![]() The opening words of the Genesis creation narrative (Genesis 1:1–26) sum up the biblical editors' view of how the cosmos originated: "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth" Yahweh, the God of Israel, was solely responsible for creation and had no rivals, implying Israel's superiority over all other nations. In this period too the older three-level cosmology in large measure gave way to the Greek concept of a spherical Earth suspended in space at the center of a number of concentric heavens. 330 BCE) did Jews begin to adopt the Greek idea that it would be a place of punishment for misdeeds, and that the righteous would enjoy an afterlife in heaven. ![]() Humans inhabited Earth during life and the underworld after death there was no way that mortals could enter heaven, and the underworld was morally neutral only in Hellenistic times (after c. ![]() The ancient Israelites envisaged the universe as a flat disc-shaped Earth floating on water, heaven above, underworld below. Nor do the biblical texts necessarily represent the beliefs of all Jews or Christians at the time they were put into writing: the majority of the texts making up the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament in particular represent the beliefs of only a small segment of the ancient Israelite community, the members of a late Judean religious tradition centered in Jerusalem and devoted to the exclusive worship of Yahweh. The Bible was formed over many centuries, involving many authors, and reflects shifting patterns of religious belief consequently, its cosmology is not always consistent. God creating the cosmos ( Bible moralisée, French, 13th century)īiblical cosmology is the biblical writers' conception of the cosmos as an organised, structured entity, including its origin, order, meaning and destiny.
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