Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife

by Bart D. Ehrman

I am afraid of Death, and so I roam open country (Gilgamesh, Tablet IX, i)

In his self-defense, as recorded in the Apology, Socrates claims that his primary purpose in his life as a public figure has always been to do what he knew was right, regardless of the consequences. It is far better, he insists, to suffer for doing what is right than to prosper while doing what is wrong. So too in the face of death: if his actions should lead to his execution, that is not his concern. He can only control his own actions, not those of others who choose to punish him for them. And so, no matter what, he will continue doing what he has always done by following the direction given to him by his god.

Plato championed an essentially dualistic anthropology in which the body and soul are more or less at war with each other, with each one wanting what is at odds with the other. That is why, for Plato, physical pleasure is not the great good most people take it to be but the ultimate enemy. Pleasure ties a person to the body. When people feel pleasure, they want more. They focus on getting it. They live for it. But to what end? The body that feels pleasure will die. Then what? The pleasure brings no good in the long term.

Whatever we think of death—whether it brings extinction or a life beyond—we do not need to face it with terror. Plato’s ultimate point is that there is nothing to fear.

The one inscription I have always found even more amusing (and moving) is a seven-letter Latin abbreviation that was as widely used in antiquity as “R.I.P.” (“Rest in Peace,” itself from the Latin requiescat in pace) has been in the modern world. The abbreviation is “n.f. f. n.s. n.c.” Translated, it provides a most trenchant summary of the materialist views endorsed and promoted by Epicurus, Lucretius, and their followers: non fui, fui, non sum, non curo—“I was not. I was. I am not. I care not.”

The closest equivalent to the Greek psychē is the Hebrew nephesh. The nephesh, though, is not a soul, set in contrast to the body. Hebrew anthropology was not dualistic (body and soul) but unitary. Nephesh means something like “life force” or “life” or even “breath.” It is not a substance that can leave a person and exist independently of the body. It is the thing that makes bodies live. When the body stops breathing, it becomes dead matter. In modern terms, when you stop breathing, your breath doesn’t go somewhere. It just stops. So too with the Hebrew nephesh. The person is then dead.

a person’s ultimate destination is sometimes called “Sheol,” a term whose meaning and etymology are debated. It occurs over sixty times in the Hebrew Bible, and there is unanimity among critical scholars that in no case does Sheol mean “hell” in the sense people mean today.

Poetry in books such as Psalms, Proverbs, Job, and extensive passages of the prophets did not use rhyming schemes as in much English poetry. Instead of rhyming “sounds” at the end of lines, Hebrew poetry could be said to have rhymed “ideas.” There were various ways a poet could set up an idea-rhyming scheme, but the most common was to express the same idea in parallel lines using different words. In this scheme the second line simply rephrases the idea of the first. You can see this use of “synonymous parallelism” throughout any poetic section of the Hebrew Bible.

Alan Segal, the late scholar of Judaism, unequivocally stated: “There are not any notions of hell and heaven that we can identify in the Hebrew Bible, no obvious judgment and punishment for sinners nor beatific reward for the virtuous.”5

Today people think of a prophet as someone who predicts the future. And ancient Israelite prophets certainly did that. But it was not their major task. Israelite prophets understood themselves primarily to be spokespersons for God.

The key verse for our purposes is Isaiah 26:19: Your dead shall live, their corpses shall rise. O dwellers in the dust, awake and sing for joy! For your dew is a radiant dew, and the earth will give birth to those long dead [literally: “shades”].

After the period of the classical prophets, Jewish thinkers came to imagine that in fact there would be life for the individual who had died. For them, there was a possibility of life beyond the grave—real, full, and abundant life. But in this original Jewish conception, unlike widespread Christian views today, the afterlife was not a glorious eternity lived in the soul in heaven or a tormented existence in hell, attained immediately at the point of death. It was something else altogether. It was the idea that at the end of time God would vindicate himself and his people. When history and all its evil and suffering had run its course, God would reassert his sovereignty over this world and destroy everything and everyone who was opposed to him, bringing in the perfect, utopian world he had originally planned. Inhabiting this world would be the righteous who had lived and suffered throughout all of history. God would miraculously bring them back into their bodies, and they would live, bodily, without any pain, misery, or suffering, for all time, in his most glorious kingdom.

Paul insists that this is how it will be at the future resurrection. The body that goes into the ground is corruptible and temporary; it will be raised incorruptible and eternal. “It is sown in weakness but raised in power; it is sown a natural [Greek: psychic] body, it is raised a spiritual [Greek: pneumatic] body” (1 Corinthians 15:44). It will still be a body, but it will be made up of the most highly refined “stuff” there is: pneuma, or spirit. And so the resurrection is a glorious transformation in which the raised body will be a spiritual body, one that can never grow infirm or die.