Judaism, in its initial form, didn't have much of an
afterlife per se. In early
Judaism, the
afterlife was rarely mentioned or alluded to; they thought that
death was considered to be quite simply a fact, and that what comes after it shouldn't be worried over too much. Instead, they believed that one should focus all one's thoughts on this
life. This is the reason that having children (lots and lots of children) is so very important in
Judaism--in a very real way, one's children were thought to be one's afterlife.
When the
Babylonian Captivity occurred around BC 600, the
Jews were exposed to
Zoroastrianism, and various tenets from that religion wound up influencing
Judaism. Among other things, the idea of an
afterlife began to develop. Their
afterlife was sometimes depicted as fairly bland; it was sometimes considered to be simply a place for shades and ghosts. There was no punishment and no reward. Think of the scene in the
Odyssey where
Odysseyus meets the dead
Tiresias. This was called
sheol. There was also sometimes a place called
Ghenna depicted, which seems very much like the
Greek and
Roman Hades. There is no suggestion that there are separate places for reward and punishment, in the way that
heaven is supposedly a placein the
sky and
hell is a place in the
ground, but rather punishment and reward may take place in the same region.
It is very important to note that the
Jews did not believe that the non-
Jewish would go to
hell. Some
Jews believed in a sort of manifold path idea to salvation, and
Judaism was just the best way to go. In traditional
Judaism, however, the thing of it was that
Jews quite simply didn't care what happened to the
gentiles. The
Jews were the favorite of their
God, who was the
one, true God, and everyone else would wind up doing their own thing. There is quite a bit of interesting
lore and
thought deaing with this last idea of the seperation between
Jews and
gentiles, however this isn't the place to go into it.