The Egyptians labelled this place the kingdom of the god Osiris, the lord of the dead and the judge of souls in afterlife. Osiris was based on a historical figure, the first pharaoh, who, after his own death, became ruler of the world beyond. The ka would be ushered into Osiris’s court by Anubis, a jackal-headed god. The candidate would then be put on one side of a set of scales. On the other was an ostrich feather. Since goodness was deemed to be very light, if he or she had been good they would not tip the balance and would be welcomed in to an eternal pleasure dome of banquets, contests, dancing and fun, where there was no illness, hunger, sorrow or pain. If they tipped the scales, they were consigned to an ill-defined underworld of monsters. The verdict was recorded in a court record by Thoth, Osiris’s son.
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