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(i) Next to Nothingness

A casual reader of many parts of the Old Testament could be forgiven for thinking that ancient Israelite belief about life after death was not very different from that of Homer:

In death there is no remembrance of you;

in Sheol who can give you praise?⁶

The dead do not praise YHWH, nor do any that go down into silence.⁷

Dust you are, and to dust you shall return.⁸

What profit is there in my death, if I go down to the Pit?

Will the dust praise you? Will it tell of your faithfulness?⁹

My soul is full of troubles, and my life draws near to Sheol.

I am counted among those who go down to the Pit;

I am like those who have no help,

like those forsaken among the dead, like the slain that lie in the grave,

like those you remember no more, for they are cut off from your hand.

You have put me in the depths of the Pit, in the regions dark and deep.

Your wrath lies heavy upon me, and you overwhelm me with all your waves …

Do you work wonders for the dead? Do the shades rise up to praise you?

Is your steadfast love declared in the grave, or your faithfulness in Abaddon?

Are your wonders known in the darkness,

Or your saving help in the land of forgetfulness?¹⁰

In the noontide of my days I must depart;

I am consigned to the gates of Sheol for the rest of my years.

I said, I shall not see YHWH in the land of the living;

I shall look upon mortals no more among the inhabitants of the world …

For Sheol cannot thank you, death cannot praise you;

those who go down to the Pit cannot hope for your faithfulness.

The living, the living, they thank you, as I do this day;

fathers make known to children your faithfulness.¹¹

We must all die; we are like water spilled on the ground, which cannot be gathered up.¹²

The living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing; they have no more reward, and even the memory of them is lost. Their love and their hate and their envy have already perished; never again will they have any share in all that happens under the sun …

Whatever your hand finds to do, do with your might; for there is no work or thought or knowledge or wisdom in Sheol, to which you are going.¹³

Now [sc. if I had died at birth] I would be lying down and quiet;

I would be asleep; then I would be at rest, with kings and counsellors of the earth …

There the wicked cease from troubling, and there the weary are at rest.

There the prisoners are at ease together; they do not hear the voice of the taskmaster.

The small and the great are there, and the slaves are free from their masters.¹⁴

Sheol, Abaddon, the Pit, the grave. The dark, deep regions, the land of forgetfulness. These almost interchangeable terms denote a place of gloom and despair, a place where one can no longer enjoy life, and where the presence of YHWH himself is withdrawn.¹⁵ It is a wilderness: a place of dust to which creatures made of dust have returned.¹⁶ Those who have gone there are ‘the dead’; they are ‘shades’, rephaim,¹⁷ and they are ‘asleep’.¹⁸ As in Homer, there is no suggestion that they are enjoying themselves; it is a dark and gloomy world. Nothing much happens there. It is not another form of real life, an alternative world where things continue as normal.

The most lively biblical scene of continuing activity in Sheol merely confirms this. Isaiah 14 offers a splendid depiction of the king of Babylon arriving in the underworld to join the erstwhile noble shades who are there already. In a passage worthy of Homer, he is grimly informed that things are very different down here:

Sheol beneath is stirred up to meet you when you come;

it rouses the shades to greet you, all who were leaders of the earth;

it raises from their thrones all who were kings of the nations.

All of them will speak and say to you:

‘You too have become as weak as we! You have become like us!’

Your pomp is brought down to Sheol, and the sound of your harps;

maggots are the bed beneath you, and worms are your covering.¹⁹

Allowing for poetic licence, this indicates a minimal human activity of recognition; but the greeting is made in order to inform the newly arrived monarch that his power counts for nothing in this miserable world. Indeed, he is even worse off than the others, because he was not even buried in his own land. Thus, while

All the kings of the nations lie in glory, each in his own tomb …

You are cast out, away from your grave, like loathsome carrion;

clothed with the dead, those pierced by the sword,

who go down to the stones of the Pit, like a corpse trampled underfoot.²⁰

If there are different degrees within Sheol, they are degrees of misery and degradation. The passage reveals something else: a fluidity of thought between Sheol as a mythical abode of the shades on the one hand and the physical reality of the grave—stones, worms, maggots and all—on the other.

It would be wrong to give the impression that the early Israelites were particularly gloomy about all this. Only a world which had already begun to hope for something more interesting and enjoyable after death would find this vision unusual or depressing. Their minds, and their hopes, were on other things. When Jacob declares that losing another son ‘would bring down my grey hairs with sorrow to Sheol’, he does not mean that such a tragedy will result in him going to Sheol rather than somewhere else, but that his passage there will be accompanied by sorrow rather than by contentment at a long and worthwhile life.²¹ The description of his eventual death does not mention Sheol, but rather says that he ‘was gathered to his people’; there is no reason, though, to suppose that his descendants thought he was anywhere other than in Sheol. The tension remains between that belief and the implicit hope, on a different level altogether, contained in the instructions that his body be taken back to the family burial place.²² The same hope underlies Joseph’s command that his bones be eventually taken back to the promised land.²³

This combination of themes is taken up and repeated in what becomes the regular formula for dying kings. David ‘slept with his ancestors, and was buried in the city of David’, which is the more interesting since his ancestors were not buried there. ‘Sleeping with one’s ancestors’, in other words, was not simply a way of saying that one was buried in the same grave or cave, but that one had gone to the world of the dead, there to be reunited with one’s forebears.²⁴ The minimal sort of ‘life’ that the shades had in Sheol, or in the grave, approximated more to sleep than to anything else known by the living. They might be momentarily aroused from their comatose state by an especially distinguished newcomer, as in Isaiah 14, or (as we shall see) by a necromancer; but their normal condition was to be asleep. They were not completely non-existent, but to all intents and purposes they were, so to speak, next to nothing.²⁵

This conclusion, though it seems so clear in the texts, has sometimes been challenged on the basis of the archaeological evidence of ancient Hebrew burials and their attendant customs. Eric Meyers, in particular, has argued that the ancient and widespread practice of secondary burials (collecting and storing the bones after the flesh has decomposed) reflects a belief in a continuing nephesh, enabling the bones to provide ‘at least a shadow of their strength in life’, with the mortal remains constituting ‘the very essence of that person in death’.²⁶ Many ancient Israelite tombs show evidence of grave-goods, apparently providing for the needs of the dead.²⁷ Thus being ‘gathered to one’s fathers’, or, in the case of Qumran (so Meyers suggests) to one’s brethren, meant that one’s bones would be stored along with theirs.²⁸ This, coupled with the suggestion of some other scholars that there was a reasonably widespread cult of the dead in ancient Israel, as in the ancient non-Jewish world, has caused some to question whether the picture of life after death was really as shadowy as the biblical texts indicate. Have they, perhaps, deliberately covered over a more popular belief with an ‘orthodox’ statement of the next-to-nothing existence of the dead, perhaps to discourage interest in and association with the dead?²⁹

The latter proposal seems to be ruled out on closer inspection. The evidence simply does not support it. And it is important to heed the warning of an eminent archaeologist, himself a student of the same phenomena: ‘any analysed rite or custom lends itself to more than one interpretation.’³⁰ The practice of secondary burial can itself be interpreted in various ways; its sudden reintroduction in the middle of the second-Temple period is often (though still controversially) linked with the rise of resurrection belief, as we shall see in the next chapter.³¹ Earlier statements proposing that ancient Israelites thought of the dead as dangerous and hostile are without foundation.³² And various scholars have pointed out that, while grave-goods and the provision of food and drink can be interpreted as helping the newly deceased to pass on to the underworld, once that process was complete there was no need for further provision. The dead had gone and were not part of the ongoing life of the people in the way that they were, and are, in many other cultures.³³

Death itself was sad, and tinged with evil. It was not seen, in the canonical Old Testament, as a happy release, an escape of the soul from the prison-house of the body. This, of course, is the corollary of the Israelite belief in the goodness and god-givenness of life in this world. Hence the robust if stern wisdom of Ecclesiastes: since this is the way things are, your best course is to enjoy life to the full.³⁴

Around this point we meet a tension, well known and full of theological import, between death as the natural ending of all mortal life and death as the punishment for sin. This tension runs back (assuming the point of view of a first-century reader) to Genesis 2:17, 3:3, and 3:22: eating from the tree of knowledge will result in death, but even after the first pair have done so there remains the possibility that they might eat from the tree of life and so live for ever. We may note the especially pregnant point that if the promised punishment for eating the forbidden fruit was death, the actual, or at least immediate, punishment was banishment from the garden. Since, however, the point of banishment was so that they could not eat from the tree of life and thus live for ever (3:22–4), the two amount more closely to the same thing than it might appear at first sight.

