Do Jews believe in heaven?” I can’t begin to count the number of times I’ve been asked this question. Modern people—and especially Jews raised in the twentieth-century Reform tradition—are flummoxed by the notion of heaven, and the rabbis are less than helpful. “Jews believe it is this life that matters, not the next”—you hear this a lot. When my own congregational rabbi, Andy Bachman—who is Reform, a lover of baseball and political blogs, a father of three who picks his children up from school—talks about heaven, he refers to his own “conscious effort to teach people a reasonable Judaism.” To the bereaved, he will talk about continuity from generation to generation. If a grieving person is receptive, he’ll talk about souls ascending back to God, but he doesn’t embroider—he doesn’t speak of friendships in heaven, or family reunions, or continuing consciousness, or even selfhood. Rabbi Bachman doesn’t talk about heaven’s acreage or architecture; he certainly doesn’t offer up the hope of bodily resurrection.
Judaism’s vagueness on the matter of heaven is a problem for many of the Jews I know. An emphasis on this world may move them to honor their parents and to give to charity, but it’s cold comfort when the time comes for those parents to die—or, worse to the point of being unimaginable, if a child should die. When you are facing the sheer cliff of your own mortality, the modern Jewish emphasis on this life rather than the next can feel brutally insufficient.
It may astonish readers to know, then, that it was Jews who invented our idea of heaven. They did not invent the idea of an afterlife, or the idea of heaven as the home of God—those ideas had been around for thousands of years, long before the Jews ever existed as a people. But the idea of heaven as we understand it—a place in the sky where the righteous go after death to live forever with God—that is a concept born to the Jews sometime during the second century before Christ. It was, if you will, a theological miracle. Similar ideas existed in other cultures around that time, and some Jews had even come to believe in a spirit world where their ancestors rested—and sometimes awoke—but the connection between “righteous” behavior, as the Bible puts it, and resurrection and eternal life was entirely new and almost entirely Jewish. Before the second century BCE, regular people, it was thought, didn’t go to heaven. After the second century, some of them did. Later, Christians embraced the idea of heaven, amplified and embroidered it—and changed it in fundamental ways. Still later, Muslims made their Paradise both more coherent and more vivid than any Christian or Jewish version. But heaven, at its root, is a Jewish idea.
AFTERLIFE IN THE HEBREW BIBLE
Let us begin, then, with the Jewish patriarch Abraham, the man who received promises from God and who was willing to sacrifice his own son Isaac because God commanded him to do so. The Bible says nothing about what, if anything, Abraham believed about an afterlife. It says that his beloved wife, Sarah, died at the age of 127, and that Abraham purchased a burial cave called Machpelah for 400 shekels. He mourned for her, then buried her. When Abraham died, his sons Isaac and Ishmael, who had not been on speaking terms, came together to bury him in the same cave. Abraham died what people today would call “a good death,” as the book of Genesis says, “in a good old age, an old man and full of years, and was gathered to his people.”
But not, as far as the Bible indicates, to God. For the authors of the Torah, heaven was the home of God and his angels, but it was not the dwelling of humans or anything resembling humans. The Hebrew Bible is full of allusions to heaven, but all of them refer to the sky or the weather—such natural disasters as Noah’s flood occur thanks to God’s intervention on earth from on high. In the story of Lot, “the Lord rained on Sodom and Gomorra sulfur and fire from the Lord out of heaven.” Heaven is the place from which God descends to give orders and to change people’s lives. When God wants to tell Abraham that Hagar’s son Ishmael will father nations, he speaks from heaven. When He commands Abraham not to slay Isaac, he sends down an angel from heaven.
Heaven is not just inaccessible. It is forbidden. Just before the Lord promises Jacob that he will inherit the land of Israel, Jacob lays his head down on a rock and has a dream in which he sees heaven’s gate, an image that terrifies him. (In Jacob’s Dream, a mid-twentieth-century painting by the Jewish painter Marc Chagall, the terror is gone; what Jacob dreams is something like the deep blue of a swimming pool, in whose depths people hide and float; on the ladder to heaven, angels twist and turn like circus performers. Jacob, the seer, wears a Mona Lisa smile.) The Bible is not so whimsical—it practically thunders as it describes Jacob’s reaction to his heavenly vision: “He was afraid, and said, ‘How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven!” When people tried to build a tower that reached up to heaven—Babel—God did not allow it. He toppled the tower and scattered the people all over the earth.
When Jacob dies, he doesn’t talk about going to heaven. All he wants is to be buried in his grandfather Abraham’s cave. Jacob lives in Egypt, but he explicitly instructs his loved ones to carry his corpse back to Canaan. “I am about to be gathered to my people,” Jacob says, “in the cave in the field at Machpelah, near Mamre, in the land of Canaan,” where his grandparents are buried. Egypt is more than 200 miles from Canaan. Jacob’s sons take the unusual step of mummifying their father’s body before they carry him back to the homeland, where he is, according to his wishes, gathered to his people.
