Zend

The Zend or Zand (literally "interpretation"), refers to late middle Persian (see Pazend and Pahlavi) language commentaries on the individual Avestan books within Zoroastrianism. They date from the 3rd to 10th centuries and were not intended for use as theological texts by themselves but for religious instruction of the (by then) non-Avestan-speaking public. In contrast, the texts of the Avesta proper remained sacrosanct and continued to be recited in Avestan, which was considered a sacred language.

Manuscripts of the Avesta exist in two forms. One is the "Avesta-o-Zand" (or "Zand-i-Avesta"), in which the individual books are written together with their "Zand". The other is the "Vendidad Sadeh", in which the Yasna, Vispered and Vendidad are set out in alternating chapters, in the order used in the "Vendidad" ceremony, with no commentary at all.

The use of the expression "Zend-Avesta" to refer to the Avesta in general is a misunderstanding of the phrase "Zand-i-Avesta" (which literally means "interpretation "of" the Avesta").

A related mistake is the use of "Zend" as the name of a language or script. In 1759, Anquetil-Duperron reported having been told that "Zend" was the name of the language of the more ancient writings. In his third discourse, published in 1798, Sir William Jones mentions a conversation with a Hindu priest who told him that the script was called "Zend", and the language "Avesta". This mistake results from a misunderstanding of the term "pazend", which actually refers to the use of the Avestan alphabet in writing the "Zand" and other Middle Persian religious texts, as an expression meaning "in Zend".

The confusion then became too universal in Western scholarship to be reversed, and "Zend-Avesta", although a misnomer, is still occasionally used to denote the older texts.

Rask's seminal work, "A Dissertation on the Authenticity of the Zend Language" (Bombay, 1821), may have contributed to the confusion. N. L. Westergaard's "Zendavesta, or the religious books of the Zoroastrians" (Copenhagen, 1852-54) only propagated the error.