― Foreign Fire ―

Zoroastrianism

The Persian doctrine being preached from the modern pulpit

―

The church is not teaching you Moses. On six of its most confident doctrines, the church is teaching you Zoroaster — and calling it Christianity.

The Sin That Killed Two Priests

Nadab and Abihu were priests. Sons of Aaron. They stood at Yahuah's altar and offered incense to Him — the right altar, the right God — but with fire He had not commanded. They died on the spot. The Hebrew calls it esh zarah — strange fire, foreign fire. Yahuah does not grade worship on sincerity. He grades it on whether He asked for it (Leviticus 10:1–2).

This study is about foreign fire in the modern Christian pulpit. It is about a Persian prophet named Zoroaster, and six doctrines the church preaches every Sunday that came from him — not from Moses.

Where the Doctrines Came From

Western theologians blame Greek philosophy when a Christian doctrine does not match the Torah. Greek philosophy is the costume. The body underneath is older and further east. Zoroaster organized a complete religious system long before Plato was born — two cosmic gods at war, named celestial hierarchies, organized demonic armies, souls sorted at death, eternal sacred fire. You can still see the same religion operating today in Hindu temples in India, because Hinduism and Zoroastrianism grew from the same Indo-Iranian root — same named celestial beings, same fire-priests, same immediate sorting at death. But it was the Persian branch, not the Indian, that conquered Babylon. When Cyrus the Persian released the Jews in 539 BC, Israel lived under Zoroastrian rule for two hundred years. They came home soaked in Persian assumptions. Greek philosophy later refined those assumptions into philosophical language and the church inherited the package. The source is not Athens. The source is Persia.

The Six Doctrines

1. Satan. The Hebrew satan is ha-satan — the accuser, a courtroom prosecutor under Yahuah's authority (Job 1, Zechariah 3). Zoroaster taught two cosmic gods at war, with Angra Mainyu running his own kingdom against Ahura Mazda. The church preaches Zoroaster's rival god and calls him biblical.
2. Angels. The Torah does not name a single angel. Daniel and Enoch later name Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, and Uriel — and that may be genuine revelation. But Zoroaster taught a devotional system around named celestial beings, where worshippers pray to them by name for healing and protection. The church prays to Saint Michael for protection and asks guardian angels to watch over children. The names may be real. The praying-to-them is foreign fire.
3. Demons and Territorial Spirits. Deuteronomy 32:8–9 teaches that Yahuah assigned the nations to heavenly beings, and Psalm 82 shows Him judging them when they became corrupt. Territorial spirits are biblical. What Zoroaster added was the dualistic packaging — two roughly equal armies in cosmic war, with the outcome genuinely contested. The church preaches dualism, treating Satan as Yahuah's near-equal opponent. The Bible teaches rebellion under sovereignty, not a 50/50 cosmic standoff.
4. Heaven and Hell. The Torah says the dead sleep in Sheol until the resurrection (Ecclesiastes 9:5, Psalm 6:5). Zoroaster taught the Chinvat Bridge — souls sorted immediately at death, paradise or torment right then. Every funeral where the preacher says "she's looking down on us" or "he's in a better place" is preaching the Bridge. The Torah preaches the grave.
5. Resurrection. The Bible teaches one stage — sleep, then rise at the trumpet (Daniel 12:2, 1 Thessalonians 4:16). Zoroaster taught two stages — immediate sorting of the soul, then bodily resurrection later. The church preaches both: "grandma is in heaven right now" and "she will rise on the last day." Those two statements only fit together in Zoroaster's system, not in Moses'.
6. Fire. In the Torah, fire from Yahuah is a specific event — the bush, Sinai, the altar Yahuah Himself kindled (Leviticus 9:24). Nadab and Abihu died for offering fire He did not command. Zoroaster made fire a permanent institution — priests in rotation feeding sacred flames that must never die. Every sanctuary lamp, every eternal flame, every Olympic torch, every altar candle lit by clergy in rotation is a Zoroastrian fire temple with another building on top.

Foreign Fire

Six doctrines. None of them in Moses. Every one of them in Zoroaster. The church that claims to be the continuation of Moses is, on its most confident teachings about the spiritual realm, the continuation of Zoroaster. Same God on the lips. Different religion underneath.

