Divine Rewards and Punishment

Yom Kippur

In anticipation of the upcoming holiday of Yom Kippur, where Jews across the world will be praying to be inscribed in the book of life both in this world and the next, we will look at how Jewish ideas of divine rewards and punishments changed as Judaism transitioned through the 1st millennium BCE. We'll look mainly at three major stops. The exact times for each of these groups is debated academically, but we don't really need to establish an absolute chronology to posit a relative chronology. The three eras are roughly as follows. In the first era, you are rewarded materially for following God and God's commandments, and punished for disobeying them. In the second era, we see Jewish thinkers grapple with the age old question of why do good things happen to bad people. In other words, how does our theology hold when God doesn't seem to be rewarding good people and punishing bad people? In the third era we see the introduction of an afterlife and a divine judgment after-death. Good people may receive divine rewards in the afterlife, and evil people will receive punishment.

Era 1: Vihaya im shamoa, If you will listen

Twice a day, religious Jews recite the Shema. The second paragraph, vihaya im shamoa [1] outlines succinctly the general ideas of this era. If you listen to God he will bring the Yoreh and Malkosh, the early and late rains, and you will have plenty of crops, and you will eat and be satisfied. And if you do not listen, God will withhold the rain, and you will perish from the land.

These themes are repeated throughout the Torah. Deut. 28 starts with the same words, vihaya im shamoa and describes the blessing, if you follow, and a very extensive list of curses. A similar blessing/curse appears in Lev. 26.

In the book of Shoftim (Judges), the link between following God and receiving prosperity is explicit. The cycle goes like this. The people start worshiping other gods. God sends an external nation against them as punishment. A judge arises and delivers them and reestablishes correct worship practices. The judge dies and the process repeats.

In the monarchy period it is similar, the calamities that befell both the Kingdom of Israel and the Kingdom of Judah were directly attributed to idolatrous practices. Sometimes, the correlation was questionable and these needed some def explanations.  For example, Yoshiayhu (Josiah) the absolute best king for extirpating idolatry from the land was slain in battle, while his grandfather Manashe (Manasseh), who reestablished all the evil practices that Josiah stopped, lived a long peaceful reign.  When the Kingdom of Judah falls, it is attributed to the idolatry of Manashe, even though he had already been off the scene for over 50 years [2].

Nevertheless, we see from the beginning of the Torah to the end of Kings, that doing God's will comes with the promise of reward here on earth, whether it be through timely rains, or peace from enemy activity. And disobeying God, brings concomitant punishments.

Era 2: Kohelet (Ecclesiastes) and Iyov (Job)

The second era begins later in the development of Jewish thoughts. The question of "why do bad things happen to good people" is one that has plagued monotheistic religions forever. In era one, there was an explicit promise that bad things do not happen to good people, so if a bad thing happens, you can safely trust it's because that person sinned.

The books of Kohelet and Iyov offer alternative views. We'll start with Iyov. The basic story is known to everyone. God tests the righteous Iyov by bringing calamities on him, destroying his property, killing his children, and afflicting him with diseases. Iyov is the quintessential good person who has bad things happen to him. Iyov complains to three friends who come and visit him, but he refuses to curse God.  At the end, Iyov challenges God to answer for what he did, and God does answer. It's God's answer that is important to us here.

God's answer (Job 38-41) is worth reading on your own. But the basic idea is that God is amazingly powerful, therefore it is not in Iyov's right to question God's judgment. It appears to be a "might makes right" argument, but a more modern reader can interpret it as "God works in mysterious ways." In other words, there is a divine design behind all things, and if it looks unfair now, that's only because you are not privy to all the information. This is answer one for "why do good things happen to bad people."

The second "answer" comes from Kohelet. I say "answer" in quotes, because it's not a very good answer. The book of Kohelet, is a nearly existentialist work which basically says that everything has been done before, and there is no rhyme or reason to the events of the earth. The conclusion, is that since everything is pointless anyway, you might as well worship God (Ecc 12:13-14).  This answer shows a real struggle by the author over how to reconcile divine promises of rewards with earthly results that don't seem to live up to the billing.

Era 3: The afterlife

The Babylonian exile ended with the return of the Jewish people to Israel as sanctioned by the Persian emperor Cyrus. This was a formative period for the world.  Specifically in the 6th-5th centuries BCE, you have the rise of the Zoroastrian religion. Jewish people living in Babylon were exposed to this religion and it's clear that it greatly influenced post-biblical Jewish and Christian theology [3].

One of the central tenets of Zoroastrianism is that after death, people were judged on their righteousness on earth, by crossing the "bridge of judgment" and depending on how good they were they either proceed to heaven or hell [4].

Immediately this provides a very nice answer to the problems of Iyov and Kohelet. There is a method for divine justice and if it appears that a righteous person is being punished here on earth, that's ok, because they will get rewarded in the afterlife, or in Judaism, Olam Haba (the world to come). The idea of a post-death judgment and afterlife are spelled out in detail in the Talmud, but are never mentioned in Tanach. They represent a later era of Jewish thought.

The Development of Monotheism

When exactly Judaism became monotheistic is debatable.  Certainly, the Tanach seems to imply that many of the people and even kings participated in a more polytheistic ritual system.  However, at some point, the Jews certainly did put all their weight behind a single God.  At the beginning, maybe there was a fortuitous turn of events, that convinced them that this God was indeed all powerful.  Or perhaps, the destruction of the northern kingdom with their blatant idolatry gave needed ammunition to the monolatrists (people who worship one God but don't deny others) and monotheists in the southern kingdom. It's not clear when the holiday of Yom Kippur started, but the Yom Kippur of the Tanach is one where the material fortunes of the nation are set.   However as time went on, it was clear that even God's favorite emissaries on earth were subject to the same travails and misfortunes, and no cohen's interference seemed to help.  The southern kingdom was destroyed, just like the northern one, and its subjects were sent into exile.

But the southern kingdom was reestablished, so maybe a divine plan was in effect after all.  Or maybe there was no point to anything, as in Kohelet.  The visible miracle-producing God of the Torah and Tanach was gone at this point.  Instead, there was now a subtle God who worked quietly and in seemingly incomprehensible ways, that humans just couldn't understand.  But this wasn't good enough to Jews who were exposed to Persian ideas of divine justice and the idea of life behind death.  So Judaism morphed to accept this concept, and it became a fundamental one of every monotheistic religion thereafter.  Along with this change, Yom Kippur, now in the absence of the communal temple ceremony, became a day of personal judgment, specifically of judgment for the afterworld.

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1. Deut 11:13-21, This passage is interesting for another reason, in that it's the only section in Deuteronomy where the text abruptly switches from Moshe speaking in first person, to God speaking in first person. ↩

2. See 2 Kings 21:11-15, 22:14-20.↩

3. One could argue the reverse that Jewish theology influenced Zoroastrianism, but that's a harder argument to make.↩

4. Another tenet of Zoroastrianism is that the dead will be resurrected for a final battle between good and evil, something that permeated late Jewish and Christian eschatology.↩

Edit: Fixed up the footnote links.