WI: Jewish "Hades" survives

Today, the 3 big monotheistic faiths have a common view of the afterlife, inherited from Zarathustra's faith by the Jews, who survived in both Christianity and Islam: there's an heaven where the righteous go, and an hell for the not-so-righteous. But Jews did not always believe in such an afterlife: before being deported to Babylon, the view of the afterlife they had was something similar to the Hades depicted in the Odyssey, a dark place without punishment nor reward, in which everyone went. Could this vision survive, or Judaism would have developed an heaven-and-hell afterlife system in any case, maybe modeled after the Egyptian one? After all, many Psalms are thinly veiled plagiarisms of hymns to Aton, who is even the namesake of the term Adonai. (well, Egyptians had a sort of heaven, but no hell. You simply ceased to exist even in the afterlife). If Christianity, or a similar Judaism-derived faith, emerges, would it have the same success?
 
I don't think so, the original Christianity was an Apocalyptic cult whose very early followers were slaves and outcasts, which makes sense if you think about it: turn the other cheek, your true reward is in the afterlife etc. I don’t think as many people would join a religion that promised them basically the same thing as existing religions.
 
I don't think there would be a Christianity in this case. I think this form of Judaism can easily survive, since actually nearly all religions have this besides the Abrahamistic ones and Zoroastrianism.
 
I don't think so, the original Christianity was an Apocalyptic cult whose very early followers were slaves and outcasts, which makes sense if you think about it: turn the other cheek, your true reward is in the afterlife etc. I don’t think as many people would join a religion that promised them basically the same thing as existing religions.
Yeah, cause it wasn't like Paul was a well regarded pharasiee before his conversion or anything...
 
Official Judaism to this day is pretty vague on the afterlife. In the mainstream view, Gehenna is really more of a Hades or Purgatory than a Hell; and the Garden of Eden is a temporary stop before the Messianic Age, which is the exact opposite of the Christian Rapture - the resurrection of the righteous (or perhaps all the dead, or all the Jewish dead - sources differ) on this earth.

The Sheol idea isn't completely gone, because it is in the texts and Judaism is a very textual faith, like Protestantism.

There is an old Rabbinic idea that the souls of the righteous become one with the Presence of the Lord, which sounds a bit like Nirvana.

And many Jews simply say that the religion gives little guidance on the afterlife because it is good deeds in this world that matters (makes sense, since Judaism values works over faith).

So what you may be looking for is not just that Jewish "Hades" - Sheol or Gehenna - survives, but that it remains the only real afterlife theory in Judaism, or at least in the bulk of believers in it and its descendant faiths. That requires Zoroastrianism, Manichaenism, Mithraism and so on never catching on in the Roman Levant. Plausible, maybe. An even better bet might be another set of afterlife beliefs that are more satisfying and assure a better world-to-come for the righteous - maybe some variation of Egyptian faith and the Isis Cult?

If you're asking what effects this would have on world religion and philiosophy, utterly, absolutely profound, no question. But you need something more fundamental than Judaism happening to Zoroastrianize its afterlife beliefs - to this day, there are other strains in the Jewish faith. It is Christianity and Islam that have nearly universally adopted the Zoroastianized version.
 
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