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