Why do a form of heaven and hell seem to exist in all other Abrahamic faiths but no Judaism?

Question

As far as I understand in Judaism there either is no life after death before the return of Messiah and the resurrection of all, or an afterlife all people go to possibly after purification. Meanwhile other Abrahamic religions seen to have the basic division into the good afterlife and the bad, punishing afterlife. Was this also a current in Judaism at one point, or is this influence from elsewhere?

Answer 1

Heaven and hell do exist in Judaism, just different versions of them.

The English word heaven—and the Hebrew שָׁמַיִם shamayim and Greek οὐρανός 

ouranos

, which it translates—all just mean “sky” in their respective languages. Because holiness and goodness are generally seen as "up," the sky became the natural dwelling place for the holy and good God. The Greeks looked to their highest mountain and claimed its summit as the dwelling place of their gods; the Babylonians and Israelites aimed even higher, placing their deities above the sky itself. Heaven had little to do with life after death or anyone’s eternal fate; it was simply where God dwelled in the creation.

In the biblical period, we see heaven in the process of becoming something of a metaphor. Heaven becomes synonymous with God’s realm and, in the New Testament, with God. (Matthew uses the phrase kingdom of heaven instead of the phrase found in the other gospels, kingdom of God.) This is a kind of metaphorical construction called metonymy, and the usage of heaven in the Bible is similar to referring to the executive branch of the United States government as The White House or the Congress as Capitol Hill. Here, heaven stands in for God and God’s government.

Eventually, in later Christian thinking, heaven becomes associated not only with God’s present dominion, but God’s future dominion. It represents the fulfillment of eschatological expectation for life after death. Initially, it referred to the kingdom that would come to earth, but later, in popular understanding, it became the destination for righteous mortal souls after death. Heaven was not simply God’s dwelling place, it was the dwelling place of all righteous spirits after death. good is up and after death, the righteous good go up to heaven.

Judaism, to the extent it Jews believe in an afterlife, hold to the earlier idea of the Resurrection of the Dead. In this view, the afterlife does not take place on some other plane of existence, but is the result of God's raising the righteous to new and everlasting life in a new, glorified body at the end of history. (Interestingly, this is still the official understanding in Christianity, though most Christians believe in going to heaven instead.)

So, Jews do have an afterlife concept, it's just that their afterlife is in "the world to come", which refers to the redemption of this world rather than escape to some other one.

The modern concept of hell as a place of eternal psychic torment is not found in the Bible. The Hebrew Bible/Old Testament describes a sheol (also known as the grave), which is the realm of the dead for both the righteous and the unrighteous. In any event, although sheol is not a place of fulfillment or hope, neither is it a place of punishment. If Judaism has a concept of hell, this is it: either a shadowy afterlife or simply remaining dead without hope of resurrection.

The closest we get to a place of divine punishment in the scriptures is Gehenna, a place Jesus invokes as the destiny of the wicked.

But what is this Gehenna that Jesus is talking about? The term is the Greek transliteration of the Hebrew/Aramaic גי הינום Gei Hinnom, meaning “the Valley of Hinnom,” which is an actual place just outside Jerusalem. During the city’s pre-Israelite, Jebusite history, it was used as a place of pagan worship and child sacrifice. Even in its Israelite history, the valley was identified as a place where idolatrous practices were still performed and where sinning Israelites would go “to burn their sons and daughters in the fire” (Jer 7:31). By Jesus’ time, it had long become the valley into which Jerusalem’s trash was dumped and burned. As a result, it was a place “where worms don’t die and the fire never goes out” (Mark 9:48).

What becomes clear is that even though Gehenna is an actual physical place, Jesus is not describing such a place—he is describing the fate of the wicked: they are cast into the divine garbage dump to rot and be consumed by fire. They are refuse, discarded from the plan of eternity. Hell, is in short, a metaphor.

Islam uses concepts of the afterlife similar to the Christian ones, although it, too, affirms a resurrection of the dead at the end of all history. Interestingly, the term for "hell" found in the Qur'an is جهنم jahanam, which is simply the Arabic spelling of Gehenna.

So, heaven and hell do exist in Judaism, just in different forms than the ones they evolved into in Christianity and Islam.