This is Nadab and Abihu. Right altar. Right God. Wrong fire. And Yahuah's response to foreign fire — even from priests, even inside His own tabernacle, even offered sincerely in His own name — is not nuance. It is death. The way home is the same way back. Put down the Persian fire. Return to what Moses taught.

The church is not teaching you Moses. On six of its most confident doctrines, the church is teaching you Zoroaster — and calling it Christianity.

Introduction

▸ Leviticus 10:1–2

"And Nadab and Abihu, the sons of Aaron, took either of them his censer, and put fire therein, and put incense thereon, and offered strange fire before Yahuah, which he commanded them not. And there went out fire from before Yahuah, and devoured them, and they died before Yahuah."

Nadab and Abihu were priests. They were sons of Aaron. They were in the tabernacle offering incense to Yahuah. They did not go to Egypt and bow before a golden calf. They did not offer their worship to Baal. They brought fire before Yahuah — the right direction, the right altar, the right God — but He did not command it. And for that, they died.

The Hebrew phrase is esh zarah (אש זרה) — strange fire, or foreign fire. Not fire offered to another god. Fire offered to Yahuah that He did not authorize. That is the standard. Yahuah does not grade worship on sincerity. He grades it on whether He asked for it.

This study is about foreign fire in the modern Christian pulpit. Specifically, it is about a Persian prophet named Zoroaster — who lived somewhere between 1500 and 1000 BC, taught a complete religious system with two cosmic gods at war, named angels, organized demons, souls sorted at death, and eternal fire — and whose doctrines Israel came back from exile carrying. Those doctrines are preached every Sunday in every evangelical, Catholic, and Orthodox church on earth. Most pastors have no idea where they got them.

The test is simple. Does Moses teach it? If Moses does not teach it, and Zoroaster does, then it is foreign fire — no matter how much of the Bible you wrap around it.

One Wellspring, Three Rivers

Western theologians have pointed at the wrong suspect for centuries. When a doctrine in the church does not match the Torah, the standard answer is "that came from Greek thought." Plato. Aristotle. The Stoics. Neoplatonism. The blame lands in Athens.

Greek philosophy is the costume. It is not the body underneath. The body is older, and the body is Persian.

Zoroaster organized a complete religious system long before any Greek philosopher was born. Two cosmic gods at war. Named celestial hierarchies. Organized demonic armies. Souls sorted at death. Eternal sacred fire maintained by priests. Two-stage afterlife. Every one of those doctrines was already a fixed framework in Persia centuries before Plato. When the Persian Empire conquered the Greek world for three hundred years, those doctrines crossed into Greek thought and were translated into philosophical language. Greek philosophy did not invent the doctrines. Greek philosophy dressed them in togas.

And there is a sibling-witness in the East. Hinduism teaches the same framework: devas (named celestial beings with territorial assignments), asuras (an organized opposing force), immediate sorting of souls at death (Svarga and Naraka), and eternal sacred fire maintained by priests (Agni, the fire god). Hinduism teaches it because Hinduism and Zoroastrianism grew from the same ancient Indo-Iranian root. They are siblings. The Persian branch went west. The Indian branch stayed east. You can still see the religion operating today in India, on the same blueprint.

But it was the Persian branch — not the Indian — that conquered Babylon, ruled the Jews for two hundred years, and pumped its doctrines into post-exilic Judaism.

In 586 BC, Babylon destroyed the Temple and carried Judah into exile. In 539 BC, Cyrus the Great — a Persian, and a Zoroastrian — conquered Babylon and released the Jews. From that point until Alexander the Great in 332 BC, Israel lived under Persian rule. That is the window. That is when the infection entered.

Before the exile, the Hebrew Scriptures teach one picture of the spiritual world. After the exile, that picture changes — not because Yahuah revealed completely new doctrines, but because Israel came home soaked in Persian assumptions and read those assumptions back into its own Scriptures. The book of Daniel, written during the exile, names individual angels for the first time in the Hebrew canon. The intertestamental books (1 Enoch, Jubilees, the War Scroll at Qumran) flesh out a cosmic war between matched armies. By the time the New Testament is written, the whole framework is assumed background.

