form of these texts deemed religious functioned within communities of YHWH-worshippers for enough time so as to resist extensive assimilation and dissolution under the pressures of more politically powerful religious cultures. Despite this, the presence of the Sargon-esque birth narrative (concerning the Akkadian Sargon I, but dated to the Neo-Assyrian Sargon II) in the Moses story appears to speak to the influence of neighboring religions on the development of these texts.¹ Thus, it is important to examine the figuration of the building block of “prophet-founder” narratives in both Hebrew and Old Avestan texts with an awareness that the latter may have shaped, to an extent, the former. This examination is significant to the discussion taken up in this chapter because it is clear that however externally influenced the composition of particular details of the Torah might have been, the construction of the Moses character would have had to be designed in a manner deemed acceptable to an audience of YHWH-worshippers in order to survive. This dissertation has shown that such communities seem to have preserved, rather than abandoned, particular formations of building blocks that appear to have been marked by the mobile pastoralist social and agriculturally marginal environmental contexts in which they likely developed.