The Book of Ecclesiasticus describes the dead, in the Lord’s eyes, as ‘those who do not exist’ (17:28) and, a few verses further on, drives home the point when it says of Yahweh: ‘He surveys the armies of the lofty sky, while all men are no more than dust and ashes.’ (17:32) Historical and archaeological records show that here was a religion which did not attempt to buttress its position on earth by the promise of an eternal reward. Rather, and bravely by our own standards, it stood or fell on its earthly merits. Yahweh was understood in terms of what He could do for the Israelites in this life. So any suggestion of a bonus for good service to their God was couched in terms either of national victory over Israel’s oppressors, or, as in the case of Job once he had suffered endless adversity as part of a debate on the nature of human goodness between Yahweh and Satan, in purely material terms.
Heaven, or any effort to describe or plot the afterlife, remained of almost no concern until 586 BC, when Nebuchadnezzar captured Jerusalem and destroyed its holiest of holies, the Temple. The Jews began the trauma of fifty years of exile in Babylon. One consequence of adjusting to the enormity of this defeat was the birth of a school of thought that dreamed and planned of a new Israel that would rise from the ashes. This was in part simply a nationalistic movement, inspired by the image of a free homeland, a restored Temple and a liberated Jerusalem. But it was also about something more, because it had a strong religious and spiritual dimension. ‘About Zion I will not be silent,’ it was written in Isaiah at this time, ‘about Jerusalem, I will not grow weary, until her integrity shines out like the dawn and her salvation flames like a torch.’ (Is 62:1–2). These words refer to more than the building blocks of a city, though that extra something could simply be attributed to the exuberant imagery of the prophet. However, four chapters further on, there can be no mistake: ‘For as the new heavens and the new earth I shall make will endure before me – it is Yahweh who speaks – so will your race and name endure.’ (Is 66:22–23).
The new Israel with the new Jerusalem was not simply an independent earthly kingdom, but a quasi-mystical place, halfway between heaven and earth, where the living and their dead ancestors would mix and co-exist under the benign gaze of Yahweh. It is one of the most powerful and enduring images of afterlife in the Bible. In wanting to cloak themselves with both the protection of Yahweh and the aura of their illustrious ancestors, the exiled Israelites had introduced two vital ingredients into the story of heaven. The first was the notion that there could be some higher sphere here on earth, a renewed and perfected place where death no longer separated those who had loyally followed Yahweh from the living. Rather than the old horizontal division with a remote heaven at the top, earth in between and a catch-all sheol at the bottom, this new scheme preferred vertical lines that linked both living and dead with the Lord on the basis of their faith.
The second idea, closely associated with the first, was that of bodily resurrection – that the dead could literally rise from their graves to be with their descendants and their Lord. It seems likely that the Jews borrowed this concept from their captors in Babylon, many of whom embraced Zoroastrianism, the major belief system in the Middle East before Islam. Details of Zoroaster are few and far between, but he is believed to have lived around 1200 BC in Bactria, the area known today as Iran. He broke with the tradition, near-universal at the time, of invoking a pantheon of gods, and taught instead that there were only two gods, one good and one bad, who were locked in a cosmic battle with earthlings their cannon fodder. When Ahura Mazda, the good god, finally triumphed over his opponent, the fiendish Ahriman or Angro Mainyush, the dead would be summoned for a Last Judgement. The righteous would be restored in body and spirit and returned to a cleansed earthly paradise – the word comes from pairidaeza in old Persian, meaning the enclosed garden of the Persian king – the true and eternal kingdom of Ahura Mazda where everyone would live for ever.