For the authors of the Torah, being gathered to your people was the best you could hope for after death. The ancient Israelites were buried in caves. These were not natural fissures, but man-made tombs, dug underground, usually with a central chamber and one or two adjacent rooms. When a person died, his or her corpse would be placed on a slab inside one of the chambers. When the next family member passed away, the old bones would sometimes be swept off the slab to make room for the new corpse. Generations of bones ringed the circumferences of these burial caves, intermingled and indistinguishable. Ancient Jews were literally gathered to their ancestors. Burial caves are still to be found everywhere in Israel, in orchards and beneath apartment buildings; bulldozers at construction sites often dig them up accidentally. Even today, those caves are full of bones.
Abraham and Jacob wanted their bones to be gathered together with those of their ancestors in the Jewish homeland, not elsewhere. This desire to be buried “at home” was then—and remains today—a critical theological and political point. Even a Jew who, like Jacob, spent his life, his career, his productive years abroad, wanted to spend eternity in the same cave as his ancestors. In America today, Jewish funeral homes with an Orthodox clientele offer Promised Land burials for about $5,000; clients of the Diaspora, who have spent their whole lives in Brooklyn, or St. Louis, or Atlanta, can join their forefathers after death in the dirt of the Promised Land. Moe Goldsman, a Los Angeles–based mortician, gave his wife a fat manila envelope for their tenth anniversary. Inside were deeds to funeral plots in Israel—in the town of Beit Shemesh, ten miles outside Jerusalem. “She was very upset,” recalls Goldsman by phone, with a laugh. “Both of our families are buried here in Los Angeles. ‘The kids aren’t going to visit us,’ she said.” As a consolation, he also gave her a trip to Hawaii.
The Jewish claim that the bones of the patriarchs rest beneath the earth in Israel are—without some miraculous advance in DNA testing or the discovery of, say, a body buried with a magical staff or a multi-colored coat—unprovable. Indeed, some recent Palestinian scholarship argues that without archaeological evidence of the patriarchs, Jewish claims to the land of Israel are empty. “So take the past, if you wish, to the antiquities market,” writes the Palestinian nationalist poet Mahmoud Darwish. “Leave our country, / our land, our sea…everything, and leave / The memories of memory.” The alleged site of Abraham’s cave—long a tourist destination and a place venerated by Jews and Muslims alike—is in modern-day Hebron in the occupied West Bank and has been at the center of deadly disputes as recently as 1994, when the Israeli settler Baruch Goldstein opened fire on a group of Muslim worshippers there, killing twenty-nine of them.
The caves and the bones in them are so important because Jewish identity was rooted then—as it is now—in ancestry and not in an explicit promise (as, say, Roman Catholic and Islamic theology has it) of community togetherness in the afterlife. According to traditional interpretations of the Bible, the patriarchs had no heaven. What they had was generations of family and tribal affiliations—people in the past and in the future living under Abraham’s covenant with God. (“As for me,” God says in Genesis 17, “this is my covenant with you: You will be the ancestor of a multitude of nations…. I will give to you and to your offspring after you the land where you are now an alien, all the land of Canaan, for a perpetual holding.”) A person’s identity, in other words, was entirely connected to who his or her parents and grandparents were, and, after death, to the righteous behavior and community status of children and grandchildren. The worst thing for a Hebrew was to die childless. The prophet Isaiah describes seven women so desperate for children that they all appeal to one man, and offer to sleep with him, provide their own food, and make their own clothes, if only the man will “take away our disgrace!” The best a Hebrew could hope for was to rest for eternity among the bones of his people.
It would not, however, be strictly true to say that the biblical account offers no afterlife at all. There was a place called Sheol. The book of Psalms refers to this place, as do the books of Isaiah and Job. It was a dark and murky underworld where people had some sort of ghostlike existence. People whose lives had been unfulfilled—by displeasing God, or dying young or violently, or having no children—went to Sheol. It is cold, dark, mute, numb—entirely disconnected from God. In the Bible, nobody wants to go there. And from Sheol there’s no return. Job mourns:
As the cloud fades and vanishes,
So those who go down to Sheol do not come up;
They return no more to their houses,
Nor do their places know them any more.
The Bible offers an inconclusive picture of life after death. You may be gathered to your ancestors. Or you may go down to Sheol, where everyone forgets all about you.
ANCESTOR WORSHIP
The biblical account of the afterlife is official teaching, handed down by the rabbis and codified in the Torah. It reflects, in other words, what the rabbis want people to think and practice—and perhaps even what many people did think and practice—but it is not an unbiased, historical account of what the people of the Bible actually believed. The Israelites of the biblical period were able to hold contradictory ideas in their heads about God and the afterlife. There was what the rabbis taught. And there was what they practiced, with their neighbors, at home.
