The Hebrew Bible is not particularly interested in the structure and geography of the heavenly and earthly realms. It begins with the plain and laconic state ment that “in the beginning God created the heaven(s) and the earth” and pro ceeds to detail what precisely God produced during each of the seven days of his creation. In other words, the Bible gives an account of how the universe/world came into being (cosmogony) rather than informing its readers about the actual composition and layout of the universe (cosmology). There can be no doubt, however, if one musters all the available biblical evidence, that underlying the biblical view of the cosmos is the ancient Near Eastern model of a three-tiered universe consisting of the “earth” (eretz) in the middle, sandwiched as it were between “heaven” (shamayim) above and the “netherworld” (she’ol) below ( J. E. Wright, The Early History of Heaven, New York 2000, pp. 52 ff). It is not until the early Jewish apocalyptic literature, in particular the so-called ascent apocalypses, that we first find an almost scientific curiosity in the geogra phy and composition of the cosmos.
On the ascent apocalypses see:
M. Himmelfarb, Ascent to Heaven in Jewish and Christian Apocalypses, New York 1993; on the cosmology of the ascent apocalypses see in more detail my article “In Heaven as It Is in Hell: The Cosmology of Seder Rabbah di-Bereshit,” in: Heavenly Realms and Earthly Realities in Late Antique Religions, ed. Ra‘anan S. Boustan and Annette Yoshiko Reed, Cambridge 2004, pp. 253 ff. Note that in the present paper, too, I am dealing only with those apocalypses which develop an interest in the cosmological make up of the universe, in particular its manifold heavenly structure. – For the broader context of apocalyptic literature and “natural sciences” see Michael Stone, “Lists of Revealed Things in the Apocalyptic Literature,” in Magnalia Dei: The Mighty Acts of God. Essays on the Bible and Archaeology in Memory of G. Ernest Wright, ed. Frank Moore Cross, Werner Lemke, and Patrick D. Miller, Garden City, NY 1976, pp. 414–52; Philip S. Alexander, “Enoch and the Beginnings of Jewish Interest in Natural Science,” in The Wisdom Texts from Qumran and the Development of Sapiential Thought, ed. C. Hempel, A. Lange, and H. Lichtenberger, Leuven 2002, pp. 223–44.
According to this book, the geography of the cosmos consists therefore of the heaven (which is reserved for God alone) and the earth (which accommodates, among other things, the places where the deceased righteous and wicked are gathered). The netherworld, in the strict sense of the word, does not even exist (or else is not the center of the author’s interest). Only in later apocalypses are the righteous moved up to heaven, at first (in Dan 12, written around 165 B.C.E.) to some kind of astral existence and then (1 Enoch 39 and 71)4 to the same heavenly realm in which God also dwells. The apostle Paul is the first to mention more than one heaven (in 2 Cor 12:2, written in the second half of the first century C.E.): he knows of at least three heavens and locates the dwelling place of the righteous in the third heaven. As soon as the notion of more than one heaven is introduced, the number of the heavens grows and, together with it, the attempt to attribute to each of them different inhabitants and different inventories. The “Slavonic Apocalypse of Enoch” (2 Enoch) comes up with seven or even ten heavens (depend ing on the version) but nevertheless, despite its generous space, locates the deceased wicked together with the righteous in the third heaven, albeit in differ ent quarters. The “Greek Apocalypse of Baruch” on the other hand, contents itself with five heavens but separates the righteous and the wicked in the third and the fourth heavens respectively. Altogether, the number of the heavens in the Jewish ascent apocalypses varies between one, three, five, seven, and ten (sometimes fluctuating even within the same text) but seems to stabilize eventu ally at seven. In rabbinic Judaism, the tradition that the heavenly realm does not consist of just one heaven but is divided into precisely seven heavens has become the norm.
- It seems safe to assume that this model of the cosmos was known to the rabbis from the apocalyptic tradition and that they integrated it into their own world view. In what follows I will analyze b Hagiga 12b–13a, the locus clas sicus of rabbinic cosmology, and try to determine the rabbis’ peculiar attitude towards it.
The Talmudic text is a Sugya explaining m Hagiga 2:1 with its famous pro visions regarding the laws of ‘arayot (prohibited sexual relationships), ma‘ase bereshit (the “work of creation”) and merkava (the “chariot” of Ezek 1). Fol lowing the sequence of the Mishna it begins with a brief exposition of ‘arayot, followed by a much longer exposition of ma‘ase bereshit and merkava. The relevant rabbinical texts can be grouped in three clusters: (1) Re’uyot Yehezqel (ed. I. Gruenwald, in: Temirin 1, 1977, pp. 115 f. and 121 ff.; (2) Pesikta deRav Kahana 23 (ed. Buber, fol. 154b; ed. Mandelbaum, vol. 2, p. 343), WaR 29:11 and Dev 2:23 (32), and (3) b Hagiga 12b, ARNA 37 (ed. Schechter, p. 110), Targumic Tosefta on Ezekiel 1 (ed. Wertheimer, Batei Midrashot, vol. 2, p. 138), 3 Enoch §§ 21 and 50 (Synopse zur Hekhalot-Literatur, ed. P. Schäfer et al., Tübingen 1981), Seder Rabba di-Bereshit §§ 767–777 (Synopse zur Hekhalot Literatur), and Midrash Konen (ed. Jellinek, Beit ha-Midrash, vol. 1, p. 33). The Sugya proceeds, after a brief digression about the size of the first man, with a description of the ten things that were created on the first day. These ten things are heaven and earth, tohu and bohu, light and darkness, wind and water, and the measure of day and the measure of night. Except for the measure of day and night (which most likely refers to the organizational structure of day and night according to Gen 1:5), the remaining eight “things” are precisely the “things” mentioned in the description of the first day of creation in Gen 1:1–3.