This complex issue has been suggestively discussed by James Barr as part of his argument that, despite the too-much-protesting statements of Cullmann and others, the Bible does indeed concern itself with human immortality.³⁵ Barr is surely right to stress that the Genesis story as it now stands indicates that humans were not created immortal, but had (and lost) the chance to gain unending life. For his discussion to be taken forward, however, it is vital to distinguish at least four senses of immortality: (a) ongoing physical life without any form of death ever occurring; (b) the innate possession of an immortal part of one’s being, e.g. the soul (which is itself in need of further multiple definition), which will survive bodily death; (c) the gift from elsewhere, e.g. from Israel’s god, to certain human beings, of an ongoing life, not itself innate in the human make-up, which could then provide the human continuity, across an interim period, between the present bodily life and the future resurrection; (d) a way of describing resurrection itself. The first, it seems, is what Adam and Eve might have gained in Genesis 3; the second is the position of Plato; the third emerges, as we shall see later, in second-Temple writings such as the Wisdom of Solomon; the fourth is emphasized by Paul.³⁶ Barr, however, never draws such distinctions with any clarity. His proof that the Bible is indeed concerned with ‘immortality’ thus fails to hit all the relevant nails squarely on the head.

It is not difficult to see what expulsion from the garden would have meant (not only to readers, but to editors of the Pentateuch) during and after the exile in Babylon, especially in the light of the promises and warnings of the great Deuteronomic covenant. Moses held out to the people life and death, blessings and curses, and urged them to choose life—which meant, quite specifically, living in the promised land as opposed to being sent into the disgrace of exile.³⁷ But already in Deuteronomy there was the promise that even exile would not be final: repentance would bring restoration and the renewal both of the covenant and of human hearts.³⁸ This explicit link of life with the land and death with exile, coupled with the promise of restoration the other side of exile, is one of the forgotten roots of the fully developed hope of ancient Israel. The dead might be asleep; they might be almost nothing at all; but hope lived on within the covenant and promise of YHWH.

(ii) Disturbing the Dead

The regular forbidding of making contact with the dead is normally taken as good evidence that many in ancient Israel tried to do so.³⁹ It would be extraordinary if they had not. Ancestor-cults were widespread in the ancient world, as they still are in many places today.⁴⁰ Most human societies have been aware that one might be able to get in touch with those who had gone before, and that there might be some advantage to be gained by doing so, whether to ward off any malign influence, to gain insight into things outside normal human knowing, or simply to re-establish contact with departed loved ones. Such practices were common among the Canaanites whom the Israelites were to dispossess, and were high on the list of the things that the covenant people were to renounce.

The principal scene which illustrates the point is the meeting between Saul and the dead Samuel.⁴¹ Saul himself, as part of his royal reforms, had forbidden necromancy, banishing the mediums and wizards through whom contact could be established. But when he faced a military crisis, and YHWH remained silent in response to his prayers, Saul himself, in disguise, sought out a medium (his servants apparently had little trouble in finding one, despite the ban), and at his instruction she called up Samuel. The multiple theological and emotional layers of the story are remarkable—it was, after all, Samuel who had pronounced divine judgment on Saul for earlier disobedience ⁴²—but for our purposes the point is what happened next. As the medium called up Samuel, she was given superhuman knowledge, recognizing Saul through his disguise (v. 12). Saul reassured her, and she continued, seeing an elohim coming up out of the ground (v. 14). Elohim normally means ‘god’ or ‘gods’; this usage presumably reflects Canaanite belief in the divinity of the dead, surviving here as a kind of linguistic fossil.⁴³ Here it seems to mean ‘a spirit’, ‘a being from the world of the gods’. It is indeed Samuel, angry at being disturbed (v. 15); he really does know the future (he had already warned Saul of divine judgment, but he now knows precisely when it will arrive); but it is not good news. YHWH is taking away from the rebellious king his kingdom, victory and life itself:

Moreover, YHWH will give Israel, together with you, into the hands of the Philistines; and tomorrow you and your sons shall be with me. YHWH will also give the army of Israel into the hands of the Philistines.⁴⁴

While the scene plays its own part within the dramatic build-up towards the climax of the book, in Saul’s death and David’s imminent accession, it also served as an awful warning for its readers. Necromancy might be possible, but it was both forbidden and dangerous. Doubtless people would continue to advocate it, as Isaiah mockingly said:

Now if people say to you, ‘Consult the ghosts and the familiar spirits that chirp and mutter; should not a people consult their elohim, the dead on behalf of the living, for teaching and instruction?’ Surely, those who speak like this will have no dawn! They will pass through the land, greatly distressed and hungry … they will see only distress and darkness, the gloom of anguish, and they will be thrust into thick darkness.⁴⁵

But it will only bring ruin. The living god is the only source of true life, wisdom and instruction, and he will give it to those who truly seek him. The dead are to remain undisturbed in their long sleep.

(iii) The Unexplained Exceptions

Two figures, and perhaps a third, stand out from this story. They appear to escape the common lot of mortals, and find their way by a different route to a different destination.⁴⁶

Genesis 5 offers a genealogy of the antediluvian patriarchs, with the common refrain ‘and he died’, echoing the judgment of Genesis 3.⁴⁷ Into this list breaks Enoch, son of Jared, father of Methuselah. Enoch, says the writer, ‘walked with God; then he was no more, because God took him’ (verse 24). This simple, unadorned statement, at first sight merely a gently euphemistic way of marking the passing of a devout man, gave rise to enormous later speculation. What had happened to Enoch? Where was he? Had he escaped death? To Enoch, as a result, were attributed later books of secret revelation and wisdom.⁴⁸

Along with Enoch goes Elijah, who went up to heaven in a whirlwind, snatched away by the heavenly horsemen and chariots.⁴⁹ Even Elisha, who inherited a double portion of Elijah’s spirit, was not granted that favour. It is perhaps because of his unusual departure—the text stresses that his body was not to be found—that later tradition envisages him returning again before the final day of YHWH arrives.⁵⁰ Elijah, too, became the putative author of apocalyptic writings, and speculation about his coming was clearly an important feature of first-century expectation.⁵¹

Thirdly, the fate of Moses himself was shrouded in uncertainty. Deuteronomy states clearly enough that Moses died in the land of Moab having looked into the promised land from Mount Nebo, and that he was buried in a valley opposite Beth-peor, but that nobody knows the precise location of his grave.⁵² This was presumably aimed at preventing his tomb from becoming a place of pilgrimage. But the uncertain location of both his death and his burial opened the door to a different sequence of possibilities. Eventually some came to believe that he, like Elijah, had not actually died in the normal way, but had been taken up to heaven.⁵³

None of these three was held up as a model for what a pious or devout Israelite might expect to happen again. Nobody suggested that if someone lived an exceptionally holy life, or accomplished some great deed, they might be similarly treated. No explanation is given as to why Enoch and Elijah were given a favour—if favour it was—denied to such great figures as Abraham, Joseph or Samuel. No account is available of what sort of existence they had gone to (a question of particular relevance, one might think, to later developments about the resurrection), or, in particular, of the kind of heavenly world in which Elijah could still possess his body. They remain the unexplained exceptions to the otherwise universal rule.

Equally, the one or two miraculous resuscitations of the dead attributed to Elijah and Elisha are not particularly relevant to the study of Israelite beliefs about death and life beyond.⁵⁴ The people concerned would die again. Our main interest in these stories—apart from their anticipation of stories about Jesus—is their implicit assumptions about death. The life-force (nephesh, always difficult to translate) departs from the child and then returns when Elijah revives him. Elisha’s servant tells him that the child has not ‘woken up’.⁵⁵ This language anticipates some of the key ideas that are used in connection with resurrection itself.

(iv) The Land of No Return

‘The undiscover’d country, from whose bourn/ No traveller returns.’ Thus Shakespeare’s Hamlet, musing on death—all the more remarkably in a play written from within Christendom.⁵⁶ But the sentiment is an accurate description of the regular Old Testament belief about the fate of the dead: death is a one-way street, on which those behind can follow but those ahead cannot turn back.⁵⁷ Humans are here today, gone tomorrow, and seen no more.⁵⁸ The book of Job contains the most emphatic statements on the subject:

Remember that my life is a breath; my eye will never again see good.

The eye that beholds me will see me no more;

while your eyes are upon me, I shall be gone.

As the cloud fades and vanishes, so those who go down to Sheol do not come up;

they return no more to their houses, nor do their places know them any more.⁵⁹

A mortal, born of woman, few of days and full of trouble,

comes up like a flower and withers, flees like a shadow and does not last …

For there is hope for a tree, if it is cut down,

that it will sprout again, and that its shoots will not cease.