So when this study traces a doctrine to Zoroaster, remember the picture. One wellspring — Persia. Three rivers carrying it forward — Hinduism showing the religion still alive in the East, Greek philosophy refining it for the West, and post-exilic Judaism delivering it directly into the church. When a pastor teaches one of these doctrines from a Christian pulpit, the source is not Athens. The source is older and further east. And that source has a name: Zoroaster.

What follows is a walk through six of those doctrines. In each case: what Moses taught, what Zoroaster taught, where the shift shows up in Scripture after the exile, and what your church preaches this Sunday.

1. Satan

The Hebrew word is ha-satan (השטן) — the accuser. The definite article matters. It is a job, not a name. Like the prosecutor in a courtroom.

In Job 1, the sons of Elohim come to present themselves before Yahuah, and the satan comes among them. Yahuah speaks first. Yahuah brings up Job. The satan responds with an accusation. Yahuah grants limited permission. The satan acts only within the limits Yahuah sets. In Zechariah 3, the same picture — the satan stands at Yahuah's right hand to accuse Joshua the high priest, and Yahuah rebukes him. In 1 Chronicles 21, a satan moves David to number Israel; the parallel in 2 Samuel 24 says Yahuah moved him. The accuser is an agent of Yahuah's judgment, not a rival to it.

In the entire Hebrew Tanakh, there is no cosmic war. There is no rebellion in heaven at the dawn of time. There is no devil with his own kingdom. Yahuah alone is sovereign. The satan is a servant.

Zoroaster taught the opposite. His system had two gods from the beginning — Ahura Mazda, the lord of light, and Angra Mainyu, the lord of darkness. Rivals. Each with his own kingdom, his own army, his own territory. The fate of creation decided by the war between them. Humans choose sides.

Two famous passages that modern Christianity reads as Satan's origin story do not survive contact with the text. Isaiah 14's "How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning" is explicitly addressed to "the king of Babylon" (verse 4). The chapter calls him a man (verse 16). Ezekiel 28's cherub in Eden is explicitly addressed to "the prince of Tyrus" (verse 2) and "the king of Tyrus" (verse 12). Strip those two passages of the Persian framework imposed on them later, and the Hebrew Scriptures have no origin story for Satan. None.

When your pastor preaches that Satan is God's enemy locked in cosmic battle, when the worship song says "the enemy is defeated," when the Sunday school lesson draws Satan as a rival with his own kingdom — that is Zoroaster, not Job. The Bible has a satan. Christianity has a Satan. Same word. Different religion.

2. Angels

The Torah has two classes of heavenly creatures described by name: cherubim and seraphim. Both are creatures. Neither is called by a personal name. When a messenger (malak) appears to Abraham, to Hagar, to Gideon, to Manoah — he appears, delivers the message, and leaves. He is not named. When Manoah asks his name directly (Judges 13:18), the messenger refuses: "Why askest thou thus after my name, seeing it is secret?"

Before the exile, no Hebrew Scripture names an individual angel. Not one. There is no Michael, no Gabriel, no Raphael, no Uriel in Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings, Chronicles, Job, or the pre-exilic prophets.

Zoroaster taught a named bureaucracy. Ahura Mazda is served by the Amesha Spentas — six great archangels with names, ranks, and territorial assignments. Below them, the Yazatas — a hierarchy of lesser beings, each with a domain, each invoked by name in Zoroastrian prayer. Every star, every element, every virtue has a named spirit assigned to it. The same framework appears in Hinduism with the devas — a named celestial hierarchy with territorial and elemental assignments, prayed to by name. Two siblings of the same eastern religion, both teaching a named celestial bureaucracy.

Where the Line Actually Sits

After the exile, Daniel names Gabriel and Michael for the first time in the Hebrew canon. The book of 1 Enoch — quoted by Jude in the New Testament (Jude 14–15), preserved in multiple copies at Qumran, kept in the Ethiopian canon — lists seven named archangels with specific domains. Raphael over healing. Uriel over the luminaries. Michael over Israel. Gabriel over Paradise.

Two possible explanations for the shift. One: Yahuah waited until the post-exilic period to reveal names that were always true, and Daniel and Enoch carry genuine revelation that fills in what the Torah held back. Two: post-exilic writers absorbed the Persian framework and grafted Hebrew names onto Persian concepts. The two possibilities are not the same, and they should not be collapsed.

