The Pearly Gates
For He looked down from His holy height; from heaven the Lord looked upon the earth, to hear the groaning of the prisoner, to set free those who were doomed to death, Psalm 102:19-20 NASB
Heaven – Early Hebrew thought says almost nothing about heaven or hell. The ideas of eternal bliss in some celestial realm and eternal punishment in a demonic abode are developments of much later ages. As far as the Tanakh is concerned, everyone enters She’ol at death. There is no kingdom of bliss waiting on the other side of the grave. The Hebrew šāmayim (“heaven” or “heavens”) has two referents: 1) everything that is above the earth (the sky, the sun, the moon, the stars), and 2) the abode of God. It doesn’t take much imagination to recognize the first of these meanings. Living in a pre-electrical age in the nomadic wastes of the Near East, celestial phenomena were constantly present. Furthermore, virtually all the surrounding pagan cultures associated these objects with deity. Israel rejected the pagan associations, but it still lived “under the heavens.”
The second reference to God’s abode does not imply an other-world kingdom. It will take centuries to construct the pearly gates version. The fact that God looks down from šāmayim isn’t a geographical location statement. It is a statement about sovereignty and majesty. Therefore, Solomon “recognizes that all of heaven and the highest heavens themselves (“heaven of heavens”) cannot contain the Almighty God. As vast as the heavens are, they are merely part of God’s creation, and he stands above it all.”[1] By the way, heaven is not a place for Man, not even after death. Man is made for the earth which is why the new heaven descends to the earth, not the other way around. As I’ve mentioned before, if you’re planning to get to heaven, you’ll be the only human being there. Everyone else will be on the new earth.
The concepts of heaven and hell as we understand them today are the development of rabbinic and Hellenistic thinking. They are basically answering the question, “How will the balance scales of justice be settled when it appears that the wicked get away with it in this world?” The Greeks pushed Western civilization into the idea of reward and punishment in the life to come, and rabbinic thinking seems to have followed the same path in the development of the ‘olam ha’ba, but for Abraham and David, this world is it. How God sorts it all out later is unknown. He does, according to Exodus 34:7, but that’s the end of the information.
So, when David writes about God looking down from šāmayim (plural – “the heavens”), we should read it as figurative language concerning sovereignty. God “sees” what is happening with the destitute because He has a lofty vantage point, as Thomas Aquinas’ famous tower analogy suggests. It’s not the pearly gates. It’s comforting oversight. You can put your three-tiered universe aside and pretend you’re sitting under the starry night sky in the desert near Ein Gedi. Look up. God is in control.
Topical Index: heaven, šāmayim, hell, Psalm 102:19
[1] Austel, H. J. (1999). 2407 שׁמה. R. L. Harris, G. L. Archer Jr., & B. K. Waltke (Eds.), Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament (electronic ed., p. 935). Chicago: Moody Press.