Though its root grows old in the earth, and its stump dies in the ground,

yet at the scent of water it will bud, and put forth branches like a young plant.

But mortals die, and are laid low;

humans expire, and where are they?

As waters fail from a lake, and a river wastes away and dries up,

so mortals lie down and do not rise again;

until the heavens are no more, they will not awake or be roused out of their sleep.

Oh that you would hide me in Sheol,

that you would conceal me until your wrath is past,

that you would appoint me a set time, and remember me!

If mortals die, will they live again?⁶⁰

The last question, clearly, expects the answer ‘no’, which is reinforced elsewhere in Job, and echoed in (among other places) Jeremiah.⁶¹ Within the book, part of the point is Job’s insistence that YHWH must give judgment in his favour during this life. The dead have no future; so God’s judgment must take place here and now. This, perhaps, is the point of the book’s controversial ending (42:10–17), though we cannot discuss this here.

The passage in Job often thought an exception to this rule is almost certainly not. The older translations show why it was thought an exception; the more recent, why it is now doubted:

I know that my redeemer liveth,

and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth:

and though, after my skin, worms destroy this body,

yet in my flesh shall I see God:

whom I shall see for myself,

and mine eyes shall behold, and not another. (AV)

In my heart I know that my vindicator lives

and that he will rise last to speak in court;

and I shall discern my witness standing at my side

and see my defending counsel, even God himself,

whom I shall see with my own eyes,

I myself and no other. (NEB)

I know that I have a living Defender

and that he will rise up last, on the dust of the earth.

After my awakening, he will set me close to him,

and from my flesh I shall look on God.

He whom I shall see will take my part:

my eyes will be gazing on no stranger. (NJB)

For I know that my Redeemer lives,

and that at the last he will stand upon the earth;

and after my skin has been thus destroyed,

then in my flesh I shall see God,

whom I shall see on my side,

and my eyes shall behold, and not another. (NRSV)⁶²

Though the New Revised Standard Version thus returns, in a measure, to the tradition of the Authorized (King James) Version, the others reveal just how problematic this is; and the marginal notes in most modern translations admit that nobody quite knows exactly what the crucial passages mean (for instance, the NRSV points out that for ‘in my flesh’ we could read ‘without my flesh’, which would of course change the meaning completely). Most scholars agree that, difficult though the passage is to translate, it is still more difficult to suppose that, in the teeth of the other passages explored above, it suddenly holds out a hope for a bodily life beyond the grave.⁶³ It is true that the response to Job’s speech in chapter 19 is that of Zophar in chapter 20, in which the traditional view is strongly reaffirmed as though by way of rebuke (‘they will perish for ever like their own dung … they will fly away like a dream, and not be found; they will be chased away like a vision of the night …’⁶⁴). This could have some oblique retrospective bearing on the supposed meaning of chapter 19. But even if this were to shift the balance back a small way towards the traditional understanding, it would hardly be enough to force us, through all the translation problems and against the run of the rest of the book, to insist that this little passage forms an exception to the otherwise complete view of death offered by Job.

Ecclesiastes, too, insists that death is the end, and there is no return. Though nobody can be sure what precisely happens at death, as far as we can tell humans are in this respect no different from beasts:

The fate of humans and the fate of animals is the same; as one dies, so dies the other. They all have the same breath, and humans have no advantage over the animals; for all is vanity. All go to one place; all are from the dust, and all turn to dust again. Who knows whether the human spirit [or: ‘breath’, ruach] goes upward and the spirit of animals goes downward to the earth?⁶⁵

No: to die is to be forgotten for good.⁶⁶ Death means that the body returns to the dust, and the breath to God who gave it; meaning not that an immortal part of the person goes to live with God, but that the God who breathed life’s breath into human nostrils in the first place will simply withdraw it into his own possession.⁶⁷

(v) The Nature and Ground of Hope

When Walther Zimmerli wrote his short, clear monograph, Man and his Hope in the Old Testament, the question of life beyond the grave was not only not the main issue; it hardly rated a discussion.⁶⁸ This is a reminder that our present question was simply not faced head on by the majority of the Old Testament writers. They took for granted the picture we have sketched above, and got on with other things. The hope of the biblical writers, which was strong and constant, focused not upon the fate of humans after death, but on the fate of Israel and her promised land. The nation and land of the present world were far more important than what happened to an individual beyond the grave.

The hope of the nation was thus first and foremost that the people, the seed of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, would multiply and flourish. Even in the story of the Fall there is hope in childbearing.⁶⁹ Children, and then grandchildren, are God’s great blessing, and to live long enough to see them is one of the finest things to hope for.⁷⁰ It is a sign of Joseph’s great blessedness that he was able to see and hold his own great-grandchildren.⁷¹ Conversely, to remain childless is a sign of great misery (people today in Europe and America, with all kinds of other aspirations, often regard the ancient stigma of childlessness as quaint and small-minded, but in a world where children are the centre of one’s future hope it makes a lot of sense). To see one’s children die or be killed was perhaps the greatest possible personal disaster.⁷² To perpetuate not only the nation but one’s individual family line was thus a sacred responsibility, requiring special customs and laws to safeguard it.⁷³ Such beliefs and practices are hardly unique to ancient Israel, but they became all the more important through their association with the promises made to Abraham and his heirs, and through the events that had formed Israel into a people with a distinct sense of vocation and mission in the world. To the devout Israelite, the continuance of the family line was not simply a matter of keeping a name alive. It was part of the way in which God’s promises, for Israel and perhaps even for the whole world, would be fulfilled. Hence the importance, particularly in the post-exilic period when the nation was gathering itself together again, of those genealogies which seem so bafflingly unreligious to late modernity, and of the prophetic insistence on the ‘holy seed’.⁷⁴

Along with the family went the land. God had promised to give the land of the Canaanites to Abraham’s family, and this remained the patriarchal hope up to the eventual conquest.⁷⁵ This explains, of course, why the narrator attaches great significance to Abraham’s purchase of a field containing a cave for use as a burial place (Genesis 23: the story of the purchase takes up the entire chapter). There Abraham buries Sarah, and is then buried himself; they are later joined by Isaac and Rebekah, by Leah, and finally by Jacob himself.⁷⁶ The point of all this was not to engage in any kind of post-mortem reunion, but to make certain the promise of God, which was not at this stage for an individual life beyond the grave but for the family’s possession of the promised land.

This is, of course, why the great prophetic promises, constituting the major hope of Israel throughout the period, focus on the peace and prosperity of the land, and of the nation within it. Deuteronomy, with the promised land in sight, expands the initial vision of Exodus (a land flowing with milk and honey) to embrace all kinds of agriculture.⁷⁷ If one can see nation and land flourishing, one can go to the grave in peace.

As some biblical writers focused the hope of the nation more on the royal family, so the hope of the land became focused on Jerusalem. The two went together, of course, as from the time of David Jerusalem was the royal city, and from Solomon’s day the site also of YHWH’s Temple. The prosperity of king, city and Temple are thus not a separate hope to that of the nation and the land, but rather its quintessence, its sharp point. From this root grow the lavish hopes expressed in the Zion-oracles and the songs of royal blessing and victory, drawing on the older theology and re-expressing it as a promise and hope of prosperity for Israel and, wider, for the whole world:

In days to come,

the mountain of YHWH’s house

shall be established as the highest of the mountains,

and shall be raised above the hills;

all the nations shall stream to it.

Many peoples shall come and say,

‘Come, let us go up to the mountain of YHWH,

to the house of the God of Jacob;

that he may teach us his ways,

and that we may walk in his paths.’

For out of Zion shall go forth instruction,

and the word of YHWH from Jerusalem.

He shall judge between the nations,

and shall arbitrate for many peoples;

they shall beat their swords into ploughshares,

and their spears into pruninghooks;

nation shall not lift up sword against nation,

neither shall they learn war any more.⁷⁸

A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse,

and a branch shall grow out of his roots.

The spirit of YHWH shall rest upon him:

the spirit of wisdom and understanding,

the spirit of counsel and might,

the spirit of knowledge and of the fear of YHWH.

His delight shall be in the fear of YHWH …

The wolf shall live with the lamb,

the leopard shall lie down with the kid;

the calf and the lion and the fatling together,

and a little child shall lead them …

They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain;

for the earth shall be full of the glory of YHWH as the waters cover the sea.⁷⁹

Here is my servant, whom I uphold,

my chosen, in whom my soul delights;

I have put my spirit upon him;

he will bring forth justice to the nations …

He will not grow faint or be crushed until he has established justice in the earth;

and the coastlands wait for his teaching.⁸⁰

The spirit of YHWH is upon me, because YHWH has anointed me;

he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted,

to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners …

They will be called oaks of righteousness,

the planting of YHWH, to display his glory.

