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2. No Future Life, or None to Speak of: The Sadducees

The three best sources for the beliefs, positive and negative, of the Sadducees are the New Testament, Josephus and the rabbis.³ None of them was neutral in reporting the Sadducees. The New Testament, not surprisingly, sees their rejection of resurrection as their main characteristic. Josephus (who, as an aristocrat, may have been closer to them than he cares to let on) describes them as though they were really a hellenistic philosophical school. The rabbis speak mostly of their attitude to purity. This is all we have to go on. After AD 70 there were no Sadducees left to answer back or put the record straight. But from the sources’ fairly solid agreement on the point it is clear that we are on the right track. Basically, the Sadducees denied resurrection; it seems more than likely that they followed a quite strict interpretation of the Old Testament, and denied any significant future life at all. But, as will become apparent, the contemporary instinct to see the Sadducees as the radicals, because they denied the resurrection, is 180 degrees wide of the mark. They denied it because they were the conservatives.

Matthew, Mark and Luke all report the Sadducees’ question to Jesus, designed (as were similar questions reported by the rabbis) to make fun of the idea of resurrection and so to disprove it by a reductio ad absurdum. The three synoptists simply state, by way of introduction, that the Sadducees ‘say there is no resurrection’; and the question they ask shows well enough the line of argument they present. Just imagine a particular case, they say, and you will see how absurd resurrection is.⁴

Less well known perhaps, but equally important, is Luke’s comment in Acts as Paul faces a hearing before the Jewish council. Paul, he says, realizing that some council members were Sadducees and some Pharisees, declares that what is at stake in his case is resurrection itself, on which (he says) he sides firmly with the Pharisees. This precipitates an argument between the two factions, and the court breaks up in disorder. Luke’s description is interesting, though tricky, and we must look at it carefully because it provides important evidence not only for the Sadducees but also for the Pharisees:

⁷ As he said this, a row flared up between the Pharisees and the Sadducees, and the gathering was split down the middle. ⁸ (The Sadducees say that there is no resurrection—neither angel, nor spirit—but the Pharisees confess them both.) ⁹ There was a great uproar, and some of the scribes from the Pharisaic party rose up and became belligerent. ‘We find nothing wrong with this man,’ they said. ‘Supposing a spirit or an angel spoke to him?’⁵

The scene is thoroughly believable; and we must remember, of course, that the Luke who is writing this, and making sidelong explanatory comments, is the same Luke who describes Jesus’ own resurrection in considerable detail in the final chapter of his gospel. The crucial phrase comes in the strange sentence in brackets in verse 8. Many translations flatten it out: NRSV, for example, writes, ‘the Sadducees say that there is no resurrection, or angel, or spirit; but the Pharisees acknowledge all three.’ There are three problems with this. First, if that was what Luke intended to say, he went about it a very strange way, using ‘neither … nor’ with ‘angel’ and ‘spirit’, followed by a word which means ‘both’, as of two, not ‘all three’.⁶ The Pharisees’ response, interestingly, confirms this, and helps to elucidate matters, by highlighting not the resurrection itself but the either/or of angel and spirit. Second, there is no other evidence that the Sadducees denied the existence of angels and spirits; since they claimed to base their views on the Pentateuch, in which angels make frequent appearances and spirits are far from unknown (not least the spirit of YHWH, though that is perhaps not relevant here), it is very unlikely that they did in fact deny their existence.⁷ Third, Luke is very clear both in his gospel and in Acts that the resurrection of Jesus himself did not involve Jesus becoming, or even becoming like, an angel or a spirit.⁸ Thus, though attempts have been made to say that ‘neither angel nor spirit’ refers to different interpretations of the resurrection—resurrection life seen as angelic or spiritual—it is far more likely that Luke meant something else.⁹

The most likely interpretation—and a very revealing one it is—is that those who held to belief in resurrection in this period, that is, the Pharisees, had also developed regular ways of describing the intermediate state.¹⁰ In that world, nobody supposed the dead were already raised; resurrection, as we have seen, describes new bodily life after a present mode of ‘life after death’.¹¹ So: where and what are the dead now? To this, we may surmise (and verse 9 will demonstrate it further), the Pharisees gave the answer: they are at present like angels, or spirits. They are presently disembodied; in the future, they will receive their new embodiment. What the Sadducees denied, then, was on the one hand the resurrection, and on the other hand the two current accounts of the intermediate state. They did not deny the existence of angels or spirits, but they denied that the dead were in a state that could be so described.¹²