The test is the content. If a post-exilic source agrees with Torah and expands on it without contradicting it — like Enoch on the Watchers, which fits Genesis 6 perfectly — that is revelation. If a post-exilic source introduces a system the Torah does not have and the Torah explicitly forbids, that is import. So the question is not whether named archangels exist. The question is what the church does with them.

The Real Foreign Fire on Angels

What Zoroaster actually contributed to the modern church is not the existence of named angels. It is the devotional system around them. In Zoroastrian and Hindu practice, named celestial beings are prayed to by name. Each one has a specific job. Each one is invoked for a specific need. Worshippers approach the named being directly for healing, protection, success, fertility, or fortune. The named being becomes a mediator and an object of devotion.

That system is not in the Torah. The Torah does not tell anyone to pray to a named angel. The Torah does not assign a guardian angel to an individual person. The Torah does not authorize asking Michael for protection or Raphael for healing. Enoch tells you the names. Enoch does not tell you to pray to them. The Torah forbids approaching anyone but Yahuah for the things only Yahuah gives.

The Catholic Church prays to named saints and to named archangels by name. Evangelical "spiritual warfare" ministries assign specific archangels to specific battles. Children's books teach kids that they have a personal guardian angel watching over them. New-age spirituality runs entire industries around invoking Gabriel, Raphael, Uriel, and others for healing and guidance. Every one of those practices is the Zoroastrian and Hindu devotional system in Christian dress. The names are real. The framework around them is foreign fire.

3. Demons and Territorial Spirits

The Torah knows about unclean spirits. Saul is troubled by an evil spirit from Yahuah (1 Samuel 16:14). The sons of Israel are warned not to sacrifice to the goat-demons (seirim) or to the shedim — rival spirits associated with foreign altars (Leviticus 17:7, Deuteronomy 32:17).

And the Torah also teaches something the modern church often misses: territorial spiritual beings are real, and they hold real authority over nations. The framework is in Deuteronomy 32:8–9. The original Hebrew — preserved in the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Septuagint, before later scribes softened it — reads that when Yahuah divided humanity into nations at Babel, He set the boundaries of the peoples "according to the number of the sons of Elohim," and kept Israel for Himself directly. He assigned each nation to a heavenly being from His divine council.

Then Psalm 82 shows what happened. Yahuah stands in the divine council and judges the elohim He had assigned over the nations. They had become corrupt. They had judged unjustly. They had let the wicked oppress the poor in the territories under their care. Yahuah sentences them: "I have said, Ye are elohim; and all of you are children of the most High. But ye shall die like men, and fall like one of the princes."

When Daniel 10 says Gabriel was delayed by "the prince of the kingdom of Persia" and that Michael came to help, and that next he must fight "the prince of Grecia" — that is the same divine council framework from Deuteronomy 32 and Psalm 82 showing up in narrative. When Paul writes "we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world" (Ephesians 6:12), he is reaching back to those same passages. Territorial spirits are biblical. The framework is Hebrew.

Where Zoroaster Slipped In

What Zoroaster contributed is not the existence of territorial spirits. What Zoroaster contributed is the dualistic packaging. In Zoroastrian doctrine, Angra Mainyu commands the daevas — an evil army that mirrors Ahura Mazda's good army rank for rank, position for position, force for force. Two structured hierarchies in roughly equal contest. The cosmos is a battlefield where the outcome is genuinely undecided until the final reckoning. The same picture appears in Hinduism with the asuras as an organized opposing force to the devas.

That is the line. The Hebrew framework: Yahuah is sovereign over everything, including corrupt heavenly beings He assigned and now judges. The Persian framework: two roughly matched armies in cosmic war, with humans tipping the balance by choosing sides.

The church has often slid from the first into the second. When spiritual warfare is preached as if Satan and Yahuah are roughly matched players whose game is still in doubt, when deliverance ministries name principalities like opposing chess pieces in a contest of force versus force, when a popular Christian novel presents heaven and hell as parallel armies pushing back and forth across a battlefield — that is the Persian framework, not the Hebrew one. The Bible says rebellion under sovereignty. Christianity often preaches dualism under the cross. The first is Moses. The second is Zoroaster.