They shall build up the ancient ruins, they shall raise up the former devastations;

they shall repair the ruined cities, the devastations of many generations …

For as the earth brings forth its shoots,

and as a garden causes what is sown in it to spring up,

so the sovereign God YHWH will cause righteousness and praise

to spring up before all the nations.⁸¹

Give the king your justice, O God,

and your righteousness to the king’s son.

May he judge your people with righteousness,

and your poor with justice.

May the mountains yield prosperity for the people,

and the hills, in righteousness.

May he defend the cause of the poor of the people,

give deliverance to the needy, and crush the oppressor …

May he have dominion from sea to sea,

and from the River to the ends of the earth …

For he delivers the needy when they call,

the poor and those who have no helper.⁸²

Once and for all I have sworn by my holiness; I will not lie to David.

his line shall continue for ever, and his throne endure before me like the sun.

It shall be established for ever like the moon, an enduring witness in the skies.⁸³

These and similar promises are of course well known, much studied and beyond our present enquiry. But they must be recalled here in case any impression be given that the absence, for most ancient Israelites, of any statement of human life beyond the grave meant that they were without a living and vibrant hope. At the heart of that hope was the knowledge that YHWH, the God of Israel, was the creator of the world; that he was faithful to the covenant with Israel, and beyond that with the whole world; and that, as such, he would be true to his word both to Israel and to the whole creation. How this would be worked out, what role a future ideal king might have in it, what place there would be for Jerusalem within it, and at what time the promises would eventually be fulfilled—all this remained to be seen, and I have written about it elsewhere.⁸⁴ Some of the prophets preached about a ‘day of YHWH’ when threats as well as promises would be carried out.⁸⁵ It is true that, as we shall see, at some points within this tradition a new word was spoken, promising life beyond the grave. But for the vast majority in ancient Israel the great and solid hope, built upon the character of the creator and covenant god, was for YHWH’s blessing of justice, prosperity and peace upon the nation and land, and eventually upon the whole earth. Patriarchs, prophets, kings and ordinary Israelites would indeed lie down to sleep with their ancestors. YHWH’s purposes, however, would go forwards, and would be fulfilled in their time.

Such was the foundational hope of ancient Israel. It is important now, in moving to examine what appear to be developments within various biblical traditions, to appreciate that these developments are also built on this foundation, however much they disagree in what appear to us as significant details.

(ii) Delivered from Sheol?

There are some passages which appear, at least on one reading, to offer hope that YHWH will deliver people from Sheol. The problem with these passages is to know whether this refers to a deliverance that lies beyond Sheol—i.e. that YHWH will snatch the dead person out of Sheol, either taking them, after death, to some other, more attractive, post-mortem existence, or rescuing them after a short stay—or whether it simply refers to deliverance from death, i.e. prolonging life to a good old age rather than being cut off in one’s prime.

The best-known of these passages is Psalm 16:

I have kept YHWH before me; because he is at my right hand, I shall not be moved.

Therefore my heart is glad, and my soul rejoices; my body also rests secure.

For you do not give me up to Sheol, or let your faithful one see the Pit.

You show me the path of life; in your presence there is fullness of joy;

in your right hand are pleasures for evermore.⁸⁶

There is legitimate doubt over whether this refers to escaping death or passing through it to a life beyond,⁸⁷ but there is no question of the basis of the hope. It is YHWH himself, the one the Psalmist embraces as his sovereign one (verse 2), his portion and cup (verse 5), the one who gives him counsel in the secret places of his heart (verse 7).

The same question can be raised in connection with Psalm 22. The Psalmist is clearly in deep trouble, physical danger, and distress: ‘you lay me’, he says, ‘in the dust of death’ (verse 15). Nevertheless, he prays that God will save his life, and, in a famous reversal of fortunes, the closing verses of the Psalm give thanks that God has done just that (verses 22–31). As part of this thanksgiving, the Psalm celebrates the fact that everyone will eventually submit to God, even the dead:

To him shall all the proud of the earth bow down;

before him shall bow all who go down to the dust,

and he who cannot keep himself alive.⁸⁸

The main hope, though, seems to be that of rescue from violent death, rather than a deliverance the other side of the grave. The Psalm ends with a reaffirmation of the traditional hope of Israel, for the coming ‘seed’ who will give God thanks (verses 30–31).⁸⁹

This affirmation of continuing life, rather than of resurrection itself, is presumably what is intended by Psalm 104 as well:

When you hide your face, they [animals and sea creatures] are dismayed;

when you take away their breath, they die, and return to the dust.

When you send out your breath [or ‘spirit’] they are created;

and you renew the face of the ground.⁹⁰

The question of how this might be read in the later second-Temple period is again a separate issue, to which we shall return in the next chapter.

The same questions are raised by an equally famous passage from Job. God, declares Elihu, opens mortal ears to hear his warnings,

that he may turn them aside from their deeds, and keep them from pride,

to spare their souls from the Pit, their lives from traversing the River.

Then, when they draw near to that fate,

Their souls draw near the Pit, and their lives to those who bring death.

Then, if there should be for one of them an angel,

a mediator, one of a thousand, one who declares a person upright,

and he is gracious to that person, and says,

‘Deliver him from going down into the Pit; I have found a ransom;

let his flesh become fresh with youth;

let him return to the days of his youthful vigour.’

Then he prays to God, and is accepted by him,

he comes into his presence with joy …

That person sings to others and says,

‘… He has redeemed my soul from going down to the Pit,

and my life shall see the light.’

God indeed does all these things …

to bring back their souls from the Pit,

so that they may see the light of life.⁹¹

This appears to be less ambiguous than Psalm 16, and, in keeping with the rest of Job, it is best to see it as referring to rescue from an early, untimely death, rather than to a rescue which happens afterwards. However, both these passages could well have been read within post-biblical Judaism in the sense of a post-mortem rescue. While it is true, as we shall see presently, that the original meaning of passages like these may be uncertain, it is also true that the uncertainty could easily be removed in later translation and comment.

(iii) Glory after Suffering?

Something more definite can be said about Psalm 73 at least.⁹² One of the classic biblical complaints about the apparent injustices of life (the wicked and arrogant always seem to get away with it), this Psalm takes its place alongside the book of Job itself. It offers, though, a different sort of answer. For a start, when the Psalmist goes into God’s sanctuary, he realizes that the wicked will indeed be condemned, though how and when this will happen remains unclear:

Truly you set them in slippery places; you make them fall to ruin.

How they are destroyed in a moment,

swept away utterly by terrors!

They are like a dream when one awakes; on awaking you despise their phantoms.⁹³

But that is not all. The Psalmist himself discovers that he is grasped by a love that will not let him go, a power that even death, and the dissolution of the body, cannot thwart:

Nevertheless I am continually with you; hold my right hand.

You guide me with your counsel, and afterward you will receive me to glory.

Whom have I in heaven but you?

And there is nothing on earth that I desire other than you.

My flesh and my heart may fail,

but God is the strength of my heart and my portion for ever …

For me it is good to be near God;

I have made the Lord YHWH my refuge, to tell of all your works.⁹⁴

It seems clear that ‘and afterward’ (w^eachar) in verse 24 refers, not to an event that will take place later on within the present life, but to a state which will obtain after the present life of being guided by God’s counsel. This is confirmed by verse 26, where, with echoes of Isaiah 40:6–8, human frailty and even death are met by the unshakeable strength of God himself. Unfortunately the crucial word kabod, translated here as ‘to glory’—crucial because it would be good to know what exactly the Psalmist thought lay ahead—could equally well be translated, with NRSV, as ‘with honour’. We are left with a tantalizing glimpse of a life beyond the grave, a life in which (as the logic of the Psalm demands) wrongs will be put to right, and God’s justice will be perceived; a life in which those who have known God’s love in the present will discover that this love is stronger than death itself, and will ‘receive’ them to a status of honour or glory.⁹⁵

This same verb, ‘receive’, occurs also in Psalm 49:15.⁹⁶ The whole Psalm is a sobering meditation on the mortality of all human life: no better than the beasts, humans will all come to the grave at last, and all their pomp and posturing in the present will be of no avail:

Their graves are their homes forever, their dwelling places to all generations …

They will go to the company of their ancestors, who will never again see the light.⁹⁷

What follows depends on the contrast between the foolish, who will go to Sheol and remain there, leaving their worldly fame and fortune behind, and the Psalmist himself, who expects a different sort of future. This inner logic of the Psalm means that we would be wrong to place it in the earlier category, of being rescued from an untimely death; instead, we seem to be confronted, as in Psalm 73, with at least a glimmer of assurance of God’s ransoming power being stronger than death itself. Otherwise the Psalm’s only affirmation would be that the wise and righteous have a short stay of execution, but that they will in good time follow the foolish to Sheol. No:

Like sheep they are appointed for Sheol; Death shall be their shepherd;

straight to the grave they descend, and their form shall waste away;

Sheol shall be their home.

