Heaven: A Traveller’s Guide to the Undiscovered Country

Thoth was credited with producing the illustrated Book of the Dead (c. 1580–1090 BC). As well as frightening depictions of the ghouls of the underworld and recreations of the court-room weigh-ins, it also contained hints on how you could ensure that the verdict went your way once you came before Osiris. At different stages of the pharaohs’ rule, the qualities necessary to achieve that ultimate lightness were different. In one age it would be courage in battle, in another loyal service to the ruler, in another great wisdom or moral strength. The admission criteria for the Egyptian heaven were set according to the needs of the present. As the practice became more popular, the scroll would also include a map of the land beyond this life – with its seven gates, rivers and valleys of the sky and potential traps – and was routinely placed alongside the bodies of kings when they were buried.

The influence of such ideas on the heaven that Christianity promoted so assiduously is, however, remote. A much more immediate embarkation point is Judaism, in effect Christianity’s elder sibling. Unlike the Egyptians, it initially had little interest in an afterlife. This is the view that dominates the opening sections of the Old Testament or Hebrew scriptures and which prevailed while the Israelites established themselves in the Holy Land from around 1200 BC onwards. In addition to the here and now, these Jews believed there were two other worlds – one above and unobtainable, heaven, the abode of the gods which was ruled over by Yahweh (who was not yet regarded as the only God), and one below and inevitable, subterranean sheol – a word borrowed from Semite faiths in the region – to which were consigned all the dead, regardless of the merits or faults of their earthly lives. There was no suggestion that virtuous mortals might aspire to take the ‘up-lift’ to the heavens when they died. Entry was strictly restricted to a named and heroic handful – for example, the prophet Elijah. His journey to the skies – after his historic victory over the pagan monarchs Ahab and Jezebel and their deity Baal – is the only such voyage detailed in the Old Testament: ‘Now as they [Elijah and his pupil Elisha] walked on, talking as they went, a chariot of fire appeared and horses of fire, coming between the two of them; and Elijah went up to heaven in the whirlwind.’ (2 Kings: 2:11–12) Another similarly honoured was Enoch, a devoted servant of Yahweh, who is described in the Book of Genesis as ‘walking with God’ during his lifetime (365 years, according to Genesis, a figure dwarfed by his son Methu-saleh’s 969 years) and then rather vaguely as ‘vanishing because God took him’ (5:24).

Since almost no-one went there, Judaism wasted no time trying to map out the realm of the gods. There was also little interest in sheol. Tradition taught that it was a dark, silent mausoleum, separated from this life, but the sort of questions we now ask about personal immortality would have been met with blank stares by Jews of the period. The lines of communication between sheol, heaven and earth as the three sides of a triangle were, however, well-established. In the First Book of Samuel (Chapter 28), King Saul prepares for a battle by donning a disguise and consulting a necromancer at Endor. The ghost that she conjures up ‘rises from the earth’. It is Samuel himself, and Saul wants his dead ancestor, called reluctantly from slumber in sheol, to intervene in heaven with Yahweh, who he believes has abandoned the Israelites. Samuel accurately predicts that Saul will die. But Saul’s interest was not in his own personal immortality, his own fate after death; rather, he had a broader political concern. This is the key theme in the great prophets. Their teachings were bound up with this world and the problems affecting Israel, principally its survival.

Lack of interest in heaven continued unchallenged until the eighth century BC, when the Jews found themselves increasingly under threat from their mighty Assyrian neighbours to the north and east. In extremis, the people were encouraged to change tack and focus their faith on Yahweh, cutting down on intermediaries or other spirits and gods. Practices of ancestor worship, it was said, distracted from Yahweh, disappointed Him, and therefore had brought about military defeats. So, the souls of the faithful and unfaithful departed were, at a stroke, cast into outer darkness. King Josiah (640–609 BC), for instance, introduced new legal taboos on the disposal of corpses in an effort to stamp out remaining tendencies towards veneration of the dead. They were to be buried swiftly and then forgotten, he decreed, while necromancers and wizards were outlawed. As with all such official sanctions in matters of faith and morals, the Jews did not wipe out the practice of ancestor worship altogether, but they certainly marginalised it.

The living and the dead henceforth were eternally separated. The dead had no knowledge of the living and therefore could not distract from events on earth. 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’ – while the evil-doers are punished: ‘Those who abandon you 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 heaven, while God, the saints and assorted luminaries inhabited a higher, less recognisable and hence largely inaccessible plain – the spiritual heaven:

In the vision the winds were causing me to fly and rushing me high up into heaven. And I kept coming until I approached a wall which was built of white marble and surrounded by tongues of fire … And I came into the tongues of fire and drew near to a great house which was built of white marble, and the inner wall were [sic] like mosaics of white marble, the floor of crystal, the ceiling like the path of the stars and lightnings between which [were] fiery cherubim, and their heaven of water, and flaming fire surrounded the wall, and its gates were burning with fire. And I entered into the house, which was hot like fire and cold like ice, and there was nothing inside it; fear covered me and trembling seized me. And as I shook and trembled, I fell upon my face and saw a vision. And behold there was an opening before me [and] a second house, which is greater than the former, and everything was built with tongues of fire … It is impossible for me to recount to you concerning its glory and greatness. As for its floor, it was of fire and above it was lightning and the path of the stars; and as for the ceiling, it was flaming fire. And I observed and saw inside it a lofty throne – its appearance was like crystal and its wheels like the shining sun; and I [heard] the voice of the cherubim; and from beneath the throne were issuing streams of flaming fire. It was difficult to look at it. And the Great Glory was sitting upon it – as for His gown, which was shining more brightly than the sun, it was whiter than any snow … The flaming fire was round about him, and a great fire stood before Him.

(Book of Enoch 1:20–21, 49–50)

The authors of Enoch provide further details: there is an alabaster mountain, topped by sapphire, which is the throne of God and a sweet-smelling tree-of-life (like the Hesperides Tree of Greek mythology), which will be enjoyed in the north-east of heaven by the meek and the just for eternity. Moreover, they echo the Book of Daniel (it is unclear which text came first) in employing one of the most enduring descriptions of heavenly figures. In his dream about heaven, Daniel sees the ‘Ancient of Days’. ‘His robe was white as snow, the hair on his head as pure as wool.’ (Dn 7:9–10) Enoch speaks of the same figure, protected by the wings of the Lord of the Spirits, with hair as white as wool.