By the time of the New Testament, two major Jewish parties disagreed on how to read the spiritual realm. The Sadducees rejected the whole expanded framework — Acts 23:8 says they "say that there is no resurrection, neither angel, nor spirit." The Pharisees embraced the post-exilic expansion wholesale. Paul, a Pharisee, inherited their reading. The early church inherited Paul. And the dualistic packaging that came in with Persia has been baked into Christian preaching ever since.

4. Heaven and Hell

The Torah is blunt about the dead. They sleep.

▸ Ecclesiastes 9:5

"For the living know that they shall die: but the dead know not any thing, neither have they any more a reward; for the memory of them is forgotten."

▸ Psalm 6:5

"For in death there is no remembrance of thee: in the grave who shall give thee thanks?"

▸ Psalm 115:17

"The dead praise not Yahuah, neither any that go down into silence."

The Hebrew word for the place of the dead is Sheol (שאול) — the grave, the pit, the common ground where every human being, righteous and wicked alike, goes at death. There is no sorting. There is no immediate judgment. The dead wait. They sleep until the resurrection.

Zoroaster taught something completely different. At death, the soul travels to the Chinvat Bridge ("the bridge of the separator"). The righteous cross safely to paradise. The wicked fall into torment. The sorting is immediate. The reward or punishment begins at the moment of death. Hinduism teaches the same immediate sorting through Svarga (the heavenly realms) and Naraka (the hells), where souls go right after death based on their deeds. Two siblings of the same eastern religion, both teaching that the soul does not sleep — it is sorted on arrival.

The church teaches the Bridge. Not the grave. At every funeral, the preacher does not say "he is sleeping until the resurrection." The preacher says "he is in a better place now." "She is looking down on us." "He is singing with the angels in heaven today." This is not the Torah. This is not what the Psalms say. This is the Chinvat Bridge dressed in Christian language.

The same switch happens on the other side of the Bridge. The Torah's warnings about Gehenna — the valley of Hinnom outside Jerusalem where garbage burned perpetually — were warnings about a real place Yahushua's listeners could see with their eyes, a symbol of judgment and utter destruction. Over time, Gehenna got conflated with the Greek Hades and the Zoroastrian torment realm, and became the modern concept of Hell — a permanent underworld where disembodied souls suffer forever immediately after death. That package — immediate sorting, conscious suffering, permanent torment beginning at the grave — is not in the Torah. It is in the Avesta.

5. Resurrection

The Torah and the Prophets teach one stage. The dead sleep. At the end, they rise.

▸ Daniel 12:2

"And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt."

▸ 1 Thessalonians 4:16

"For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of Elohim: and the dead in Messiah shall rise first."

Sleep. Trumpet. Rise. One event. One stage. The dead are unconscious until the resurrection morning.

Zoroaster taught two stages. First the soul is sorted at the Chinvat Bridge immediately at death — paradise or torment, right then. Then, at the end of the world, the body is raised and reunited with the soul for the final judgment. A two-part process. A temporary afterlife for the soul, followed eventually by a bodily resurrection.

Hinduism took the same starting material — a soul that does not sleep at death — and went a different direction. Instead of resurrection at the end, Hinduism teaches reincarnation: the soul cycles through bodies based on karma. Same root assumption (the soul is conscious and sorted at death), different ending. The Torah goes a third way — the only way — and says the soul does not float, does not get sorted, does not transmigrate. It sleeps. And at the trumpet, it rises.

The modern church teaches Zoroaster's two stages. That is why a pastor can stand at a graveside and say "Grandma is in heaven with Jesus right now" and in the same sermon say "and on the last day, she will rise again." The two statements contradict each other in a one-stage system. They only make sense in the two-stage system Zoroaster taught. The church preaches both because it inherited both — and it has stopped noticing that they cannot both be true at once.

Either the dead sleep until the trumpet, or they are in heaven at this moment. The Torah teaches one. Zoroaster teaches the other. The church preaches the Zoroastrian version and calls it biblical hope.

6. Fire

In the Torah, fire from Yahuah is a specific act in specific moments. Fire lights the bush for Moses and goes out. Fire descends on Sinai and recedes. Fire falls on the altar when Elijah prays and consumes the offering. Fire rests on the apostles at Pentecost and disperses. Fire is an event. Yahuah uses it when He chooses to use it.

