LORD SMASH!

One thing I particularly noticed when moving from OT to NT was that the concepts of heaven and hell were new in the NT. That is, they'd been mentioned once or twice in the OT, but only in passing; I suspect they were mostly seen as philosophical abstractions. They certainly didn't seem to be used as carrots or sticks very much.

So I suspect this explains why the OT God kept cursing people's descendants unto the fourth generation, or elevating three generations of someone's sons to the kingship despite them being manifestly unsuited for the job: if the guy at the head of the family tree does something sufficiently good or bad that his own life isn't long enough to reward or punish him in, the only thing you can do to increase the reward/punishment is to apply it to his children and his children's children, which it's assumed he will care about because people generally do. But then it kept falling down when the punished children were good and didn't deserve that sort of treatment, or the rewarded children turned into nasty spoiled brats; hence the NT cleverly invented the afterlife, so that it could redirect the entire punishment/reward to the person who actually did the thing, and treat their children as separate individuals with their own score sheets.

In conversation with a Jewish friend about the idea of Jewish tradition and especially the Talmud, we came up with this analogy: people think of it as a tarball, but it's not, it's source control.

I had never thought of this idea, neither has it come up in my theology class as a possbility. However, I think next time the disucssion on cursing one or more generations comes into play I'll see what others think. I think this is a fab concept though :-)