But God will ransom my soul from the power of Sheol, for he will receive me.⁹⁸

If this is the correct understanding, many later worshippers might see the point even where, as in Psalm 16, historical exegesis might question it.⁹⁹

These three Psalms stand out.¹⁰⁰ By contrast, in Psalms 34 and 37, the reward of the righteous is firmly this-worldly. The anguished entreaties of Psalm 88, one of the bleakest of all, ask their awful questions without, it seems, any hope of a positive answer.¹⁰¹ Psalm 16 in its way, and Psalms 73 and 49 in theirs, are alone among the biblical texts in hinting at a future of which the rest of the ancient Israelite scriptures remain ignorant.

(ii) Daniel 12: The Sleepers Wake, the Wise Shine

We begin with the central passage, Daniel 12:2–3:

² Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt. ³ Those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the sky, and those who lead many to righteousness, like the stars for ever and ever.

There is little doubt that this refers to concrete, bodily resurrection.¹⁰⁷ The metaphor of ‘sleep’ for death was, as we have seen, already widespread; sleeping in the dust of the earth (literally, ‘the earth of dust’ or ‘the land of dust’) was a clear biblical way of referring to the dead.¹⁰⁸ It was therefore natural to continue the metaphor by using ‘awake’ to denote bodily resurrection—not a different sort of sleep, but its abolition. This is not, of itself, an ‘otherworldly’ idea, but a very much ‘this-worldly’ one.¹⁰⁹

Those who awake are ‘many’, but not, it appears, all.¹¹⁰ The passage is not attempting to offer a global theory of the ultimate destination of the whole human race, but simply to affirm that, in a renewed bodily life, God will give everlasting life to some and everlasting contempt to others. In the context (see below) there can be little doubt who these persons are: they are the righteous who have suffered martyrdom on the one hand, and their torturers and murderers on the other. The rest—the great majority of humans, and indeed of Israelites—are simply not mentioned.

Verse 3 offers two parallel similes to describe the final state of the resurrected righteous (or, just conceivably, of a sub-set of them). They are denoted as ‘the wise’, hammaskilim, and as ‘those who turn many to righteousness’, or perhaps ‘those who justify many’, an allusion to Isaiah 53:11 (see below). They will, says the verse, ‘shine like the brightness of the sky’, and ‘like the stars for ever and ever’. This has led some to suggest that their final state is actually to become stars, in some kind of ‘astral immortality’. Such a reading has become accepted quite widely, and influential on other readings of Jewish and early Christian texts.¹¹¹ There are, however, serious problems with this interpretation, and the matter is sufficiently important to warrant a brief excursus.

To begin with the present text itself. It is not clear how metaphorical the passage intends to be: a short poetic statement, echoing an earlier scriptural passage, and itself located within a climactic vision of the future, can scarcely be treated as a precise or exact description.¹¹² The two clauses are similes: the passage predicts that the righteous will be like stars, not that they will turn into stars, nor even that they will be located among them.¹¹³ Moreover, if the second clause were to mean that the maskilim would become actual stars, the parallelism with the first clause (‘shine like the brightness of the sky’) would force the meaning there that ‘the wise’ would become the sky itself, which is clearly out of the question. Two other strong considerations must be borne in mind as well: first, that there is no hint whatever of the kind of supporting or surrounding cosmology which we find in Plato, Cicero or other expressions of the classic ‘astral immortality’; second, that the sequence of thought in verses 2 and 3 presents a two-stage future, quite unlike what we find in the Timaeus, Scipio’s dream, or in the various epitaphs where ‘astral immortality’ found popular expression. In all of those, the point was that the soul departed immediately upon death, to rejoin its proper place among the stars. Here, by contrast, ‘the wise’ are at present dead, ‘asleep’, and will ‘wake up’ at some point still in the future. That is when they will ‘shine like the sky, and like the stars’. The structure of the belief, the surrounding cosmology, and the actual exegesis all prevent us from linking Daniel 12:3 with the line of thought from Plato (and perhaps elsewhere) to Cicero and beyond.

Nor do the Jewish parallels regularly adduced serve to strengthen the case. There are some similar passages, of course, as one might expect in such a variegated phenomenon as the wide world of Judaism within its hellenistic environment. Perhaps the most striking is 4 Maccabees 17:5, where the martyred mother is addressed in glowing and certainly ‘astral’ terms:

The moon in heaven, with the stars, does not stand so august as you, who, after lighting the way of your star-like seven sons to piety, stand in honour before God and are firmly set in heaven with them.

Certainly any reader in the hellenistic world would know what to make of that.¹¹⁴ We should not be so sanguine, though, about some of the other references that are sometimes put forward on this point.¹¹⁵ There are three or four passages which seem at least to borrow the idea (though still transplanting it into a Jewish cosmology): the Testament of Moses offers a good example, as does 2 Baruch.¹¹⁶ There are even, it seems, a couple of possible examples at Qumran.¹¹⁷ The best-known source of possible parallels for an ‘astral’ interpretation is 1 Enoch; but even there caution is advisable with most of the references that are often cited.¹¹⁸ The doctrine of resurrection itself tells against it, since it envisages a two-stage future (first being dead, then, later, being raised), not a single step into a shining immortality. The only passage that seems either to suggest that the righteous become stars, or to move towards a world more like that of the Timaeus, are 1 Enoch 58:3 (‘the righteous shall be in the light of the sun, and the elect in the light of eternal life which has no end, and the days of the life of the holy ones cannot be numbered’—set in a chapter which is all about the coming world that will be full of light) and 108:11–14 (immediately before the close of the book):

So now I shall summon their spirits if they are born of light, and change those who are born in darkness … I shall bring them out into the bright light, those who have loved my holy name, and seat them each one by one upon the throne of his honour; and they shall be resplendent for ages that cannot be numbered … the righteous ones shall be resplendent.

Here, as in Plato or Cicero, the spirits come from light and go back to light. Granted the composite nature of 1 Enoch, however, it is impossible to cite the book as a whole as a representative of the ‘astral’ view; indeed, granted that there were several previous opportunities to say this kind of thing, and that these were not taken, we might suggest that at the very least the multiple authors, and the eventual redactor, were not eager to press such a point. Thus, though several texts play with the idea of ‘light’ in general, and many refer directly to Daniel, it is hard to make a case that ‘astral immortality’ had taken root in ancient Judaism as it clearly had in ancient paganism.

We return from this important digression to the meaning of Daniel 12 itself. The similes in verse 3 indicate, not so much that the righteous and the wise will be shining and twinkling like stars, but that in the resurrection they will be leaders and rulers in God’s new creation. The imagery, set in the biblical context which is surely the primary world from which to understand the author’s meaning, suggests a royal connotation: it is kings who are spoken of as stars or celestial beings.¹¹⁹ God-given kings and rulers are to provide light to the world as the stars in the firmament were made, according to Genesis 1, to give light to the earth.¹²⁰ This appears to be, in line with other ideas in Daniel, a kind of democratization of earlier royal traditions: it belongs with the idea that ‘the saints of the Most High’ will receive the kingdom (7:18, 22, 27). By looking at the stars, commentators have missed the real point: the righteous, the wise, will not so much be transformed into beings of light, as set in authority over the world. Daniel 12:3 adds to 12:2, then, the sense that the resurrection is not simply a resuscitation in which the dead will return to life much as they knew it before. They will be raised to a state of glory in the world for which the best parallel or comparison is the status of stars, moon and sun within the created order.

