I get that the poster making those claims believed it. I saw no reason to accept those claims, particularly since we have other Jewish writings of the same period that do identify a fiery hell.
I am not making a claim that such belief was mainstream to Jewish theology, but it was clearly a belief held by some large number of people.
Well, i guess you’re probably right, although i haven’t heard of them. But it sounds credible as the Jews had been influenced, Hellenized(no pun) by previous Greek rulers. Also they had been in exile in Babylon as well.
While I do not know the exact origin of the various depictions of a fiery hell, it is unlikely that they borrowed from the Greeks, whose Hades was pretty much identical to the Jewish Sheol. As to the Babylonians, their contact was nearly five hundred years in the past.
If someone is going to study the bible with any serious intent, they would do well to look into the Apocrypha or Intertestamental writings. Particularly, looking over First Enoch would be a good start.
Hades of the Greeks was not as Sheol. I’m sure you know some Greek mythology and the nature of the underworld.
Plato is often credited among scholars for inventing the idea of purgatory/inferno with his work The myth of Er. :
http://www.jonathantweet.com/jotfigmentplatom.html
Not all Jews returned from Babylon, some stayed in the region and there was still contact between the communities. Their exile even resulted in rabbinic scriptures known as the Babylonian Talmud:
I looked the passage up in The Five Gospels by the Jesus Seminar. Here’s what I found:
[ul]
[li]The passage has no parallels in other gospels.[/li][li]Folk tales about a rich man and poor man trading places in the afterlife were common in that era.[/li][li]Explicit judgment scenes were common in afterlife tales: this one lacks such an aspect. [/li][/ul] Not sure that amounts to anything other than the depiction of hell in the chapter isn’t especially detailed, though they do make clear the weather is more than balmy. Dante that isn’t.
Yes. And there is no significant difference between Hades and Sheol. Both were places where the dead simply vegetated in mournful darkness. It would seem that it is quite possible that the Jews, who had no serious tradition of an afterlife, borrowed Sheol from the Greek Hades. Where have you ever seen a text (aside from Luke’s presentation of the parable of Lazarus), that describes Hades as different from Sheol?
It is certainly true that a great number of Jewish scholars continued to live and study in the region of Babylon for hundreds of years following the Exile. However, the intertestamental writings occurred in the second century B.C.E. through the second century C.E. By the time that they were written, the region of Babylon had, itself, been thoroughly Hellenized. On the other hand, most of the intertestamental works were written in Judaea and Egypt, (Alexandria being the other major center of learning within Judaism), so a claim that the notions of a fiery hell originated in Babylon would need rather more evidence than a simple guess that it might have happened that way.