The practice of including non-Avestan commentaries alongside the Avestan texts led to two different misinterpretations in western scholarship of the term zand; these misunderstandings are described below.
In the final step, the idiomatic translation was complemented with explanations and commentaries, often of significant length, and occasionally with different authorities being cited.
[3] Among those texts is the Bundahishn, which has Zand-Agahih ("Knowledge from the Zand") as its subtitle and is crucial to the understanding of Zoroastrian cosmogony and eschatology.
[3] The term zand is a contraction of the Avestan language word zainti (𐬰𐬀𐬌𐬥𐬙𐬌, meaning "commentary, explanation").
[5] The dating of the Zend is considered complicated in contemporary scholarship, especially in the light of the orality of the text and the lack of reference to it outside of Zoroastrian literature.
[7] The priests' practice of including commentaries alongside the text being commented upon led to two different misunderstandings in 18th/19th century western scholarship.
Similarly, in his third discourse, published in 1798, Sir William Jones recalls a conversation with a Hindu priest who told him that the script was called Zend, and the language Avesta.
This mistake resulted from a misunderstanding of the term pazend, which actually denotes the use of the Avestan alphabet for writing certain Middle Persian texts.