Rachel Hallote is a tiny, birdlike woman with frizzy black hair that’s graying at the temples and huge, hazel eyes. She is a dead ringer for her mother, the novelist Cynthia Ozick. An archaeologist by training and a professor at Purchase College, SUNY, she has spent decades excavating and studying the burial sites of the ancient Israelites, and her book Death, Burial and Afterlife in the Biblical World is an inspiration. Simply told, beautifully written (archaeologists don’t usually write like novelists; Hallote does), it argues that the tombs of the dead Israelites tell an entirely different story from the stories of the Bible. She argues that while the Bible might insist on certain conventions concerning the afterlife—the righteous sleep like Abraham, others (explicably or inexplicably) go to Sheol—everyday practice was something else. Hallote believes that the ancient Hebrews were, like their neighbors in the land of Canaan (indeed, like other ancient or primitive cultures) engaged in ancestor worship. Their dead relatives lived somewhere, in another realm. They needed attention.
The archaeological record is convincing. In Hebrew burial caves of 2000 to 1500 BCE, Hallote and her colleagues have found jars and bottles for liquids and oils, small plates for food, weapons, and jewelry. I visited Hallote one rainy morning because I hoped she would clear up my confusion. The Hebrew Bible does not speak about a distinct afterlife. But if the Hebrews had no afterlife, why were they buried with all this stuff? Hallote’s big eyes grew bigger. “Why are they leaving stuff? Because they believe the dead need it…. You’ve got to take care of your dead, because if you don’t, they might wreak havoc on your life.” The earliest Israelites believed dead spirits—good ones, bad ones—lived somewhere. It wasn’t heaven, but it wasn’t the peaceful sleep of Abraham and Jacob either. The idea that spirits existed in another, Sheol-like realm, that they communicated with the living, that the living could communicate with them and satisfy or displease them with daily actions—all these ideas existed in the Jewish context long before Jews ever started to talk about heaven.
Great books—The Undertaking by Thomas Lynch and The American Way of Death by Jessica Mitford—have been written about Americans’ disconnection from death—about our habit of warehousing our elderly relatives until they die, then submitting them to chemical preservation and burying them in impenetrable lockboxes. In the ancient world, people were not so detached from their dead. The Hebrews lived in multigenerational family clusters, in small houses on top of their family burial caves. Within this tiny universe, generations would shift around in the rooms—the childbearing couple would sleep in a master bedroom; grandparents would sleep next door. And when the grandparents died, they would simply move into the cave beneath the house. (Hallote speculates that people who died in their prime would be buried farther away—in fields or farmland—where they could fend for themselves.) Like their neighbors the Canaanites, the ancient Hebrews did what they could to tend to and placate the spirits of their dead who lived beneath their floor. They fed them wine, they provided food, they gave them ointments. The Hebrews held banquets and parties in honor of their dead. They probably observed such tribal rites for thousands of years.
Hallote and others argue that the absence of afterlife in the Hebrew Bible was an effort by the religious authorities to suppress the cult of the dead among the Hebrews. The monotheism to which they were committed could allow no deviation. Wining and dining your dead, asking for their advice, holding feasts in their honor—all this looked dangerously like a violation of the First Commandment: I am the Lord your God, you shall have no other gods before me. One time-honored way to suppress unorthodox activity—in government, in the military, in religion—is simply to pretend it doesn’t exist.
As Hallote and Segal, and indeed many other scholars, point out, the religious authorities who wrote the Bible knew that ancestor worship was part of Hebrew culture because they wrote strict laws forbidding it—and who writes laws against practices that don’t exist? Deuteronomy, though chronologically fifth in the Torah, is thought to have been written first. It is, essentially, a list of dos and don’ts for the Jewish people, and among the don’ts are sorcery, magic—and the summoning of the dead. “No one shall be found among you…who practices divination, or is a soothsayer, or an augur, or a sorcerer, or one who casts spells, or who consults ghosts or spirits, or who seeks oracles from the dead,” it says. In Leviticus, the authorities promise that anyone who raises the dead shall be cut off from God forever and “stoned with stones.”
Those hoping to escape such punishment need look only at the story of King Saul for a deterrent. Saul, who historians believe lived around 1000 BCE, ordered all mediums and wizards expelled from his territories. Yet, faced with a swelling army of Philistines (an enemy tribe in Canaan), he became desperate and was driven to seek the counsel of his deceased mentor, Samuel. Saul knew he was violating the law, so he disguised himself in a cloak and went after dark to a sorceress to ask for her help in raising Samuel’s spirit. Literature through the ages echoes the Bible: no good ever comes of talking to ghosts. In the underworld, Homer’s great hero Odysseus sees his mother—who died from missing him—but he cannot touch her. Hamlet talks with his father’s ghost, a conversation that leads to a stage full of corpses. When Samuel comes up from Sheol to talk to Samuel, he is cranky, like a child awakened from a nap. “Why have you disturbed me by bringing me up?” he asks. Then he tells Saul his destiny. He will be cut off from God. His sons will die in battle. The Philistines will win the war. The Bible could not be clearer: raise the dead and bad things will happen.