Where does this remarkable passage belong historically? Does that help us to explain why it comes out with this remarkable idea at this late stage in the growth of biblical tradition? The immediate context of the passage is martyrdom: the martyrdom which occurred during the crisis of the 160s (see 1 and 2 Maccabees), and, in particular, the martyrdom of faithful Israelites under the persecution of Antiochus Epiphanes.¹²¹ Daniel 11:31 speaks of Antiochus’ desecration of the Jerusalem Temple, and his setting up of the ‘abomination of desolation’ mentioned already in 9:27. Verses 32–5 of chapter 11 describe what happens next, as some Judaeans compromise with the pagan invader and others stand firm and suffer for it, some of them being killed. Verses 36–45 then describes the final boasting and sudden fall of Antiochus, the earlier verses (36–9) staying close to what we know as actual events, and the later ones (40–45) diverging—at the point, we assume, where the writer’s own time is to be located. But what matters is that at the time of Antiochus’ fall, a time of unprecedented anguish for Israel (12:1), the angelic prince Michael will arise to fight on their behalf and deliver them. This is the context for the prediction of resurrection. The remainder of the passage and indeed of the book (12:4–13) contains final revelations (if they can be called that; they have, notoriously, seemed to tease as much as to reveal) about the timing of the forthcoming events, and a last promise to Daniel himself (v. 13) that, after his own ‘rest’, he will join the maskilim and rise (the word ta‘amod here means ‘stand up’) for his reward at the end of the days. The ‘resurrection’ envisaged here is not a state upon which the righteous enter immediately upon death, but is a further event, following an intermediate period.

The prediction of resurrection is not an isolated piece of speculation about the ultimate fate of humans, or even Judaeans, in general, but a specific promise addressed to a specific situation. Israel’s god will reverse the actions of the wicked pagans, and raise the martyrs, and the teachers who kept Israel on course, to a glorious life. Simultaneously, he will raise their persecutors to a new existence: instead of remaining in the decent obscurity of Sheol or ‘the dust’, they will face perpetual public obloquy. The whole scene, in fact, carries with it elements of the lawcourt, in which YHWH as the righteous judge puts wrongs to right, punishing the wicked and vindicating the righteous.¹²² Michael, the angel or ‘prince’ who is Israel’s specific protector, will be YHWH’s agent in bringing this judgment to pass.¹²³

Once we grasp this larger picture we can see that it, in turn, belongs closely with the still larger vision of the book of Daniel as a whole. Again and again the book tells of pagan rulers attacking YHWH’s people, trying to make them conform to new pagan ways, boasting arrogantly against the true god and his people, and of the faithful and wise Israelites holding on, retaining their loyalty and integrity, and being vindicated in the end as their god acts dramatically to rescue them and condemn or overthrow their oppressors.¹²⁴ In particular, 11:31–5 and 12:1–3, the key passages here, are anticipated frequently in the earlier parts of the book, and, together with chapters 10–12 as a whole, are clearly intended to draw out fuller significance from what has been said before. This encourages us to see the prediction of resurrection as the final and most explicit promise in a much longer line, which begins with the setting up of the divine kingdom over against all pagan kingdoms (2:35, 44–5), and continues through the exaltation and vindication of the son of man (representing the people of the saints of the most high (7:13–14, 18, 27)), including frequent narratives of deliverance from death (hinted at in 1:10; explicit in 2:13; plotted throughout chapters 3 and 6).¹²⁵ Daniel’s prayer in chapter 9, questioning the meaning of Jeremiah’s prophecy of a seventy-year exile, receives the answer that the exile will in fact last seventy times seven years, i.e. 490 years, coming to its climax in the setting up of the abomination of desolation, the cutting off of an anointed prince, and final judgment on the oppressor (9:2, 24–7).¹²⁶ Chapters 10–12 then spell all this out in more detail. This is how Israel’s long exile will reach its climax, how the arrogant pagans will be judged, how the righteous will be delivered.

Chapters 10–12, then, and particularly the passage at the end of chapter 11 and the start of chapter 12, provide a different lens through which to view the same events as those spoken of in 2:31–45 and 7:2–27. The stone cut from the mountain that smashed the multi-metalled statue and became a mountain in turn; the ‘one like a son of man’ who is exalted over the beasts; the suffering maskilim being raised to shine like the stars, while their persecutors receive everlasting contempt; these are essentially the same. Any second-Temple Jew who pondered the book would find in 12:2–3 not a new and outlandish idea, unanticipated and unforeseen, but the crown of all that had gone before.

This would be all the more so for a reader whose ears were open to the biblical overtones of the text. Appropriately, considering the exilic theme of the whole book (the fictive setting is of course Babylon, and the historical setting is that of the ‘continuing exile’ of 9:24, under various pagan rulers climaxing in the Syria of Antiochus), the most obvious biblical precursors are those which themselves speak of exile and restoration.¹²⁷ We note, for instance, the echo of Jeremiah 30:7 in 12:2: the time of unprecedented anguish is that spoken of by the earlier prophet, not long after he had repeated his promise about a seventy-year exile which Daniel has now reinterpreted.¹²⁸ And the warning of anguish to come is part of a larger prophecy of return, rebuilding, peace and security. The pagan yoke will be broken, and the Israelite monarchy restored.¹²⁹

(iii) The Servant and the Dust-Dwellers: Isaiah

The main source for Daniel’s ideas and images in 12:2–3 is undoubtedly Isaiah. Before looking at the most obvious passage, we note first the close links with Isaiah 52–3.¹³⁰ The maskilim seem to be a plural version of the ‘servant’, who in 52:13 ‘deals prudently’ (yaskil). They are those ‘who justify many’, as does the servant in 53:11. The ‘shining’ of the righteous in Daniel 12:3 may possibly echo the ‘light’ which, in some early versions, features in Isaiah 53:11.¹³¹ And of course the entire theme—those who remain faithful to YHWH despite torture and death, and who are then vindicated—fits exactly the scenario with which Isaiah 40–55 reaches its great climax. If the servant-figure in Isaiah was in the first place a personification of the nation, or of the righteous few within it, what we have here is not exactly a democratization of the servant-concept, as is sometimes said, but a repluralization.¹³² The suffering maskilim are now the bearers of the promise of exile and restoration; Isaiah’s vision is coming true in them.¹³³ This coheres, of course, with the theme of the book of Daniel as a whole.

But does Isaiah 53 itself speak of the servant dying and rising again? There is no explicit mention of resurrection itself, and only an oblique statement of what will happen to the servant after his death (53:11). But it is clear that the servant (a) dies and is buried (53:7–9), and (b) emerges in triumph, however densely expressed (53:10–12).¹³⁴ What matters most for our purposes, however, is that Daniel provides evidence that some people were already reading Isaiah this way; and so, it was argued some time ago, does the form of the Isaiah text as we have it in Qumran.¹³⁵ The result of all this for the meaning of the central passage should not be missed. Though Daniel 12:2–3 speaks clearly of bodily resurrection for individuals, this is not something other than God’s long-promised act of vindication for the exiled nation. The either/or that has tended to drive a wedge between different interpretations of key passages (either ‘individual resurrection’ or ‘national restoration’) must be exposed as fallacious. In Daniel 12, the resurrection of God’s people (at least in the persons of the martyrs, seen as representing the nation) is the form that national restoration takes. This is the real end of the deepest exile of all.

Behind Daniel 12, though, stands also the most obvious ‘resurrection’ passage in Isaiah. Isaiah 24–7 offers a scene not just of national crisis but of cosmic judgment, through which God’s people will be rescued and the dead will be raised.¹³⁶ Few doubt that this passage was strongly present to the writer of Daniel 12:2–3:

Your dead shall live, their corpses shall rise.

O dwellers in the dust, awake and sing for joy!

For your dew is a radiant dew,

and the earth will give birth to those long dead.¹³⁷

The context is a vivid prayer of loyalty to YHWH in the midst of fierce and continuing persecution by pagans. Other lords have ruled over Israel, ‘but we acknowledge your name alone’.¹³⁸ Pagans, and those who follow their ways, have no future beyond death to look forward to:

The dead do not live, shades do not rise—

because you have punished and destroyed them,

and wiped out all memory of them.¹³⁹

But those who seek YHWH in distress find themselves in pangs like a woman giving birth; and when birth comes it turns out to be the new birth of the dead themselves (26:16–19). The original Hebrew refers literally to bodily resurrection, and this is certainly how the verse is taken in the LXX and at Qumran.¹⁴⁰ It is still possible, of course, that here resurrection is, as we shall see in Ezekiel, a metaphor for national restoration; but the wider passage, in which God’s renewal of the whole cosmos is in hand, opens the way for us to propose that the reference to resurrection is intended to denote actual concrete events.¹⁴¹

All is based upon the sovereign justice of YHWH himself, who will bring to light the wickedness done on earth (26:20–21).¹⁴² His power alone can do this: in the previous chapter, preparing the way for the climax in chapter 26, we find this statement of both national and personal restoration:

On this mountain YHWH of hosts will make for all peoples

a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines,

of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear.

And he will destroy on this mountain the shroud that is cast over all peoples,

the sheet that is spread over all nations; he will swallow up death for ever.