The Pharisees’ retort is then spot on. They do not suppose for a moment that Paul has actually been a witness of the resurrection itself; that is out of the question as far as they are concerned. ‘The resurrection’, from their point of view, will take place at a future date when all the righteous dead are raised to share God’s new world. But they wonder—in the heat of the argument, and without knowing very much of Paul’s developed views—whether he may perhaps have had a visitation from someone who, though not yet bodily raised, is presently in the intermediate state between death and resurrection, and whose existence in that state, and communication with the living from that state, provides evidence (they would say) that they will be raised in the future.’¹³ (This, as we shall see, is similar to the argument Jesus uses when he is himself in debate with the Sadducees.) While not, therefore, giving any credence to Paul’s actual claim, that Jesus was already raised from the dead (they may not even have been aware that that was the centre of Paul’s message), they are quite prepared to allow that he may have had a meeting with an ‘angelic’ or ‘spiritual’ being, to be identified as the post-death but pre-resurrection state of someone or other. Paul is thus, from their point of view, potentially at least on the side of the angels.

An interesting parallel to this text is found in an earlier passage in Acts 12, where Luke gives an unexpected display of talent in comic writing. Peter has just been miraculously released from prison by an angel, the night before Herod Agrippa was intending to have him executed. A group of Christians is meeting in the house of Mary, Mark’s mother, to pray for him. Peter comes to the house and knocks at the door, and a maid called Rhoda goes to answer it:

¹⁴ When she recognized Peter’s voice, from sheer joy she didn’t open the door, but ran in and announced that Peter was standing outside the door. ¹⁵ ‘You’re mad,’ they said to her. But she insisted it was indeed the case. ‘It’s his angel!’ they said. ¹⁶ Peter continued knocking; they opened the door, saw him, and were amazed.¹⁴

The key phrase is in verse 15: ‘It’s his angel.’ The praying Christians—a wonderful example of faith in answered prayer—believed that Peter must have been executed in the prison. They, like most societies ancient and modem, knew well enough that grieving friends and relatives sometimes receive what seems like a personal visit, vision or apparition in which the recently deceased appears for a few moments, perhaps says something, and then disappears again. This is perfectly compatible with them going off (in this case) to the prison, requesting the body, and burying it in the normal way. ‘It’s his angel’, in other words, does not mean, ‘He has been raised from the dead.’ It is a way of referring to the intermediate ‘angelic’ state in which the person will now remain, with his body dead and buried, until the resurrection. And it is this intermediate state, in whatever form it is described, that the Sadducees seem to have denied, along with the doctrine of resurrection itself.

The New Testament account of the Sadducees is backed up in this respect by Josephus. The Sadducees, he says, will have nothing to do with ‘the persistence of the soul after death, penalties in the underworld, and rewards’.¹⁵ More specifically, ‘the Sadducees hold that the soul perishes along with the body.’¹⁶ This, as will be apparent, is closely in line with Luke’s account: the Sadducees not only deny the resurrection, but also rule out any post-mortem existence that might lead to it.

The Mishnah and Talmud are equally clear:

The Sadducees asked Rabban Gamaliel whence it could be proved that the Holy One, blessed be He, makes the dead alive again. He said to them: From the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings. But they would not accept this.¹⁷

All Israelites have a share in the world to come … And these are they that have no share in the world to come: he that says that there is no resurrection of the dead prescribed in the Law; and he that says that the Law is not from Heaven; and an Epicurean.¹⁸

Some texts of the Mishnah omit the phrase ‘prescribed in the Law’; this makes the ban all the more general—denial of resurrection, not just denying that it is taught in Torah—but probably misses the point of the original debate, in which the Sadducees held the resurrection to be a recent innovation, not taught in the Five Books of Moses. The controversy was reflected in a liturgical change:

At the close of every Benediction in the Temple they used to say, ‘For everlasting’ [lit.: ‘from the age’]; but after the heretics had taught corruptly and said that there is but one age, it was ordained that they should say, ‘from everlasting to everlasting’ [lit.: ‘from the age to the age’].¹⁹

The point here is that the Sadducees are accused of teaching that there is no ‘age to come’ or ‘world to come’; the same Hebrew word, ‘olam, means both ‘world’ and ‘age’. The Pharisees believed strongly in ‘the age/world to come’, in which present wrongs would be righted. Without that, they held, one would simply work for rewards and compensations in the present life—a doctrine which would have suited the Sadducees very well, and would have suited anti-Sadducean polemic even better.

