d
of departed souls, was exceedingly simple and definite. In the Jewish
theory the universe is like a sort of three-story house. The flat earth
rests upon the waters, and under the earth's surface is the land of
graves, called Sheol, where after death the souls of all men go, the
righteous as well as the wicked, for the Jew had not arrived at the
doctrine of heaven and hell. The Hebrew Sheol corresponds strictly to
the Greek Hades, before the notions of Elysium and Tartarus were added
to it,--a land peopled with flitting shadows, suffering no torment, but
experiencing no pleasure, like those whom Dante met in one of the upper
circles of his Inferno. Sheol is the first story of the cosmic house;
the earth is the second. Above the earth is the firmament or sky, which,
according to the book of Genesis (chap. i. v. 6, Hebrew text), is a vast
plate hammered out by the gods, and supports a great ocean like that
upon which the earth rests. Rain is caused by the opening of little
windows or trap-doors in the firmament, through which pours the water
of this upper ocean. Upon this water rests the land of heaven, where
Jehovah reigns, surrounded by hosts of angels. To this blessed land two
only of the human race had ever been admitted,--Enoch and Elijah, the
latter of whom had ascended in a chariot of fire, and was destined to
return to earth as the herald and forerunner of the Messiah. Heaven
forms the third story of the cosmic house. Between the firmament and the
earth is the air, which is the habitation of evil demons ruled by Satan,
the "prince of the powers of the air."

Such was the cosmology of the ancient Jew; and his theology was equally
simple. Sheol was the destined abode of all men after death, and no
theory of moral retribution was attached to the conception. The rewards
and punishments known to the authors of the Pentateuch and the early
Psalms are all earthly rewards and punishments. But in course of
time the prosperity of the wicked and the misfortunes of the good man
furnished a troublesome problem for the Jewish thinker; and after the
Babylonish Captivity, we find the doctrine of a resurrection from Sheol
devised in order to meet this case. According to this doctrine--which
was borrowed from the Zarathustrian theology of Persia--the Messiah
on his arrival was to free from Sheol all the souls of the righteous,
causing them to ascend reinvested in their bodies to a renewed and
beautiful earth, while on the other ha