While reading Hallote’s book at the New York University library one sunny afternoon, I found myself in a kind of waking dream. I began to imagine myself as one of the ancient Hebrews—as I am, a mother, a daughter, a sister, a wife. What if I had inherited a tradition, thousands of years old, of caring for and talking to my dead relatives? What if I prepared meals for all the people for whom I was responsible, both those living in my house and those buried beneath it? What if—God forbid—I kept my dead children as the Hebrews did, in jars under the house, where they remained under my protection? What if such rituals gave me comfort, continuity, a sense, however fragile, of control over the fortunes of my family?
Then, what if my rabbis told me that all this was forbidden? That these family customs violated God’s laws? What would I do? How would I think about my dead? Wouldn’t I want to imagine them in a place where someone else would be caring for them, with as much concern and attention as I could give them? Wouldn’t I want assurances that they were safe, well fed, and cared for? If my dead spirits could no longer inhabit my house or my life, wouldn’t I want to imagine someplace for them like heaven? I asked this question of Hallote: With their almost ruthless insistence on monotheistic orthodoxy, didn’t the religious leaders pave the way for heaven? It’s possible, Hallote answers, slowly. “The religion got rid of an aspect of religious life that was working. Certainly, by the sixth century BCE, you’re not supposed to be communicating with your dead.” By suppressing one kind of practice, the religious authorities created a hole, a space, in the hearts and minds of the Jewish people. Perhaps this need made them especially receptive to the new ideas they were about to encounter. Perhaps prohibitions against ancestor worship opened the way for heaven.
ZOROASTRIANISM
The Bible says that after Moses led his people out of slavery, after the Hebrews wandered for forty years in the desert, after God gave him the Ten Commandments, after Moses died without ever setting foot in the Promised Land, after Joshua led the Hebrews back to Canaan, fighting and burning his way northward, King David—the fierce, flawed, passionate poet—marched into Jerusalem with banners flying. David’s men carried with them a box, covered with blue cloth, that contained the stone tablets God had handed down to Moses. David’s son Solomon, following instructions from God, built a temple on Mount Moriah, the hill in Jerusalem where, generations before, Abraham had drawn his knife to sacrifice his son. The story was complete, the symbolism perfect. The Jews were back in the land of their ancestors, their monotheistic religion intact, their temple—which contained an inner sanctum for their Ark—a shrine to God’s favor. Jerusalem became the center of the Jewish world, the Temple the center of Jewish worship, and for four hundred years, peace and prosperity reigned.
Then, in 586 BCE, the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar the Great stormed Jerusalem and drove many of the people who lived there—the elites and the skilled workers—into Babylon, roughly modern-day Iraq. The majority were left behind, too poor and uneducated to merit the king’s attention. Nebuchadnezzar’s armies smashed the Temple and the wall around the city, crushing the stones the Jews had so carefully quarried and carved. The Ark itself, containing the tablets from God, went missing. This loss remains at the center of the Jewish story.
What was the Jewish experience in Babylon? How did they practice their religion among strangers? More important, how—or rather, how much—did they adapt the religious beliefs of their new neighbors? For our purposes, these questions are crucial. Scholars believe that, after about a generation, the Jews lived in peace and prosperity in Babylon, too. The Persian king Cyrus conquered Babylon in 539, and after that time the Jews in exile lived as citizens in the great Persian Empire—territory that extended west to modern-day Turkey and east to India—contributing taxes and troops as needed. Persia was at that time the center of the world: its values were literate, enlightened, and tolerant. The Jews were free to practice their religion then, and they did so, worshipping at temples in Babylon and even on the Nile River island of Elephantine.
It was in Babylon, scholars say, that the Jews began to think of themselves as a people united by God, rather than a tribe connected to their turf and the day-to-day devotions at their Temple. For the first time, their identity transcended land and family. In exile, the Jews began to write down their codes, their laws, their stories. Far from their Temple, they began to create a religion that was “congregational,” rather than merely local; their rituals and prayers transcended geography.