The altar in the tabernacle had fire kept burning — but Yahuah started that fire Himself (Leviticus 9:24), and the priests were commanded to maintain it because it was His fire, not theirs. When Nadab and Abihu brought their own fire to that altar, they died. Fire was never something the priest could manufacture and call holy.

Zoroaster made fire an institution. In the Zoroastrian religion, fire itself is sacred. Every fire temple contains a flame that must never be allowed to go out. Priests (magi) are assigned in rotation to feed the fire and keep it burning around the clock, for centuries if possible. Some Zoroastrian fires are said to have burned continuously for over a thousand years. The priest does not start the fire by divine command; the priest maintains the fire as the whole point of his office.

Hinduism teaches the same thing through Agni, the fire god. Vedic priests have maintained sacred fires in temples for thousands of years, feeding them, tending them, never letting them die. Walk into a Hindu temple today and the priest will still be tending Agni's flame. Walk into a Zoroastrian fire temple in Mumbai and the magi will still be tending Ahura Mazda's. Same eastern fire-priest tradition, two surviving branches.

That is where the eternal flame comes from. The sanctuary lamp in a Catholic church that is never allowed to go out. The candles on the altar lit by priests in rotation. The Olympic torch carried from Mount Olympus and kept burning throughout the games. The eternal flame at war memorials and tombs. The "everlasting light" in synagogues (the ner tamid). None of this is from the Torah. The Torah has an altar fire that Yahuah Himself kindled. The permanent, priest-maintained, never-extinguished fire is a Zoroastrian and Vedic fire temple with whatever religious building is on top of it.

And this is the sharpest point in the whole study. Nadab and Abihu died for offering fire Yahuah did not command. The modern church, the modern synagogue, and the modern civic religion all keep fires burning that Yahuah never commanded — maintained by priests and custodians, decade after decade, in His name. The exact sin that killed Nadab and Abihu is built into the liturgical furniture of the Western world.

Foreign Fire

Six doctrines. Satan reframed as a rival god instead of a courtroom accuser. Named angels turned into objects of devotion and prayer. Territorial spirits packaged as a matched army in dualistic war instead of corrupt beings under sovereign judgment. Souls sorted at the Bridge instead of sleeping in the grave. Two-stage afterlife instead of one resurrection. Eternal priest-maintained fire instead of fire kindled by Yahuah Himself. Every one of these is built into modern Christian preaching about the unseen world. Every one of them is foreign fire.

None of these doctrines can be preached out of the Torah. Every one of them can be preached out of the Avesta — the sacred book of Zoroaster — and you can still see the same religion operating today in the Hindu temple next door. The church that claims to be the continuation of Moses is, on its most confident teachings about the spiritual realm, drinking from the Persian wellspring and translating it into Greek philosophical language.

This is not a difference of opinion. This is not a denominational flavor. This is Nadab and Abihu. Right altar. Right God. Wrong fire. And Yahuah's response to foreign fire — even from priests, even inside His own tabernacle, even offered sincerely in His own name — is not nuance. It is death.

▸ Deuteronomy 12:30–32

"Take heed to thyself that thou be not snared by following them, after that they be destroyed from before thee; and that thou enquire not after their gods, saying, How did these nations serve their gods? even so will I do likewise. Thou shalt not do so unto Yahuah thy Elohim. What thing soever I command you, observe to do it: thou shalt not add thereto, nor diminish from it."

Yahuah told Israel, before they ever set foot in the land: do not ask how the nations served their gods and copy it for Me. Do not add. Do not diminish. The exile taught them to ask the question Yahuah forbade. The church inherited their answers.

The way home is the same way back. Put down the Persian fire. Return to what Moses taught.

▸ Summary

Six doctrines — Satan as a rival god, named angels prayed to by name, demons in dualistic war, souls sorted at death, two-stage afterlife, and eternal priest-maintained fire — are preached every Sunday as biblical. None of them are in Moses. Every one of them is in Zoroaster. Same God on the lips, different religion underneath. The way home is the same way back. Put down the Persian fire. Return to what Moses taught.

"What thing soever I command you, observe to do it: thou shalt not add thereto, nor diminish from it."

— Deuteronomy 12:32