The closest we come to statements from the Sadducees themselves, or to one whom they might regard as a spiritual ancestor, is the Wisdom of Jesus ben Sirach (‘Ecclesiasticus’). From what we know of them, the Sadducees would certainly have approved of Sirach’s attitude to death and what might lie beyond:

Give, and take, and indulge yourself,

because in Hades one cannot look for luxury.

All living beings become old like a garment,

for the decree from of old is, ‘You must die!’²⁰

Who will sing praises to the Most High in Hades

in place of the living who give thanks?

From the dead, as from one who does not exist, thanksgiving has ceased;

those who are alive and well sing the Lord’s praises.²¹

Do not forget, there is no coming back;

you do the dead no good [by excessive mourning], and you injure yourself.

Remember his fate, for yours is like it;

yesterday it was his, and today it is yours.

When the dead is at rest, let his remembrance rest too,

and be comforted for him when his spirit has departed.²²

This is the Lord’s decree for all flesh;

why then should you reject the will of the Most High?

Whether life lasts for ten years or a hundred or a thousand,

there are no questions asked in Hades.²³

There is one passage in Sirach where it looks for a moment as though the prospect of post-mortem judgment is being brought to bear on moral behaviour:

It is easy for the Lord on the day of death

to reward individuals according to their conduct.

An hour’s misery makes one forget past delights,

and at the close of one’s life one’s deeds are revealed.²⁴

But the next verse indicates that the reward in question is simply that of good or bad reputation:

Call no one happy before his death;

by how he ends, a person becomes known.²⁵

It is this reputation, and the hope contained in the new generation, that offers such hope as is to be found in the present life:

Like abundant leaves on a spreading tree

that sheds some and puts forth others,

so are the generations of flesh and blood:

one dies and another is born.

Every work decays and ceases to exist,

and the one who made it will pass away with it.²⁶

There is hope here of a kind, but it is not the kind that the Pharisees were offering.

Why, we may ask, did the Sadducees hold out against the doctrine of resurrection? It is noticeable that aristocrats down the years, and across many cultures, have taken what steps they could to ensure that the comfort and luxury they have enjoyed in the present life will continue into the future one. Certainly this was so in ancient Egypt and many other societies. Sometimes slaves would be killed, perhaps even wives, to provide appropriate household members for the deceased in the life beyond. Likewise, powerful groups have sometimes advocated a strong post-mortem hope as a way of stopping the poor and powerless grumbling about their lot in the present life. And, where ‘resurrection’ has become an official dogma within a powerful system, it has had the capacity to become simply another instrument to keep the ordinary people in line. It goes against such sociological assumptions to see first-century Jewish aristocrats staunchly denying any future life. Their own supposed explanation—that the doctrine was not to be found in the foundational texts of scripture, namely the Pentateuch—is as we have seen prima facie true; there is nothing remotely like Daniel 12:2–3, Isaiah 26:19 or Ezekiel 37:1–14 to be found either in the Pentateuch or in the whole of the ‘Former Prophets’ (the historical books from Joshua to Kings). But by the first century, as we shall see, the discovery of ‘resurrection’ texts even in the Torah itself had become a regular occupation of the Pharisees, as it was to become, in a measure, of the Christians also. Why were the Sadducees committed to resisting this?

One possibility is that they were afraid of the wrong kind of interest in the dead. Granted the widespread pagan practices we looked at earlier in this section, it is not to be wondered at if Jewish leaders would regard the cult of the dead as dangerous and unsavoury. They may well have seen belief in resurrection, with its attendant beliefs in angelic and spiritual intermediate states, as half way to spiritualism or necromancy. But this does not, I think, get to the heart of it.