Here, though, is the important point: the Jewish exile coincided with the growing popularity of a new religion in the land that is now Iraq. This religion had originated about a thousand years earlier in Central Asia, in the mountains of northern Pakistan and Afghanistan, and was rooted in the teachings of a prophet named Zoroaster, or Zarathustra. It was a dualistic religion, which taught that all the good in the world came from the main deity, Ahura Mazda, who was associated with light, and that evil sprang from a demon named Agra Mainyu, associated with darkness. Zarathustra preached about an afterlife in which souls were judged according to their deeds on earth. At the judgment, each soul would walk across a razor-thin bridge that extended across a stinking pit; the good would pass safely across the bridge, while the evil fell in. And at the same time, he taught, the armies of light were at war in another realm with the armies of darkness. This war would bring about a cataclysm, a series of Messiah figures would come, and the earth would be refreshed, renewed, even perfected. Dead bodies would rise and be reunited with their souls. Everybody, in the end, would arrive in this Paradise, whose inhabitants would be, according to the Zoroastrian scripture called the Avesta, “non-aging, immortal, non-fading, forever living, forever prospering.” The word Paradise, remember, has Persian roots.
Jamsheed Choksy, a professor of religious studies at Indiana University, believes that Zoroastrianism had a crucial impact on the development of Jewish (and eventually Christian and Muslim) ideas of heaven and hell. The Jews would have come across these ideas as they traveled through the empire on business, or as troops in the Persian army. The Israelites, he explains, even “had a representative at the royal court…[their rabbis] would have had theological debates with the magi [the Zoroastrian priests]. They probably had encounters and discussions.” The book of Leviticus’s fixation on purity, says Choksy, comes from the magi: “Clearly the magi and the rabbis are discussing what they should and shouldn’t be doing.” (And obviously the earliest Christians knew about the magi—for it was these same magi who made their pilgrimage to the manger in Bethlehem.)
But the Jews felt their monotheistic faith was threatened by the idea that good and evil came from two different places, and some scholars believe that the following verse in Isaiah (also written during the Exile) is a pointed rejection of Zoroastrian polytheism. “I form light and create darkness / I make weal and create woe / I the Lord do all these things.” God creates the world, the prophet says, and everything in it: good and bad, light and dark. There are not two Gods: only One.
The story of heaven—that is, the story of how Western people began to think that they and their loved ones would go there—is bound up with the older story of Judaism caught between cultural currents, under pressure to assimilate into the mainstream on the one hand and under equal but opposite pressure to retain its unique theology and identity on the other. I have marveled, in doing the research for this book, at how enduring this theme is: the Jews, having weathered one historical cataclysm after another, continue to live caught between the extremes of liberalism and orthodoxy. In the neighborhood where I live in Brooklyn, the children of Jews like me—married to a non-Jew, celebrating and observing an amalgamation of traditions—play on the tire swing in the playground with the children of the ultra-Orthodox, the boys with their heads covered and their tzitzit showing where their dress shirts meet their loose-fitting trousers. We, the parents, smile warily at each other, reenacting the perennial tensions in our religion.
Our story now moves back to Jerusalem, where the idea of heaven was forged out of such tensions. In 200 BCE Jerusalem wasn’t much of a place. It had not yet recovered from Nebuchadnezzar’s siege. It was a ruin, a place so reduced that no one in the Ancient Near East would have said it mattered, or even called it a city. Only seven or eight thousand people lived there, most on a single hill in plain view of where their Temple used to be. These survivors had rebuilt the Temple, probably from the stones of the first, but it was smaller, and shabbier, than the original. Every time they sacrificed a goat or a lamb at its altar, the Jews must have been reminded of everything they’d lost: their Ark, their Temple, and their identity as a community that existed to serve God at that Temple. The remaining inhabitants of Jerusalem thought of themselves as a humiliated and desecrated people.
But the city was beginning to change. The Jews of the Diaspora had grown prosperous. Trade routes had opened between Jerusalem and Babylon and points east, and between Jerusalem and Egypt and points south. These Hebrew merchants and trades people spoke foreign languages. They stored precious stuff—vases, plates, leather goods, coins, food—in the Temple. They knew something of the wider world. They could read and write: they were codifying the stories and laws that would become the Torah. Still, despite all these innovations, they did not—exactly—believe in heaven.
Archaeology tells us the tribe that became the Jews had participated in something like the primitive ancestor worship of their Canaanite neighbors in the centuries before the Babylonian exile. They probably also knew about Egyptian death and burial rites, because Jacob was mummified. Perhaps they also knew that the souls of the pharaohs were thought to fly up to the stars to live as gods, and, as we have seen, the Jews of Babylon knew something about the teachings of Zoroaster and his vision of a final judgment where the good go up and the bad go down. Still, the idea of souls ascending to live with God in the sky was not yet born to the residents of Jerusalem.
Like a cheesy magician, I have left a card up my sleeve. I’ve mentioned the afterlife alternatives given to Jews by the authors of the Torah: either eternal rest among the bones of your ancestors, or Sheol, a shady place where no one wanted to go. The Torah metes out punishment for anyone who raises and talks to their dead. And that, I seemed to say, was that.
