Where Christian Views of Heaven and Hell Originated

Where Christian Views of Heaven and Hell Originated

Truth, what do Christians take for granted? Many beliefs upheld by those who profess the Judeo-Christian faith and considered inflexible truths of Christendom can be traced back to what most Judeo-Christians believe to be pagan ideas. Some Judeo-Christian principles, such as the body being a sacred object (i.e. burial rituals) and views of heaven and hell have their foundations in Egyptian and Babylonian religions. While one could view this idea as blasphemous, undermining Judeo-Christian truths, it can also be viewed as eye-opening and affirming to ones faith.

Heaven is a wonderful place, right? Judeo-Christians think of heaven as a place of luxury, a place with no tears, pain, labor, death, or destruction. Long before Christians held this premise, Egyptian’s believed in an afterlife in the fields of Re with timeless leisure. In order to attain such a life after death, they prepared their bodies to be made new: they mummified and entombed their pharaohs and people of stature. While this mummification and entombment ensured their afterlife, the common man also had a hope of crossing the great river and resting upon its golden shores. To the Egyptians, life on this earth was merely a dream from which one might someday awake. Judeo-Christians take many cultural and religious world-views from the Egyptian culture. Examples include burying the dead and the idea that cremation is barbaric. At burials today, bodies are usually dressed in their Sunday best. Jesus himself was wrapped in linen and entombed. Life on earth is but a prelude of the one to come (a dream or test).

But, enough of heaven, what about hell? The Babylonians believed the afterlife to be much different, a place of waling and gnashing of teeth: “the house where they sit in darkness, where dust is their food and clay their meat, they are clothed like birds with wings for garments, over bolt and door lie dust and silence” (92). Like the Egyptians, the Babylonians buried their dead. Their journey to the afterlife was not something to which one looked forward. Rather, silence dominated their underworld where all people--kings, queens, heroes, and servants--suffered equal torment.

For the Babylonians heaven was only for the gods. “In this underworld there also lived the Anunnaki, the nameless ‘Great Ones’ who once, like Ereshkigal (Queen of the underworld), lived above with the host of heaven”(28).