The Jewish fear of water

 

I saw ‘A new heaven and a new earth’, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea.
Revelation 21:1

At the time of Jesus, the Jewish people had no developed ideas of an afterlife. For example, many believed in a strange limbo-like existence called Sheol (pronounced as something between ‘shole’ or ‘shay-ol’). It was said to be dark, maybe cold and damp, and the souls residing there lay dormant—in effect imprisoned—while awaiting liberation which, in effect, meant a form of oblivion.

Following Jesus, his followers were better able to describe the afterlife. But many of their descriptions sound rather odd, because life with God is so different from life on earth that we have nothing with which to compare it: no language can describe the indescribable.

But St John attempted to describe heaven in Revelation 21, employing a language filled with images and metaphor at the centre of which is a concept he called ‘The New Jerusalem’. It all sounds rather odd—or even eccentric and psychedelic. But it’s worth our trying to understand what he’s saying.

John starts describing heaven by saying, ‘There was no longer any sea’. The Jews feared primordial chaos, which explains why He began His creation by separating land and sea: removing the sea removed peril and unpredictability. Similarly, the seas and oceans create natural barriers between nations and people groups, so removing the sea will re-allow the intermingling and mixing of people as God intends.

But perhaps the biggest problem concerns the way the sea was a home to evil. In Revelation 13:1, for example, ‘the beast’ is described as living in the sea, so removing the waters implies that evil itself had gone, thereby removing opportunities for rebellion against God’s from His creation. With evil gone, John goes on to say that heaven will have no more death, mourning, weeping, pain (Revelation 21:4), curses (Revelation 22:3), or night (Revelation 21:25 and 22:5).