Hello, I'm Gary Stevens, and welcome to the History in the Bible podcast.

All the history, in all the books, in all the Bibles.

Welcome back to Gary and Steve's guide to the apocalypse,

and we've really gotten into the apocalypse.

And as much as we've talked about this for several hours now,

we've only scratched the surface. And we thought that this would be a good time to talk about the afterlife and how this whole concept of the time in what happens

after a person dies after life. What happens? And how did the modern conception of afterlife build from its very beginnings?

Right. So let's go back to the context of the state of the Little Kingdom of Judah in the Middle East

and the concepts of the afterlife in the ancient Middle

East. We seem to have a fair amount of information on that, from that most ancient of

civilizations, the Sumerians, through to the Babylonians and the Assyrians and the Canaanites.

And the concept of the afterlife that they had is just blah.

That's the best way to describe it.

Bluh.

The general idea seems to be that after you die,

you go into this place of darkness and silence

and you wander around being miserable for,

it seems, eternity.

And interestingly, this concept of an afterlife is also very similar to the Greek and Roman

concepts of an afterlife of Hades, a place of darkness and misery.

So it's interesting that these civilizations have constructed an afterlife, which is just an appalling, well, perhaps not appalling. It's just,

it's like you're forced to spend Christmas at your great arts that you can't stand in the

...