The real problem was that resurrection was from the beginning a revolutionary doctrine.²⁷ For Daniel 12, resurrection belief went with dogged resistance and martyrdom. For Isaiah and Ezekiel, it was about YHWH restoring the fortunes of his people. It had to do with the coming new age, when the life-giving god would act once more to turn everything upside down—or perhaps, as they might have said, right way up. It was the sort of belief that encouraged young hotheads to attack Roman symbols placed on the Temple, and that, indeed, led the first-century Jews into the most disastrous war they had experienced.²⁸ It was not simply, even, that they thought such beliefs might lead the nation into a clash with Rome, though that will certainly have been the case.²⁹ It was that they realized that such beliefs threatened their own position. People who believe that their god is about to make a new world, and that those who die in loyalty to him in the meantime will rise again to share gloriously in it, are far more likely to lose respect for a wealthy aristocracy than people who think that this life, this world and this age are the only ones there ever will be.³⁰

We should note carefully the difference, at this point, between the promise of ‘heaven’, seen as a post-mortem comfort offered by the wealthy and powerful to the poor and powerless, on the one hand, and resurrection on the other. Resurrection is precisely concerned with the present world and its renewal, not with escaping the present world and going somewhere else; and, in its early Jewish forms right through to its developed Christian forms, it was always concerned with divine judgment, with the creator god acting within history to put right that which is wrong. Only if we misunderstand what resurrection actually involved can we line it up with the kind of ‘pie in the sky’ promises which earned the scorn of many twentieth-century social reformers.³¹

It is possible that, since the Sadducees were the spiritual and probably the physical descendants of the priest/king dynasty of the Hasmonean period, they may have retained a memory of the book of Daniel, and the doctrine of resurrection, as being in favour with those who wanted to subvert them in that earlier period. Significantly, Jesus’ discussion with the Sadducees is set by the synoptic evangelists among a string of other discussions and parables all of which in some way or other highlight the revolutionary nature of what Jesus had just done in the Temple.³²

If the Sadducees were the main proponents of the view which, claiming considerable biblical support, denied any significant future life, they were not, it seems, the only people who took that line.³³ Three writings from the final centuries BC indicate a similar position, and we have no reason to suppose that they were specifically Sadducean. In strong contrast to the book which now follows it, 1 Maccabees holds out no hope for a future life, but only for a glorious memory among those who come after.³⁴ Tobit, a book which has more than most to say about death, has nothing whatever to say about what comes afterwards, except when, in the final prayer, it echoes Deuteronomy’s statement about Israel’s god leading people down to Hades and bringing them up from the abyss—which seems, in context, to be a prediction of the eagerly awaited return from exile.³⁵ Apart from that, the only advice seems to be to avoid death at all costs, in particular by giving alms.³⁶ And 1 Baruch, like Sirach, repeats the regular Old Testament warning: those in Hades, whose spirit has been taken from their bodies, will not ascribe glory or justice to YHWH.³⁷ This may be an argument from silence; but when a context cries out for something to be said, when a culture provides the possibility to say something, and when a text refuses that possibility, the argument is not as weak as is sometimes supposed.

We should hardly be surprised that this view persisted quite strongly throughout the period up to AD 70. (We may suspect that many Jews held it after that time as well, though with the disappearance of the Sadducees, and the dominance of the post-Pharisaic rabbis, such people have left us no trace except perhaps the odd tombstone.) It was, after all, consonant with the natural meaning of much of the biblical text. As we have seen, it can also be explained in terms of the political dynamics of the time. Resurrection, depending as it did on a strong belief in the justice and sovereign power of the good creator god, was always bound to be a revolutionary doctrine. But before we can examine this further we must look at the second major option for Jews at this period. There might after all be a life beyond death which did not involve a new this-worldly existence. A blessed but disembodied post-mortem life seemed to some to have the best of both worlds, Jew and Greek alike.

