Celestial Topography: Mapping the Divine Realms of Antiquity

This dissertation explores the cartographic descriptions and depictions of the heavens in antiquity, specifically the 1st century BCE through the early 5th century CE. The physical nature of the heavens and the loci each portrayal includes or excludes tells the reader a great deal about the communities creating and engaging with these various understandings of the heavens. This study offers a series of snapshots of differing depictions of the heavens from various times and places in early Judaism and Christianity; the poetic Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice from the Dead Sea Scrolls, the depictions of 1st Century CE apocalypses, the first explicitly Christian tour of heaven in the Visio Pauli, and the artistic renderings of late antique Palestinian synagogue mosaics. In order to read these many spaces and their mythic places out, the study engages with various critical spatial theories, demonstrating that a nuanced deployment of modern spatial theory can yield fruitful results in the study of antiquity. In addition it offers one answer to the question of why the heavens developed and became so complex in the second temple and post second temple period. This dissertation suggests that this complexity was a natural development of pre-exilic proclivities for seeing the earthly temple as a miniature copy of the heavenly one; albeit one forced to develop due to imperial expansion upon the earth. The expanded holdings of heaven, while losing their importance as loci from the mythic past, were retained in early Christian maps of the heavens as the resting places of so many different sorts of righteousPh.D