Biblical versus Israelite Images of the Heavenly Realm

Abstract

The biblical editors did not create a record of the entire spectrum of ancient Israel's religious beliefs and practices. Theirs was by necessity a selective and biased account. It is left to modern scholarship to sift through all the evidence to create a more complete picture of ancient Israelite piety. This paper explores the available artifactual, inscriptional, literary and iconographic evidence in order to reconstruct what ancient Israelites and Judaeans believed about the heavenly realm, and not simply what the editors of the Hebrew Bible wanted people to believe or what they deemed appropriate to record.