Then the sovereign one, YHWH, will wipe away the tears from all faces,

and the disgrace of his people he will take away from all the earth,

for YHWH has spoken …

For the hand of YHWH will rest on this mountain.¹⁴³

This image of the eschatological banquet draws together the divine promise to the individual, to Israel, and to creation itself. We should separate out these levels neither in our own reading of Isaiah, nor in our assessment of how the book would have been read in the second-Temple period.¹⁴⁴

(v) Dry Bones and God’s Breath: Ezekiel

There is one remaining major text, whose relation with those just discussed is problematic, but whose importance for subsequent thought can hardly be denied. Ezekiel 37 is perhaps the most famous of all ‘resurrection’ passages in the Old Testament; it is the most obviously allegorical or metaphorical; it does not appear to have influenced, or to have been influenced by, either Isaiah or Daniel; yet the parallels of overall thought are remarkable.

Once again, of course, the context is the exile. For the Temple-centred Ezekiel, one of Israel’s main problems was impurity; cleansing from that impurity formed a key part of his promise of restoration (36:16–32). This is set among sustained oracles about the restoration of the land itself, with its people, its buildings, its agriculture, its flocks and its herds (36:1–15, 33–8). The overall aim of the prophecy at this stage of the book was to point to a renewal of Israel’s national life in which the Davidic monarchy would be restored, the nation would be reconstituted, and (ultimately) a new Temple would be built.¹⁵⁰ But uncleanness remained at the heart of the problem.

Of all the unclean objects an observant Jew might encounter, unburied corpses or bones would come near the top of the list. That is the state, metaphorically, to which Israel has been reduced. God, declares Ezekiel, will deal with this in an act of new creation:

The hand of YHWH came upon me, and he brought me out by the spirit of YHWH and set me down in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones. He led me all around them; there were very many lying in the valley, and they were very dry. He said to me, ‘Son of man, can these bones live?’ I answered, ‘O sovereign YHWH, you know.’ Then he said to me, ‘Prophesy to these bones, and say to them: “O dry bones, hear the word of YHWH. Thus says the sovereign YHWH to these bones: I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live. I will lay sinews on you, and will cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and you shall live; and you shall know that I am YHWH.” ’

So I prophesied as I had been commanded; and as I prophesied, suddenly there was a noise, a rattling, and the bones came together, bone to its bone. I looked, and there were sinews on them, and flesh had come upon them, and skin had covered them; but there was no breath in them. Then he said to me, ‘Prophesy to the breath, prophesy, mortal, and say to the breath: “Thus says the sovereign YHWH: Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.” ’ I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood on their feet, a vast multitude.

Then he said to me, ‘Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel. They say, “Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are cut off completely.” Therefore prophesy, and say to them, “Thus says the sovereign YHWH: I am going to open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people; and I will bring you back to the land of Israel. And you shall know that I am YHWH, when I open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people. I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live, and I will place you on your own soil; then you shall know that I, YHWH, have spoken and will act, says YHWH.” ’¹⁵¹

Both the content of the vision and the immediate conclusion that the prophet draws from it mark out this passage as an intentional and sustained metaphor.¹⁵² Ezekiel is no more envisaging actual bodily resurrection than he envisaged, when writing chapter 34, that Israel consisted of sheep rather than people. This is further confirmed by the surface contradiction between the vision itself and the application. In the vision (verses 1–10) the bones are lying unburied on the surface of the ground, as in a battlefield rather than a graveyard;¹⁵³ but in the application (verses 11–14) God promises to open Israel’s graves and bring up the dead. There should not, then, be any question but that the original purpose was to provide a highly charged and vivid metaphor of the way in which unclean Israel would be cleansed, exiled Israel restored to the land, and scattered Israel regathered, by a powerful and covenant-renewing act of new creation. It is possible that the roots of the image are found in the promises of return from exile in Deuteronomy, where covenant renewal is a matter of new, god-given life in place of death, but this may simply be a distant echo.¹⁵⁴ The echoes of Genesis 1–2 are not far from the surface, particularly in the promise of the breath/spirit—YHWH’s own breath/spirit, it turns out—which will make them once again a living people.¹⁵⁵ This is not a mere resuscitation, like the miracles performed by Elijah and Elisha. The fleshless bones can only be brought to life by a new and unprecedented act of the creator god.¹⁵⁶

The undoubted allegorical character of this passage did not stop it being seen, from at least the early rabbinic period, as a prediction of literal resurrection. Evidence for this is found in textual marginalia from early manuscripts, and in the remarkable paintings found at Dura-Europos.¹⁵⁷ But it is only in such subsequent use that we can detect anything like a confluence between Ezekiel 37 and the stream of thought that runs (mostly underground) from Hosea, through Isaiah, to Daniel.¹⁵⁸ None of those other texts mentions, let alone highlights, the main focus of Ezekiel’s vision, namely bones; and Ezekiel lacks the regular language of sleepers waking, of dwellers in the dust, or of the resurrected shining with a new glory. What all these texts refer to in one way or another, though, was the common hope of Israel: that YHWH would restore her fortunes at last, liberate her from pagan dominion, and resettle her in justice and peace, even if it took a great act of new creation to accomplish it. This is where the solid hope of the earlier period (hope for nation, family and land) joins up with the emerging belief in the creator’s faithfulness even beyond the grave. This coming together of (what seem to us) different strands of thought demands closer investigation.

(vi) Resurrection and the Hope of Israel

What place, within the wider context of Israel’s faith and life, can we give to these varied expressions of a hope for new life beyond ‘life after death’? Where did the idea come from, and how does it relate to the other types of hope (and the explicit statements of a lack of hope for post-mortem life) in the rest of the Old Testament? Here there are two related points to be made, the first about the relation of this hope to the mainstream Old Testament expectation, and the second to do with origin and derivation.

It would be easy, and wrong, to see the hope for resurrection as a new and extraneous element, something which has come into ancient Israelite thinking by a backdoor or roundabout route. Each of the passages we have studied is set in the context of the continuing affirmation of the Jewish hope for restoration, for liberation from exile, persecution and suffering. Sometimes, as in the case of Ezekiel, this metaphorical character is clear throughout the passage. Sometimes, as in Daniel, actual bodily resurrection is likewise clearly intended. Elsewhere, as in the Isaiah passages, there is room for genuine uncertainty as to where the balance lies. But however concrete the reference in any of the passages, there is no doubt that even in such cases the overarching context is that of the hope of the nation for national restoration and resettlement in the land. In other words, this is not a move away from the hope which characterized all of ancient Israel, but a reaffirmation of it. It is a reaffirmation, indeed, in a way which the hope simply for a blessed but non-bodily personal life after death (as perhaps witnessed by Psalm 73 and one or two other passages) would not be. This resurrection hope is not like that of ancient Egypt, where life after death was thought of as a continuation of normal life by other means.¹⁵⁹ Such an idea would have been seen by ancient Israel as a denial of the hope for nation, family and land to thrive and flourish.

What we have, in fact, in these passages can best be seen in these terms: hope for bodily resurrection is what sometimes happens when the hope of ancient Israel meets a new challenge, which might include the threat of judgment, as in Hosea and Isaiah 24–7, and, more specifically, the fact of exile, as (in different ways) in Ezekiel 37 and Isaiah 53. Daniel 12 is best seen, in line with chapter 9, as reflecting an awareness of extended and continuing exile, focused now in suffering and martyrdom. Of course, exile and indeed martyrdom does not necessarily have this effect, otherwise we would find resurrection ideas in (for instance) Jeremiah and 1 Maccabees as well as in Ezekiel, Daniel and 2 Maccabees.¹⁶⁰ But where a strong sense of exile as divine punishment for rebellion, disloyalty and idolatry was present (one wonders whether the story in Genesis 3, of Adam and Eve being expelled from the garden, was read in this period as a paradigm of Israel’s expulsion from the promised land, but direct evidence for this connection is lacking), then it was but a short step for that expulsion to be seen as ‘death’,¹⁶¹ life in exile to be seen as the strange half-life lived after that death, and return from exile to be seen as life beyond that again, newly embodied life, i.e. resurrection. That seems to be precisely the route taken by both Ezekiel and Daniel, the latter drawing on Isaiah and perhaps Hosea. Thus, though the promise of resurrection contradicts head on the view so frequently stated in the material we surveyed earlier in which all hope beyond the grave was ruled out, it forms an equally strong reaffirmation of the hope which ancient Israel did indeed hold: hope for renewal of national life, in the land, life as the gift of YHWH the creator god.

