The Early History of Heaven (review)

This book discusses the rise of the idea of heaven as a celestial abode of God and angels, among or beyond the stars, to which righteous humans might ascend after death. The creation of our elaborate ideas of heaven, as Wright imagines the process, arises from the mixture of two apparently discrete cultural traditions, an ancient near eastern cosmology that tended to be simple and theological and a Greco-Roman cosmology that was elaborate, multi-layered, and constructed with astronomy in mind. The two streams of thought achieve their most elaborate combinations in the extra-biblical writings of early Judaism, like the books of Enoch.

This is a rather old-fashioned thesis, the syncretistic encounter of Semitic and Greco-Roman “traditions,” and it has the tendency to isolate cultures artificially and ahistorically in order to demonstrate confluence. But Wright adheres closely to it in this book, examining “each” Ancient Near Eastern culture in turn before turning to the Greco-Roman world. Chapter One examines ancient Egyptian traditions relating to the sky and afterlife, using a small selection of mortuary texts. Chapter Two covers ancient Mesopotamian traditions relating to afterlife realms, the layout of the cosmos, and astrology. In Assyria and Babylonia Wright finds stories of heroes ascending to the abode of gods, detailed depictions of a tripartite heaven, and speculation on the gods’ relationship to star movements; but all these topics are much less developed in the literature of Sumer and Syro-Palestine. Chapter Three—which one might consider illegitimately separated from the preceding one—covers “Israelite traditions.” Here, with lengthy digressions on the Israelite pantheon and a tendency to treat quite diverse texts as uniform evidence for a kind of “biblical thought,” Wright reports that Israelite cosmology was also vague and diverse and its afterlife ideas even more so.

The range of different themes that Wright discusses in these first three chapters, from astronomy to pantheons to afterlife ideas, can be confusing. His intentions are clearly teleological—i.e., how did we end up with the heavens of Dante’s Paradiso or Bill Keane’s “Family Circus” cartoons. But in collapsing such a miscellany of religious ideas purely to exhibit heaven’s “sources,” Wright shows the serious methodological flaws in the teleological approach. Even if our popular views of heaven combine skies, stars, heavenly beings, delightful landscapes, and afterlife in one integrated scheme, the ancient cultures that Wright discusses in the first three chapters conceptualized all these topics separately: afterlife domains had nothing to do with the sky; people rarely or never visited the gods’ abodes; and many gods lived on mountains, not clouds. Hence Egyptian views of the land of the dead, Mesopotamian views of the cosmic layers, and Israelite views of god and the gods have nothing intrinsically or ethnographically to do with each other. Wright succeeds in showing that Ancient Near Eastern cultures did not have a modern idea of heaven, but one can imagine more useful ways of approaching the ancient sources.

Chapter Four, “Persian, Greek, and Roman Traditions,” becomes Wright’s crucial chapter, for it is through “biblical” Judaism’s subsequent appropriation of these Mediterranean traditions that the modern idea of heaven will arise. Wright discusses “Astronomy and the ‘Scientific’ Views of the Heavenly Realm” in each culture, showing the attention to astronomical movements and to the cosmic “layers” indicated by each heavenly body in its presumed circuit around the earth. Wright appreciates the Greeks’ and Romans’ quasi-scientific attention to the skies but proposes that this complex cosmos “can heighten ones’ sense of alienation,” impelling people to seek transcendence and union with the Divine (p. 107). It is then Persian tradition, he argues, that outlines the notion of the soul’s return to an abode in the stars.

In the next section, “Tradition and the Religious Views of the Heavenly Realm,” Wright suggests that “Mystery Religions” emerged from these various Greco-Roman traditions to address the soul’s cosmic alienation and lay out the route of the soul’s return. (No attention...