3. Blessed (and Disembodied) Immortality

By the time of Jesus and Paul, Judaism had found itself for over two centuries at the centre of swirling cultural and political winds. The conquests of Alexander the Great in the fourth century, and of Antiochus in the second, together with all the social and cultural changes they brought, challenged devotion, faith and understanding as much as they did political structures.³⁸ Here the historian may be tempted to oversimplify, not least because some of our key texts do so as well, seeing Judaism divided into those who kept the true faith and those who capitulated to Hellenism, as much in their thinking as in their compromised politics. Yet even those who resisted assimilation did so, in our period, from within what was inescapably hellenistic Judaism; by the time of the first century AD all the many varieties of Judaism were to a lesser or greater extent hellenistic, including those anchored firmly in the soil and cult of Palestine.

There is still, however, a distinction between being forced to drink polluted water and bottling it up for sale—or, to put it from the other point of view, between gratefully accepting and profiting from the god-given wisdom of the wider world and stubbornly clinging to outmoded concepts. Many Jews, we may suspect, were only dimly aware of these great cultural questions and their tell-tale everyday signs, which the historian can pick out with the advantage not only of hindsight but of the random process of selection known as ‘the vagaries of history’. Thus from our very limited evidence, and our distant perspective, it appears to us that there were some Jews in this period who rejected the Sadducees’ denial, believing that there was indeed a future life beyond death, but who equally rejected the increasingly popular belief in resurrection. Instead, they postulated, and celebrated, a future blissful life for the righteous, in which souls, disencumbered of their attendant physical bodies, would enjoy a perfect life for ever.

For such thoughts to be thinkable, the step had to be taken, more explicitly than anywhere in the Old Testament, to describe how the soul or spirit would leave the physical body at death and be capable, not just of going to Sheol, but of further more dynamic experiences.³⁹ There are several signs of this move in the second-Temple period. ‘The soul lives on after death,’ declares Pseudo-Phocylides:

For the souls remain unharmed among the deceased.

For the spirit is a loan of God to mortals, and his image.

For we have a body out of earth,

and when afterward we are resolved again into earth we are but dust;

and then the air has received our spirit …

All alike are corpses, but God rules over the souls.

Hades is our common eternal home and fatherland,

a common place for all, poor and kings.

We humans live not a long time but for a season.

But our soul is immortal and lives ageless forever.⁴⁰

However, a couple of lines earlier the same text declares, confusingly to our ears:

It is not good to dissolve the human frame;

for we hope that the remains of the departed

will soon come to the light again out of the earth;

and afterward they will become gods.⁴¹

So, too, the Testament of Abraham (which is later, and may reflect Christian influence) declares that Abraham will be taken after his death to Paradise,

where there are the tents of my righteous ones and [where] the mansions of my holy ones, Isaac and Jacob, are in his bosom, where there is no toil, no grief, no moaning, but peace and exultation and endless life.⁴²

A further example of this new perspective on the make-up and destiny of human beings is found in the Ethiopic book of Enoch. Though there are suggestive echoes of Daniel 12:2–3 later on in the same passage, here at least we seem to be moving in a decidedly hellenistic direction, in which the immortal soul passes out of the body and on to either bliss or torment:

All good things, and joy and honour are prepared for and written down for the souls of those who died in righteousness … The spirits of those who died in righteousness shall live and rejoice; their spirits shall not perish, nor their memorial from before the face of the Great One unto all the generations of the world … Woe unto you sinners who are dead!… You yourselves know that they will bring your [other MSS: their] souls down to Sheol; and they shall experience evil and great tribulation … Your souls shall enter into the great judgment; it shall be a great judgment in all the generations of the world.⁴³

In the same way Hillel (first century BC) was supposed to have spoken of the soul as being a guest in the house of life;⁴⁴ and Johanan ben Zakkai (late first century AD) was said to have wept at the end of his life because he feared the judge who had power to assign people either to the Garden of Eden or to Gehenna.⁴⁵ We must assume, from everything else we know of the Pharisaic tradition (see below), that these great sages believed in eventual resurrection; here they seem to have been employing new concepts of a body/soul dualism to explain what happened between bodily death and the final state of blessedness. So too 4 Ezra, which seems clearly to teach eventual resurrection, speaks explicitly of the spirit or soul leaving the ‘corruptible vessel’, i.e. the mortal body, with wicked souls condemned to wander about in torments, and righteous souls entering into a joyful rest in anticipation of final glory.⁴⁶ The idea of a soul separable from the body, with different theories as to what might happen to it thereafter, was widespread in the varied Judaisms of the turn of the eras.⁴⁷ Several funerary inscriptions bear witness to this kind of belief.⁴⁸

