Note: The Structure of Heaven is a 325-page book that can be downloaded from Amazon.com in Kindle format by clicking here. It is also available in paperback format by clicking here.
It’s not a stretch to suggest that Judaism evolved from Zoroastrianism, and Jewish theodicy, like the original Zoroastrian theodicy, treats evil as a spiritual quality which is defined as the opposite of good. The Jews saw God as the author of all that is good, and it is the turning away from God through the misuse of free will that creates the quality of evil. Evil was born in the Garden of Eden when Adam ate of the forbidden fruit. In doing so, he turned away from God. It began with the act, and not the apple. For Jews, evil remains a spiritual quality, as it was in the original incarnation of Zoroastrianism. It was never transformed into a metaphysical substance dispersed by a devil who is a sort of rival god.
In 597 BC, the Jews were exiled from Judah to Babylon by Nebuchadnezzar, the king of the Babylonian Empire. (Judah was part of the land that is now southern Israel. Babylon was located in what is now Iraq about 50 miles southwest of modern Baghdad, along the banks of the Euphrates River.)
Babylonian religion had many pagan gods, but Zoroastrianism, with its one God, was the religion of the Persian Empire. In 537 BC, Cyrus, the king of the Persian Empire, conquered Babylonia. It is possible that Cyrus viewed the Jews as kin, and thus freed them from their 60-year captivity out of sympathy. Upon their return to the land of Judah, the Jews rebuilt Jerusalem and the Hebrew temple.
The Jews clung to their identity throughout their years of captivity in Babylon, as well as through all the diasporas that followed. In order to do this, they resisted assimilation into other cultures. Thus, the Jewish people also resisted the urge to adopt a foreign god of evil. For Jews, to this day, evil remains a human quality, as it was in the original incarnation of Zoroastrianism. It was never transformed into a metaphysical substance dispersed by a devil who is a rival, if inferior, god.
The Jews saw God as the author of all that is good, and it is the turning away from God through the misuse of free will that creates the earthly quality of evil. Evil on earth was born in the Garden of Eden when Adam ate of the forbidden fruit. In doing so, he turned away from God. (The snake who tempted Eve was described as the “cleverest animal in the garden of Eden”, and not the personification of the devil because at the time that the Book of Genesis was written, the concept of a devil had not yet been invented. That came later with the rise of Christianity.)
The Jews were constantly being conquered and dispersed throughout pre-Christian history, and they had little to cling to except the Jewish laws written into the original Torah. The Torah does not contain references to a separate angel of evil, and consequently the rabbis continued to resist the urge to materialize evil in the form of a devil.
The concept of Satan as an angel of evil did not even exist before the establishment of Christianity, and even then, it took over 500 years after the birth of Jesus for Satan to establish himself.
Jewish theology has no heaven or Hell. It has instead the Sheol, a place where the souls of both the righteous and the unjust reside together in an anesthetized state until the end times, when they will be resurrected in their original bodies and face their rewards or punishments in person.
“And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to reproaches and everlasting abhorrence” (Daniel 12:2)”
Note: The Structure of Heaven is a 325-page book that can be downloaded from Amazon.com in Kindle format by clicking here. It is also available in paperback format by clicking here.