Jon
I waited a day or so before replying because I hoped that, on a thread with the degree of detail i have endeavoured to provide, you’d actually present texts, rather than just the claim to possess them.
My memory of the intertestamental literature, apart from the Apocrypha, is a little hazy, from studying apocalyptic twenty years or so ago. But that memory, and modern secondary literature on it, seems to confirm what I would predict: in the earlier material, there is a strong and understandable influence, post-exile, of Neo-babylonian and Persian ideas; and then there is a gradual transition to and mixing of Greek concepts.
Thus in apocalyptic, with its emphasis on heavenly events, there are multiple flat heavens after the Babylonian pattern described by Lambert (usually 3 or 7), peopled by a heirarchy of heavenly beings up to God in the highest heaven. Moving forward through time the picture is more of a spherical earth with crystalline spheres (equally populated by angelic beings, as in gnosticism) based on the Hellenic model. None of this is the simple “heaven and earth” found in Genesis and the Old Testament generally.
At the other extreme, Sheol as a place of shades becomes progressively transformed into the (more platonic) concept of actual souls, and begins to be divided into places for the righteous and unrighteous. The Persian loan-word “paradise” begins to be ambiguously applied as the resting place of the righteous prior to resurrection, either somewhere in Sheol, or in a distant hidden location of earth, or as a division of heaven. It gets equated with Eden, but is really a very different concept.
All this is new, and variably dependent on the influence of Babylon, Persia or Greece. Sometimes it’s hard to tell which, because the images are mixed, and some sources formerly believed quite late, like 1 Enoch, are now held to contain earlier material. But it’s all written in the aftermath of centuries of exposure to non-Hebrew ideas in exile, or diaspora, or foreign colonisation. It would be remarkable if pre-Babylonian ideas of cosmology, otrher than straight use of biblical texts, survived that. And I’ve not seen evidence that it did.
Now, it may be that you can produce other primary sources that show this pure 2nd millennium Hebrew influence (generic “ANE views”, as I’ve endeavoured to show, have proved to be something of a chimaera of thoroughly disparate cosmogonies and cosmologies, so their presence, and link to Hebrew ideas, would need to be demonstrated in detail). If you can provide them, great - I’ll have something to discuss, as in the case of Targhizizi and Tharumagi, which turned out to be based on a single reference in the Baal cycle that doesn’t say what was claimed; or as in the case of the “many visual representations” of Mesopotamian cosmology you claimed some time ago, of which it turned out, as I had already predicted, you couldn’t produce even one: just an Egyptian picture of the air god Shu supporting the sky goddess Nut from a coffin painting based on Old Kingdom Heliopolitan theology.
Anything less than relevant texts is, to use the phrase you like throwing at me, “hand-waving”.