Traditions: Zoroastrian Gathas; Bahá’í Hidden Words Motif: Treatment of the poor Connection verdict: Independent ethical resonance in distinct religious settings Article status: Expanded Date: 2026-11-01
Summary
Both passages make regard for poor people a test of religious standing.
Read the two scenes
Yasna 34.5 speaks from vulnerability: the petitioner asks whether divine powers can protect “your poor man” and sets that request against bands of robbers. Poverty is situated in a threatened community, not merely an occasion for private sympathy. The Hidden Word addresses the person tempted to look down on a poor neighbor. It reverses the hierarchy by presenting divine sight as favoring the poor and exposing the proud. The two texts converge in moral concern while assigning different roles to the reader.
What connects—and what does not
Yasna 34.5 asks Mazda, Right, and Good Thought to protect a poor person against robber bands; Hidden Words Arabic 25 warns against boasting over the poor.
The Gatha is a communal plea for protection; the later aphorism rebukes the superior attitude of a prosperous addressee.
Why read them side by side?
A shared concern for the poor becomes more precise when one passage is read as plea and the other as rebuke.
Sources and reading notes
- Yasna 34.5 — The speaker asks Mazda, Right, and Good Thought to protect the poor man and renounces robber gangs. Gathic Avestan hymn, likely pre-Achaemenid but scholarly dating varies; medieval manuscripts are much later. This chapter uses L. H. Mills English translation, as marked by Avesta.org.
- Bahá’u’lláh, Hidden Words, Arabic 25 — The addressee is told not to vaunt himself over the poor; the divine speaker sees his condition. Bahá’u’lláh’s 1858 text in Shoghi Effendi’s English translation; numbered aphorism in the official Bahá’í Reference Library.
Research limit
A named parallel can establish literary reuse or related tradition; a general resemblance alone cannot prove borrowing. Linked editions and translations vary. Where a source is identified as secondary orientation, the comparison does not claim direct close reading of that tradition’s primary text.