tubalkain

I noticed an interesting fact: using the search facility at http://www.bible.org/netbible/
I found the following occurrences of the words heaven and land in the Pentateuch books:
heaven 83
land 683
and the following for the 4 canonical gospels:
heaven 144
land 28

The ratio is completely reversed.
Now, of course these books contain very different topics so on one hand maybe this is not so significant. However, it seems to me this could be seen as a very plastic evidence of the profound shift in the perspective of Old vs. New Testament. The OT is a handbook on how to reach salvation through a terrestrial kingdom; the NT is a handbook on how to reach salvation through a heavenly kingdom. I would be interested in your comments.

Toto

The Hebrew Scriptures (some people object to "OT") have a number of stories set on earth, involving the creation of the earth, territorial disputes, people who lived in the land of X, etc. Part of this is just the subject matter, not a description of salvation.

Genesis 1:10
God called the dry ground "land," and the gathered waters he called "seas." And God saw that it was good.

By the time of Christianity, most of these territorial disputes had been settled by Roman law, and there was only the Kingdom of Heaven left in contention.

Doug Shaver

Salvation as Christians conceive it was an unknown concept to the people who produced the Jewish scriptures. Their writings had nothing to do with preparation for an afterlife. Whatever they believed about heaven, it was not a place where they were hoping or trying to get to. The land was where the people spent the only lives they expected to have.

aa5874

This observation may also be used as an indication that the concept of Jesus taking his followers to heaven, as depicted in the NT, is not of Jewish origin. Perhaps the tradition of a heavenly kingdom was originally from Egypt and then re-worked by the unknown authors of the NT.

tubalkain

Indeed that was my first reaction, but the shift may well be understood within the boundary of jewish culture, due to the immense changes in economy/politics/etc occurred between the age of the OT and the NT epoch.
I would object instead to the idea that the OT is not about salvation. Of course, not about the christian concept of salvation, but the stories told in the OT are not just chronicle, I think they really want to trace a path to salvation that every jew should follow. The protection of God can be maintained only if one learn from the past events and strive to follow their indications. And a land protected by God has reached a state of salvation.

At any rate, the shift from land to heaven is not, in my opinion, just a matter-of-fact consequence of the Roman conquer. Many jews fought for the land at the time of the stories told in the NT gospels and therefore the fact that the authors of the gospels had lost any hope of reconquering the land could be an indication that they were not part of any group of jewish revolutionaries. The salvation role attributed to the heaven, rather than to the land, was perhaps a choice not a mere consequence of historical developments.