Biblical_cosmology

God creating the cosmos (Bible moralisée, French, 13th century)

The Destruction of Leviathan (Gustave Doré, 1865)

The Old Testament cosmos.

The Tablet of Shamash depicting a scene in heaven, with celestial waters below, supported by a solid base, with four stars.^[35]

The Archangel Michael, a member of the host of divine beings who attend God in heaven, defeating Satan, the dragon of chaos.^[34]

Paradise and the human soul

There is no concept of a human soul, or of eternal life, in the oldest parts of the Old Testament.^[8] Death is the going-out of the breath which God once breathed into the dust, all men face the same fate in Sheol, a shadowy existence without knowledge or feeling (Job 14:13; Qoheloth 9:5), and there is no way that mortals can enter heaven.^[8] In the centuries after the Babylonian exile, a belief in afterlife and post-death retribution appeared in Jewish apocalyptic literature.^[8] At much the same time the Bible was translated into Greek, and the translators used the Greek word paradaisos (Paradise) for the garden of God^[54] and Paradise came to be located in heaven.^[46]

Babylonian Map of the World (c. 600 BCE). The Old Testament concept of the Earth was very similar: a flat circular Earth ringed by a world-ocean, with fabulous islands or mountains beyond at the "ends of the earth".^[55]

Valley of Hinnom (or Gehenna), c. 1900. The former site of child-sacrifice and a dumping-ground for the bodies of executed criminals, Jeremiah prophesied that it would become a "valley of slaughter" and burial place; in later literature it thus became identified with a new idea of Hell as a place where the wicked would be punished.^[78]

Biblical_cosmology

Paradise and the human soul

See also

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