The universe of the ancient Israelites was made up of a flat disc-shaped earth floating on water, heaven above, underworld below.[1] Humans inhabited earth during life and the underworld after death, and the underworld was morally neutral;[2] only in Hellenistic times (after c.330 BC) did Jews begin to adopt the Greek idea that it would be a place of punishment for misdeeds, and that the righteous would enjoy an afterlife in heaven.[3] In this period too the older three-level cosmology was widely replaced by the Greek concept of a spherical earth suspended in space at the centre of a number of concentric heavens.[1]