So Strack and Billerbeck began their excursus on the yeṣer in their influential Kommentar zum Neuen Testament aus Talmud und Midrasch. They attempt to trace the origins of the rabbinic concept of an internal struggle between two forces within the human being, one inclination that is good and one that is evil, finding an equivalent in earlier Hellenistic concepts. Their comments exemplify two of the major methodological weaknesses that dogged earlier scholarship on the Evil Inclination – a tendency on the one hand to read rabbinic sources from different times and places as an undifferentiated synthesis, and an overenthusiasm for perceiving in superficial similarities concrete parallels and the marks of direct borrowings, on the other.