Except that wasn’t that—not quite. Two characters in the Hebrew Bible do ascend to someplace like heaven, and there they live with God, though it’s not clear how—or why—they earn this honor. The first one is Enoch. The Bible gives almost no personal details about Enoch: his name is mentioned in Genesis, in a list of begats; he is a son of Jared, and the father of Methuselah. Yet, in a single sentence, the Bible imputes to him an extraordinary destiny: “And Enoch walked with God; then he was no more, for God took him.” He no longer existed on earth, in other words, he existed with God. No mention is made of how he died—or indeed, if he died—or what he did in life or whether or not he was worthy. He simply went to live with God. Genesis is thought by most scholars to have been written and finalized toward the end of the fifth century BCE, or perhaps somewhat earlier. In the millennia that followed, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim stories about heaven often included an appearance by a personage named Enoch; some versions were even written by “Enoch” himself. The most influential of these visionary tales were gathered together as the book of Enoch—a compilation of apocalyptic works written between the second century BCE and the second century CE by a succession of anonymous Jewish and early Christian scribes.
The other character who ascended to something like heaven is Elijah, the prophet found in the Hebrew Bible, in the books of Kings, the same prophet whom modern Jews welcome at their Passover tables each spring. Elijah served as the mouthpiece of God. He praised God’s glory, he foretold His fury, he warned Jews about the punishments that would befall them were they to worship anything or anyone else besides the God of Israel. Elijah, according to the Bible, was just walking along with his disciple Elisha when he was “taken up”: “A chariot of fire and horses of fire” appeared, “and Elijah ascended in a whirlwind into heaven.” In my research for this book scholars have—repeatedly—warned me against overgeneral declarations. The Hebrew Bible makes no mention of people going to heaven—except in the two instances where it does. Some scholars say that by the time of the Exile, some Jews, some of the time, believed that some special people went to heaven.
HELLENISM
And I’ve also kept another card up my sleeve. Despite all the influences that neighboring religious practices may have had on the way the Jews imagined heaven, most notably the fusion of Zoroastrianism with traditional Jewish beliefs, no influence was more important to the invention of heaven than that of the Greeks.
In 333 BCE, two hundred–odd years after the Babylonian exile, Jerusalem had been gobbled up in Alexander the Great’s sweep southward. The tiny city itself did not matter—scholars debate whether Alexander ever went there—but it was, like so many other small cities, a pawn in the political power struggles that emerged after Alexander’s death. It became part of the great Hellenistic Empire, a region that absorbed most of what was once the Persian Empire: extending as far east as the Himalayas and as far west as modern-day Turkey. In Israel today, a tourist can see Greek ruins, the remnants of temples dedicated to Greek gods. In the third century BCE, the language of commerce and government was Greek, education systems were Greek, and taxes were paid to provincial governors with allegiances to the Greek emperors. Jerusalem was not an official city-state, and the Greeks allowed the Jews more or less to govern themselves, but the culture around them was pervasively Greek. Like Jews or Muslims in America today, whose discomfort with such mainstream, quasi-religious symbols as Christmas trees and Easter eggs is mixed with a longing to embrace them, the Jews of the third century before Christ lived within a dominant culture so powerful it would have been impossible to evade.
As any eighth-grader knows, the Greeks had a pantheon of gods, but these gods would have mattered very little in any practical or day-to-day sense to the Jews in Jerusalem. Before around 200 BCE, the Jews, as a self-governing people—the priests of their Temple were their highest authorities—were not required to participate in what amounted to the pagan state religion. But the worldview of the Greeks was unavoidable, and it changed forever not only the way they saw themselves but their visions of the hereafter.
The Greeks, radically unlike their Jewish neighbors who were tied to generations of family history, emphasized the accomplishments of individuals. Their well-known love of sports and games reflected a more general love of individual competition. Their schools taught reading, writing, history, literature, and mathematics, and young boys learned that their individual contributions to society mattered. Residents of the empire who were citizens (not the Jews) could vote—and many of those who couldn’t aspired to citizenship and held democracy as an ideal nonetheless. Alexander’s own favorite sculptor was Lysippos, who made the great conqueror look like a varsity athlete, hair sweaty and matted, brow furrowed from exertion, rather than the customary bland, anonymous leader-god.
This worldview presented the Jews with an alternative way to see themselves. The Jews who had gone into exile had already begun to grapple with their identity specifically as Jews, since they’d long been separated from their ties to the land. The influence of the Greeks released the Jews, at least to some extent, from their tribal and generational chains.
