Article one traces the seven-heaven scheme through the ancient Near East, Judaism and Islam into medieval Christian cosmology. A newer American tradition took the same underlying impulse, a graded afterlife matching different lives to different destinies, and built it on a different number entirely, which is worth setting beside the older scheme rather than treating as a variant of it.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints teaches three degrees of glory, celestial, terrestrial and telestial, set out in Doctrine and Covenants section 76, a revelation attributed to Joseph Smith and Sidney Rigdon and dated to 1832. The celestial kingdom, the highest, is reserved for those who receive the fullness of Latter-day Saint ordinances and covenants; the terrestrial for honourable people who lacked that fullness; the telestial, still described as glorious rather than as punishment, for the remainder, with only a very limited category held to be excluded from any degree of glory at all. The scheme explicitly departs from a simple heaven-and-hell binary and is distinctive within American Christianity for that reason.
The contrast with the seven-heaven tradition is instructive precisely because the underlying religious problem, that people plainly differ in merit and that a single undifferentiated afterlife feels inadequate to that fact, recurs across traditions that never had contact with one another's specific number. Seven derives from Mesopotamian planetary astronomy carried into Judaism and Islam; three degrees derive from Latter-day Saint scriptural revelation with no debt to that astronomical inheritance at all, which is a clean case of independent invention answering a shared problem rather than of one tradition borrowing from another.