are doomed, you destroy the adulterous deserter.’ (v. 27). The emphasis is on personal, not collective, wrong-doing. The message is also found in Psalm 49. Those who embrace worldly goods and power without a thought for God will end up in sheol, while the upright will enjoy God’s favour:
Like sheep to be penned in sheol
death will herd them to pasture
and the upright will have the better of them.
Dawn will come and then the show they made will
disappear,
sheol the home for them!
But God will redeem my life
from the grasp of sheol, and will receive me.
If hitherto Judaism had portrayed a place at God’s right hand as beyond the reach and indeed desire of all but a tiny number of prophets, here now was a suggestion that everyone could go there as well, albeit departing only after a final day of judgement. In theory, people would be taken up from the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem, where Jews had long been taught to expect the coming of the Messiah, and so this became – and remains in Judaism even for such sinners as the late Robert Maxwell – the favoured place for burial. Key doctrinal pronouncements, however, such as that endorsing the concept of bodily resurrection made at the Council of Jamnia as late as AD 90, emphasised that the metaphorical meaning of the Mount could embrace Jews buried anywhere.
If Judaism took its notions of bodily resurrection from Zoroastrianism, then it subsequently borrowed the parallel concept of an immortal soul from the Greco-Roman tradition. In the end it was Christianity that effectively fused the two hitherto mutually exclusive ideas into one. Greco-Roman writers in this period were revising the standard definitions of afterlife as the dim and undifferentiated nether world favoured by Greek epic poets such as Homer. The shadowy and insubstantial Hades he wrote about around the ninth century BC was akin to the traditional Jewish sheol, but the Roman writer Virgil (70–19 BC) described instead a paradise of Elysian Fields and Isles of the Blest (an image that appeared in Homer) in his Aeneid. If Hades was comprehensive in its intake, Virgil’s paradise was avowedly selective. Entered symbolically through a gate (again later an essential part of the heavenly hardware), the dead who sought admission had to pass an examination in heroic virtue.
Virgil’s paradise is recognisable geographically as an idealisation of the Italian countryside which he knew and loved; the plains covered with wheat, the vineyards heavy with grapes, and nature’s rich crop everywhere in evidence. This romantic, pastoral vision was a powerful one that has always retained an appeal for Western civilisation, as evident in examples such as the Champs Elysées in Paris, or the Elysian Fields that were part of such classic and celebrated eighteenth-century English gardens as that built at Painshill Park in Surrey by Charles Hamilton.
The point of all this agrarian and horticultural imagery for the Greco-Romans of the first century BC was that paradise recaptured a mythical golden age of simplicity and comfort, when people were unsullied by war, untroubled by famine and oblivious to political machinations. The same thought process in Christianity was later to cast heaven in the likeness of the Garden of Eden. Heaven was both a recreation of a past perfect life and the antithesis of what people were actually enduring on earth.
Virgil’s was not a lone voice. Cicero (106–43 BC) and Plato (428–348 BC) had both already described a place above the stars where the souls of the righteous could thrive, though civic achievement was the cardinal virtue for Cicero in Scipio’s Dream, written in 52 BC. These souls would be freed of the shackles of an earthly body. The Greeks, unlike the Jews after the exile, had little time for the idea of a bodily resurrection. For Plato in his dialogue Phaedo the psyche or life force was immortal along with the nous or mind. The body was by contrast dispensable:
It has been proved to us by experience that if we would have true knowledge of anything, we must be quit of the body – the soul in herself must behold things in themselves: and then we shall attain the wisdom which we desire, and of which we say we are lovers; not while we live, but after death; for if while in company with the body the soul cannot have pure knowledge, knowledge must be attained after death, if at all. And thus having got rid of the foolishness of the body we shall be pure and have converse with the pure, and know of ourselves the clear light everywhere, which is no other than the light of truth. For the impure are not permitted to approach the pure … and what is purification but the separation of the soul from the body?
From this position, Plato then argued that since knowledge was all, we have ideas that cannot be derived from experience. Thus the soul must have existed before birth as well as after it. Of the domain beyond earth where the soul begins and ends its journey, Plato wrote that it was:
a region of purity, and eternity, and immortality, and unchangeableness, which are her [the soul’s] kindred and with them she ever lives, when she is by herself, and is not let or hindered; then she ceases from her erring ways, and being in communion with the unchanging is unchanging.
Plato’s heaven encompassed the gods, but he paid them scant regard. Its most important qualities were mental and intellectual, not physical. It was the place of philosophers, somewhere they could continue arguing pure principle for ever.
An exact interchange of ideas between the Jews and the Greeks before the time of St Paul is difficult to pin down, but there is sufficient evidence of overlap in the writings of Philo of Alexandria (20 BC–45 AD), the Jewish philosopher who made an extensive study of Greek ideas at the same time as upholding the spirit of the Hebrew scriptures. He wrote, borrowing from the Greek heroic tradition (but also with echoes of Elijah), of souls being transported up to heaven in chariots to join the angels. He even imagined specific and distinct destinations within heaven for philosophers, for angels, and for the gods, but stressed that all shared an existence that was blessed, eternal, incorporeal and asexual.
The final noteworthy shift in Jewish thinking on heaven came between 250 BC and AD 200, sometimes called the ‘inter-testamental period’ because it falls roughly between the youngest book of the Old Testament and the oldest of the New. It is also known as the apocalyptic period (from the word apokalypsis, meaning revelation) – a reference to its chosen literary style, seen in a plethora of texts which claimed to be accounts of visions from some of the great figures of the Old Testament. These apocalyptic documents fall into two main categories – the Old Testament Apocrypha, books that were at one time accepted as holy scripture but which later were denied admission to the authorised version, and the Pseudepigrapha, those which were never accepted by either Jewish or Christian authorities and which relied most heavily on the revelatory dreams featuring dead prophets. Almost all assumed that the end of the world was imminent – spurred on by the continued political subjugation of Israel first by the Syrians, ended by a revolt of the Maccabees in 161 BC, and then by the Romans, who in AD 70 destroyed the Second Temple. These reverses prompted a spirit of despair and bitter internal divisions amongst the Jews. The texts responded by projecting themselves forward into the next world, returning to the theme of a new Israel and a new Jerusalem, where Yahweh would come to defeat Israel’s enemies and reign for ever in peace and harmony. Some writers endorsed the existing idea of a bodily resurrection, but others suggested the risen body would be transformed into something as perfect and celestial as an angel.
The Book of Enoch is one of the best preserved of these texts. It was composed by several different authors, writing between 250 BC and 50 BC, and claimed to convey what Enoch – who, as we have seen, was one of the few in early Judaism to have his name on the electoral roll of heaven – had witnessed on high. Enoch’s paradise was a two-tier one – another new and subsequently important development. The righteous lived in what was a transformed earth, a literal
