Divine judgment

Divine judgment means the judgment of God or other supreme beings and deities within a religion or a spiritual belief. Ancient Egyptian religion#Afterlife and Book of the Dead In ancient Sumerian religion, the sun-god Utu and his twin sister Inanna were believed to be the enforcers of divine justice. Utu, as the god of the sun, was believed to see all things that happened during the day and Inanna was believed to hunt down and punish those who had committed acts of transgression. After she was raped in her sleep by the gardener Shukaletuda, she unleashed a series of plagues upon the whole world before tracking him down and killing him in the mountains. In another story, she hunted down the old bandit woman Bilulu, who had murdered her husband Dumuzid, and turned her into a waterskin. The Sumerians, as well as later Mesopotamian peoples, believed that all mortals went to the same afterlife: Kur, a cold, dark, cavern deep beneath the earth. Kur was miserable for all people and a person's actions during life had no impact whatsoever on how he or she would be treated in the afterlife. The idea of a final readjustment beyond the grave, which would rectify the sharp contrast so often observed between the conduct and the fortune of men, was prevalent among all nations in pre-Christian times. Such was the doctrine of metempsychosis or the transmigration of souls, as a justification of the ways of God to man, prevailing among the Hindus of all classes and sects, the Pythagoreans, the Orphic mystics and the Druids among the Celts. The doctrine of a forensic judgment in the unseen world, by which the eternal lot of departed souls is determined, was also widely prevalent in pre-Christian times. The Pharaonic Egyptian idea of the judgment is set forth with great precision of detail in the "Book of the Dead", a collection of formulas designed to aid the dead in their passage through the underworld. The "Book of the Dead" (Nekyia) in the Odyssey depicts judgment in the afterlife by Minos, the "radiant son of Zeus" who in his mortal life had been king of Crete.