“The worshipper of Nature finds the artificial, well measured halls of a temple or of a church too narrow, too sultry; he feels at his ease only under the lofty, boundless sky which appears to the contemplation of his senses.”¹

“The beliefs and observances of the Old Iranian and Vedic religions were evidently shaped by the physical and social background shared by the Indo-Iranian peoples.”²

Together, the words of Ludwig Feuerbach and Mary Boyce summarize both the path that this research has taken and the line of argument presented in the following chapters. Feuerbach's supposition connects (perhaps unintentionally) to the observation of the ancient Greek historian Herodotus that the Persians built no temples and worshipped outdoors. Boyce's comments seem to serve as an explanation for this apparent lack of religious edifices: the religion of the ancient Iranians was shaped, in part, by the physical landscape. It is this explanation which constitutes the overarching thesis of this research: the ecological landscape in which a society develops will inform the development of that society's religious culture, including its 'beliefs and observances'. The specific connection for which I will argue in this writing is the correlation between agriculturally marginal landscapes and the development of monotheism. Using comparative case studies, I will argue that the respective religions of the ancient Iranians and early Israelites developed in pragmatic response to the same ecological landscapes that gave rise to their mobile societies.