Though the Babylonian exile occurred during the key period of the Axial Age, Zoroastrianism was not essentially an Axial religion, but, rather, a transitional faith between ancient pantheistic creeds and modern monotheism. One of the things that distinguished it from other Axial religions, such as Buddhism or Hinduism, was its emphasis on eschatology – and in the battle between Ahura Mazda and Ahriman this was a very violent eschatology. By contrast to such bloody fights at the end of time, Buddhism and Hinduism promoted a more compassionate ethic. Yet it was Zoroastrianism that the Jewish exiles imbibed, and so the post-exile prophets of the Old Testament began, for the first time, to talk of a new heaven and a new earth. Moreover, these post-exile prophecies were later inserted into the oracles associated with earlier prophets to give the semblance of continuity. History was being rewritten.
Zoroastra’s influence on Jewish thinking about afterlife is seen most clearly in the Book of Ezekiel. Ezekiel was a priest and visionary who was active among the exiles in Babylon between 593 and 571 BC. He writes of seeing a valley full of dried bones. Yahweh breathes new life into them and raises them from the dead. ‘I mean to raise you from your graves, my people,’ is the message He gives to Ezekiel, ‘and lead you back to the soil of Israel.’ (Ez: 37:1–14) Leaving dead bodies to rot above the ground – as in Ezekiel’s vision – was a religious practice of the Zoroastrians, but not of the Jews who preferred to bury them. The concept of bodily resurrection after death – in this case as a way of participating in a magnificent new era for Israel – had entered the mainstream of Judaism.
As a result of the Babylonian exile, the psychology of this shift in attitudes ran deep. For the Israelites, it had been all very well leaving heaven a remote place, accessed only by a chosen few, when Yahweh had been helping them slug it out with the various other tribes of the Near East. However, as their horizons broadened and they faced other opponents, the Israelites had begun to move towards monotheism, belief in a single God, focusing on Yahweh as more than simply a national mascot. When they were defeated and carted off into exile in Babylon, this process accelerated. Yahweh had to acquire bigger dimensions. He had to be Lord not just of their tribe, but of a wider universe if He was to help the Jews to be free once more. This is a theme developed in the second and third sections of the Book of Isaiah, written during the exile, where monotheism is embraced clearly and unequivocally, and Yahweh is painted as not just the God of Israel, but the God of all, even if the others don’t yet recognise Him as such.
With such a conclusion, then, Yahweh couldn’t be restricted to one part of the earth, or carried around in the Ark of the Covenant. Equally, when the Israelites’ oppressors were so awful – in this case destroying the Temple – that no earthly punishment would be good enough for them, and no earthly restoration sufficient to avenge the insult to Yahweh, the notion of heaven as a court of final and absolute justice over and above the whole earth had great appeal. Monotheism almost inevitably brought heaven in its wake.
This link between heaven and judgement was strengthened when Jewish thought shifted decisively again, some three hundred years later. An echo of Ezekiel’s vision is found in the Book of Daniel, one of the last additions to the Old Testament, thought to have been written between 167 and 164 BC. Here Daniel writes ‘of those who lie sleeping in the dust of the earth’, i.e. on its surface. Yet he goes further: they will awake, he writes, ‘some to everlasting life, some to shame and everlasting disgrace’ (Dn 12:2). He was describing what later became a standard feature of the Christian heaven – the process by which each and every aspirant for entry is judged on the basis of how they have lived their earthly lives.
The Book of Daniel is illustrative of an emerging trend in Judaism that placed emphasis on individual vice or virtue rather than on the national fate, as the Babylonian exiles had. Personal immortality was now an issue. Sheol as a catch-all for the dead was becoming discredited. It was being remodelled into two alternatives – heaven for the blessed and hell for the damned, though not quite so explicitly as yet. The basic justice in the construct had been emerging for some time and is seen in documents older than Daniel. Psalm 73, for instance, questions the traditional Jewish view that the wicked do well in this world and suffer no eternal punishment for their sins on earth. The psalmist claims that he or she has ‘pierced the mystery’ by invoking God’s judgement in death. The righteous who lead good lives will go to God – ‘I look to no-one else in heaven, I delight in nothing else on earth’