Even more critical: the Greeks believed in the soul, the life force within each person, which was also the seat of individual personality and agency. It resided, the Greeks believed, inside the human head. They were convinced—very broadly speaking—that the spirit and the body were joined in life and that after death they separated. The body was dirty and corrupt, the source of all lower human activity—sex, eating, childbirth, sickness. While it was left in the ground to decay, the soul ascended, free of constraints, to live—if it was worthy—with the gods. In Plato’s Phaedo, Socrates says that the soul “departs to the invisible world, to the divine and immortal and rational: arriving there, she lives in bliss and is released from the error and folly of men, their fears and wild passions and all other human ills, and forever dwells…in company with the gods.” The soul, it would seem, has a mind of her own.
For Plato, the highest human achievement was wisdom. In life, he taught, men should try to make their bodily desires submit to their intellect, their soul; in death, the captive soul would be set free. And the more wisdom a person accumulated on earth, the higher the soul would ascend toward God. (Plato believed in a creator god, which he called the Demiurge, as well as in a constellation of other gods, such as stars, which were perfect and eternal. Toward the debauched antics of the Greek pantheon—Athena, Zeus, and so forth—Plato had only disdain.) Those with insufficient wisdom would be sent back to the world for another try—Plato also believed in reincarnation. Humans were made of two separate parts: mortal body and immortal soul. “There is no question, hands down,” Segal told me, “that the Greeks were the most important influence on what we think about heaven.”
I like to think of these ideas as floating around in the atmosphere of Jerusalem, looking for a home. There was the nearly universal idea that God, or the gods, lived up in the sky. There was the Canaanite idea that the beloved dead lived on, in some way, needing attention, gifts, and sustenance. There was the Egyptian idea that kings ascended to the sky after death to live with the gods—and the biblical idea that in at least two cases, special people could, too. There was the Zoroastrian idea of separate afterworlds for the good and the evil, the final destinations to be determined after the return of saviors to earth and a last judgment. And—perhaps most important—Greeks had the idea of an eternal soul that ascended to live with God under the right circumstances. The Jews would need a cultural and historical big bang to fuse them together.
THE BIG BANG
Around the year 200 BCE, tensions began to emerge in Jerusalem over the Jews’ relations with their Hellenistic overlords. The question, if you boil it down, was the same question that would continue to confront the Jews for thousands of years to the present day. How much should they participate in mainstream culture? And to what extent would such participation compromise their unique beliefs and religious practices? They had faced this question with regard to their Canaanite neighbors when they were still a country people and Moses, coming down from Mount Sinai, thundered at them not to worship idols as the Canaanites did.
The inhabitants of Jerusalem imagined at least two different resolutions to their conflict. The priests and the nouveaux riches favored aligning themselves with the Greeks and transforming Jerusalem from a ghetto backwater into a recognized city-state. Such an alliance would bring commerce and wealth to the city; it would give Jews a voice in the government and Jewish children the sophisticated education for which the Greeks were known, and they would become athlete-scholars, democrats, philosophers. The poorer residents, however, who had scraped by on their little hill for centuries while their countrymen lived in affluent exile, wished for no such alliance. They were suspicious of the dominant Greek culture; the Greek pantheon would have been repugnant to them, the pagan customs of the Greeks—naked athletic competitions, for example—would have been abhorrent. For four hundred years they had lived in full view of Mount Moriah, reminded constantly both of Abraham’s covenant with God and of the destruction of their Temple. They were content to remain small, insular, and separate.
The priests and the wealthy won out, of course. In 175 BCE, Jerusalem’s high priest, who bore the Greek name Jason, paid the Syrian king Antiochus IV, who held Jerusalem in his control, for permission to build a gymnasium in the center of the city. The gymnasium polarized the Jews. In any Greek city, the gymnasium was the ideological center. It taught the Hellenistic values of competition, individualism, democracy, and learning. Its colonnaded halls were adorned with statues of Greek gods; in its plaza, naked young men learned sports and games. No one knows exactly where the gymnasium in Jerusalem was; its remains have not been found. Professor Hanan Eshel, former head of the Department of Land of Israel Studies and Archaeology at Bar-Ilan University, believes the gymnasium was built on a hill across from the Temple, where the city’s rich had begun also to build large houses. When pious Jews took their animals to the Temple for sacrifice, they could see the sons of the priests, training for athletic contests, naked as the day they were born.
The books of the Maccabees—Jewish texts not found in the Torah—describe the goings-on at the gymnasium with horror. Young Jewish men wore wide-brimmed hats, it complains, in honor of Hermes, the fleet-footed god of the Greek pantheon. Rich Jewish boys, trying to fit in, endeavored to reverse their circumcisions. The author of one of these histories reserves special contempt for these young men: to hide circumcision is to abandon the covenant with God, he says. These boys “joined with the Gentiles and sold themselves to do evil.”