This latter point, indeed, needs to be highlighted. Echoes of the Genesis creation narratives lurk in the shadows of these passages: it is from the dust that YHWH creates humans, breathing into them his own breath, and when he takes it away again they return to dust once more.¹⁶² The fresh gift of his breath will then bring the dust to life.¹⁶³ The promise of resurrection is thus firmly linked to creation itself, which was the basis of the normal ancient Israelite celebration of life in the present, bodily life in YHWH’s good land. This robust affirmation of the goodness of life in YHWH’s world and land is what is called into question when Israel sins and faces punishment in the form of national catastrophe. We should not be surprised, then, when at that point it is to the language of creation itself that the prophets turn for help. Just as in Genesis 3 death is linked to expulsion from the garden, so in the fullest biblical statements of hope we discover a creative fluidity between the restoration of Israel to the land and the new bodily creation of human beings after the state of death.

This movement of thought is what we see in earlier writings such as Hosea. Under pressure, and in trouble, the nation begins to use the language of a new life after ‘life after death’, and this turns into the celebratory outburst of Isaiah 26. We might suggest that the likely turning-point in the sequence—the moment when somebody really begins to think in terms of human beings themselves actually dying and actually being given a newly embodied life at some point thereafter—is to be found in Isaiah’s servant passages. That is where, supremely, the hope for the nation and land becomes focused on an individual, or at least what looks like an individual; even if this is a literary code for the nation as a whole, or for a group within the nations, there are signs in the text itself, as well as in subsequent interpretation, that at least some of the ‘servant’ passages in Isaiah may have an individual, representing the nation, in mind.¹⁶⁴ That is where, we might also suggest, the belief that Israel’s god will restore the nation after exile breaks through into the belief—albeit not yet expressed very clearly—that he will restore the nation’s representative after death. The earlier national hope thus transmutes, but perfectly comprehensibly, into the hope that Israel’s god will do for a human being what Israel always hoped he would do for the nation as a whole. From there we can perceive a more obvious straight line to Daniel 12, where the nation’s representative has become plural. The experience of suffering, persecution and martyrdom had, so the writer believed, brought the exile to a new and appalling climax. The suffering righteous ones had found themselves enacting, corporately, the role of Isaiah’s servant.

Two preliminary conclusions follow from this, which we can set out in terms of the relations between the three positions presented in this chapter: (a) the dead are ‘asleep with the ancestors’; (b) the dead may be ‘received’ by YHWH into some continuing life; and (c) some at least of the dead can hope for resurrection after any such ‘life after death’.

First, (c) is not so much a development out of (b), as is sometimes suggested; it is, rather, a radical development from within (a) itself. The resurrection hope does not deny, as (b) seems at least to deny, that at death people go to Sheol, to the dust, to the grave. Nor does it affirm, as (b) seems at least to affirm, that a non-bodily post-mortem existence, in the presence and love of YHWH, is the final good for which one might hope. It does not deny that the dead are now ‘asleep’. It simply affirms—against, admittedly, the clear denials in several statements of (a)—that YHWH will do something new for them after that. The same theological and devotional belief that seems to have generated (b) can be seen also under (c)—the belief, that is, not that humans are innately immortal, but that YHWH’s love and creative power are so strong that even death cannot break them. However, (c) (resurrection in the future) is a quite different sort of thing from (b) (happy disembodied life after death), and is closer in all sorts of ways, in theology and in practical effect, to (a) itself (in which the only future hope is that of the nation, not the individual).¹⁶⁵

Second, the meanings of ‘bodily resurrection for dead humans’ and ‘national restoration for exiled/suffering Israel’ are so closely intertwined that it does not matter that we cannot always tell which is meant, or even if a distinction is possible, in relation to particular passages; that is part of the point. The intertwining adds to the robustness of the emerging belief. The idea of resurrection was not an odd ‘apocalyptic’ invention, intruding into an otherwise easy progression towards a spiritual (in the sense of ‘non-bodily’) hope.¹⁶⁶

If this account of the origin of resurrection belief in ancient Israel is anywhere near the mark, it outflanks the two other accounts that have often been given. Each is, in any case, subject to damaging criticism in its own right.

The first account, which remains popular in some quarters despite being regularly refuted, attempts to trace the emergence of Israelite belief in resurrection to ancient Zoroastrianism, pointing out that the belief seems to have emerged in Israel around the time, or shortly thereafter, that Israel was exiled in the parts of the world—Babylon, then Persia—where Zoroastrianism was the official religion of the Persian empire.¹⁶⁷ This proposal has been debated for well over a century, hampered not least by our radical uncertainty (because of the lateness of the primary sources) as to what ancient Zoroastrianism actually consisted of.¹⁶⁸ John Day has pointed out that since Daniel, the main biblical exponent of the doctrine, is clearly echoing not only Isaiah but also Hosea, this takes the stream of thought back behind any likely influence from Persia; and that, when Ezekiel speaks of the dead being raised from their graves, this cannot be related to Zoroastrianism, since the Persians exposed, rather than buried, their dead.¹⁶⁹ We may add that the thrust of resurrection, emerging around the time of the exile and being re-emphasized in the second century BC, was upon Israel’s status as the unique chosen people of the one creator god. To express this by borrowing a key idea from the very people who were causing the problem—like a prisoner of war trying to escape by putting on the hated uniform of the oppressing forces!—does no justice to the much subtler process of reflection, devotion and vision that seems to have taken place. Indeed, the very understatedness of the idea in Isaiah 53 strongly implies otherwise. The only way the Zoroastrian hypothesis could make any sense would be for resurrection to be seen as an odd, extraneous addition to Israelite faith—as it is, for instance, when a now discredited idea of ‘apocalyptic’ prevails, in which that mood or movement is seen as dualistic in the same sense that, according to most analysts, Zoroastrianism was.¹⁷⁰ But the emerging Israelite belief in resurrection was not dualistic. It was a development, albeit a startling one, whose roots lay deep within ancient Israel itself. It grew directly from the emphasis on the goodness of creation, on YHWH as the god who both kills and makes alive, and on the future of nation and land.¹⁷¹

What then of the alternative hypothesis, espoused by Day and others: that the first hints of resurrection (in Hosea, particularly) were derived by a process of imitation from the dying and rising deity (Baal) of Canaanite mythology?¹⁷² This proposal, which resurfaces from time to time in the guise of similar speculations about the origin of Christian belief in Jesus’ resurrection, has some initial plausibility in relation to Hosea, since the cults he opposed certainly included religions of this type. Hosea 6:1–2 (‘he has torn, that he may heal … after two days he will revive us; on the third day he will raise us up, that we may live before him’) can indeed be read as the kind of prayer the prophet might ascribe to Baal-worshippers who are now invoking YHWH (insincerely), and who are themselves borrowing the language of new life after death from their surrounding culture. That would explain why he seems to reject such a prayer as useless. According to Day, Hosea is ironically suggesting (as in 13:1) that Israel deserves to die for worshipping Baal, in which case repentance would mean resurrection.¹⁷³ But even if he is correct, it is hard to see this as more than one starting-point from which subsequent traditions, under different circumstances, made their own way forwards, through the fleeting references in Hosea, through the varied passages in Isaiah, and finally to Daniel.¹⁷⁴

In particular, the hypothesis of Canaanite origins hardly explains either Daniel 12, or the two Isaiah passages which it employs, or Ezekiel 37. In addition, there is no reason to think that the dying and rising of Canaanite gods was a concept ever applied to Canaanites themselves, either nationally or individually. Furthermore, it was axiomatic to Yahwism that YHWH was not like those deities, specifically in that he did not die and rise. He was not a vegetation god, part of a fertility-cult; he was sovereign over creation, not a part of it.¹⁷⁵ This, indeed, may help to explain why Jewish thinkers came to a belief in resurrection only very late, when the main opponent to traditional belief was not a local vegetation-cult, but the power of Babylon and, later, Syria.¹⁷⁶ We may make a similar point to the earlier one about the unlikeliness of Zoroastrian borrowings: if Israel’s exile had come about through compromise with the pagan gods and their nature-religions, it is hardly likely that the prophets who predicted that the exile would be undone, and the covenant renewed, would borrow a central image from those religions to develop their theme. The safest conclusion we can draw is that the belief in resurrection we find in Daniel 12:2–3 is the surprising but comprehensible result of the bringing together of two other beliefs: (a) Israel’s ancient belief that her god, YHWH, was the creator god, and that human life reflecting his image meant bodily life in this world, not disembodied post-mortem existence; and (b) the new belief that Israel’s exile was to be seen as the punishment for sin, and the belief that exile reached a kind of climax in the fate of the martyrs. YHWH’s answer to his people’s exile would be, metaphorically, life from the dead (Isaiah 26, Ezekiel 37); YHWH’s answer to his people’s martyrdom would be, literally, life from the dead (Daniel 12). This was a bold step indeed, but it was the last step in a comprehensible line of thought going back to the earliest roots of Israelite belief.