The story of the Jewish revolt against the oppressive King Antiochus—which Jews know today as the story of Chanukah—is also the story of heaven. After Jason built the gymnasium, power struggles erupted among the other priests. One rival, named Menelaus, offered Antiochus IV a cash payment for Jason’s job and Antiochus, needing money after decades of waging war against the Romans, accepted. Menelaus paid the king with treasure from the Temple’s stores, and the city’s poorer Jews—who would have been able to watch their precious belongings being hauled out of storerooms and onto carts bound for Syria—went crazy. For years, the Jews of Jerusalem fought each other, priest against priest, neighbor against neighbor, brother against brother.
Finally Antiochus had enough. In 167 CE he sent an occupying army into the city and set forth a series of decrees. Jews could not observe the Sabbath. They could not circumcise their sons. They were to sacrifice swine—forbidden by their Torah—on altars he chose, to gods he designated. He installed in the Temple what the books of the Maccabees call “a desolating sacrilege”: a statue of Zeus. Antiochus’s act was an unspeakable violation.
According to the books of the Maccabees, a poor and pious boy named Judas Maccabeus “got away to the wilderness and kept himself and his companions alive in the mountains as wild animals do.” He began raising a guerrilla army until he had six thousand men. He rode into Jerusalem and managed to vanquish Antiochus’s soldiers. He cleared the Temple of its abomination and rededicated it to the One God of Abraham. The meager quantity of oil in the lamp he lit lasted eight days and eight nights, and “the talk of his valor spread everywhere.”
Somewhere on the sidelines, watching these bloody events unfold, sat a man whom I will call Daniel. As he watched, he wrote prophecy, predictions of events to occur in the future, and the book of Daniel contains the first explicit reference in Jewish Scripture to anything like what we know now as heaven. Daniel was apparently a teacher and a sage. At first, Daniel advised the Jews to ignore the fighting in the streets: sit tight and pray to God. But once the streets of his city were full of Antiochus’s soldiers, he changed his mind. Perhaps he fled to a cave in the hills, where he wrote the words he hoped would inspire his people to passive resistance. Do not fight, Daniel said—but do not capitulate. Martyrs, he promised, would be rewarded for their faithfulness in a special way, and the words he wrote would change forever the way people imagined the future of their immortal souls. “Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to ever lasting life and some to shame and everlasting contempt. Those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the sky, and those who lead many to righteous ness, like the stars forever and ever.” With this verse, Daniel gave us heaven.
John Collins is Yale’s Holmes Professor of Old Testament Criticism and Interpretation, a scholar so revered and accessible that graduate students wait in line outside his door like acolytes. An Irishman who fell in love with ancient languages when he was in high school, Collins is an authority on the book of Daniel. I made a pilgrimage to New Haven because I wanted Collins to help me answer a question: Why did Daniel offer the prospect of heaven at this particular moment? Earlier Jews, like Abraham, had wanted nothing more than to sleep in caves with their ancestors. How and why did the cultural, religious, and historical threads entwine at this moment—165 BC—to give us this miraculous idea?
I should have known better. It was like asking an evolutionary biologist to explain why the first creature slithered out of the slime to live on land and breathe air. The smart scientist would say, “Who knows?” and Collins is a smart scientist. Who was Daniel? Collins shrugs, smiles, and lifts the palms of his hands upward. As he points out, the ancient Israelites left behind few records. Daniel was a wise man, a teacher. He could read and write. He spoke Hebrew and Aramaic. He knew the Bible stories and other Jewish narratives—including the earliest passages of the book of Enoch—that have not become part of the official canon. Collins interprets the book of Daniel as a chronology of current events posing as prophecy. In other words, the narrator puts himself in the past, as a person able to “see” what is happening in the future: the persecutions of Antiochus and the bloody rebellion.
But why was Daniel promising heaven just then? The Jews had been through tough times before—notably during the Babylonian exile—and no one had talked about heaven then. It was enough for them to die and be buried together. But by the time of the Maccabees, the Jews had dispersed enough that often grandfathers, fathers, and sons no longer lived in the same cities. “Being gathered to your ancestors” was not as simple and inevitable as it had been during the time of the patriarchs. And thanks to the influence of Hellenism, success for Jews had become as much a matter of individual accomplishments redounding to their own personal honor as to the honor of the family or a tribe.
Heaven, as the book of Daniel tells it, is a reward for an individual. Indeed, it is specifically withheld from those who do not follow the prophet’s urgent call, who are not, in his judgment, “wise,” and who fail to “lead many to righteous ness.” Being satisfied with sleeping forever in a cave worked, Collins says, “when the emphasis was on community and the family. The afterlife was your children and your name.” For the author of Daniel, though, “the goal in life is to hang out with the angels. Permanently.” At first, Collins adds, Daniel’s auditors must have thought he had lost his mind. Nothing like this had ever been an acceptable part of Jewish thinking before. But the idea had been born, and it caught on fast. Within a hundred years after Daniel wrote, Collins says, many of the Jews of Jerusalem would have said they believed in heaven.
And then Jesus came along and changed everything.