This offered one way, though by no means the only one, of coming to terms with persecution and suffering. Though, as we shall see, 2 Maccabees used the story of the persecutions under Antiochus to teach a definitely bodily resurrection, the later 4 Maccabees went in the other direction, insisting that though the body could be harmed and killed, the soul could not.⁴⁹ This means that one can cheerfully give up one’s body; the true gift of God is the soul, which cannot be taken away. Thus, in a passage with interesting resonances for those who know the New Testament, 4 Maccabees urges:

Let us with all our hearts consecrate ourselves to God, who gave us our lives, and let us use our bodies as a bulwark for the law. Let us not fear him who thinks he is killing us, for great is the struggle of the soul and the danger of eternal torment lying before those who transgress the commandment of God. Therefore let us put on the full armour of self-control, which is divine reason. For if we so die, Abraham and Isaac and Jacob will welcome us, and all the fathers will praise us.⁵⁰

The body is thus demeaned; it must be overcome by the rational faculty of the soul.⁵¹ Those who give their lives for God share the immortality of the patriarchs:

They believe that they, like our patriarchs Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, do not die to God, but live to God …

They knew also that those who die for the sake of God live to God, as do Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and all the patriarchs.⁵²

The book ends with a confident statement of the same theme:

But the sons of Abraham with their victorious mother are gathered together into the chorus of the fathers, and have received pure and immortal souls from God, to whom be glory forever and ever. Amen.⁵³

Assuming, as we must, that the writer knew and was using 2 Maccabees, we may state confidently that for this book at least there was a conscious redactional decision to delete all mention of bodily resurrection and substitute a version of the doctrine of the immortal soul, or at least of souls that could become immortal through the pursuit of wisdom. The critical point for our investigation is that, whereas in 2 Maccabees there is a two-stage expectation (a period of waiting following the martyr’s death, and then bodily resurrection at some future date), here, quite clearly, there is only one stage: the martyrs go, immediately upon death, into the blissful immortality already enjoyed by Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. This is not just, then, what we shall find in some passages of Josephus, namely, a ‘translation’ of resurrection belief into the language of pagan philosophy; it looks as though the author intends not merely to communicate a strange idea to an uncomprehending audience, but actually to change the idea itself.⁵⁴

It is possible that we should see a similar move made in a (controverted) passage in Jubilees (written around the middle of the second century BC). The writer describes how people will eventually return to the study and practice of the commandments, and how life will flourish and wickedness be abolished. Without, it seems, a cataclysmic break, the world, or at least Israel, will live in peace and rejoicing, with no Satan, no evil one to destroy (23:27–9). Then, the passage goes on:

the LORD will heal his servants,

and they will rise up and see great peace.

And they will drive out their enemies,

and the righteous ones will see and give praise,

and rejoice forever and ever with joy;

and they will see all of their judgments and all of their curses among their enemies.

And their bones will rest in the earth,

and their spirits will increase joy,

and they will know that the LORD is an executor of judgment;

but he will show mercy to hundreds and thousands,

to all who love him.⁵⁵

According to the translator, the last verse five lines of the extract can be taken in two quite different ways. It can denote spirits who remain conscious and blissful in a disembodied post-mortem state; or it can indicate, with poetic hyperbole, the righteous dying happy because they know that God will vindicate them at a later date. The earlier lines, especially ‘they will rise up and see great peace’, suggest that the latter is perhaps to be preferred: in other words, that ‘they will rise up’ is a definite prediction of a future resurrection, while ‘their bones will rest … and their spirits will increase joy’ refers to the time in between their death and resurrection. This seems to me the probable interpretation. Nevertheless, Jubilees is often cited as a representative of the ‘disembodied immortality’ position; if this is correct, so that ‘bones resting in the earth and spirits increasing joy’ refers to the final state of those concerned, we would have to say that ‘they will rise up’ in the previous verse is the only occurrence in the relevant literature of something that looks like resurrection language being used to denote something other than new bodily existence.⁵⁶

The great first-century exponent of a thoroughgoing hellenistic viewpoint is of course the Alexandrian philosopher Philo. His subtle and fascinating writings contain much food for thought, on this point and many others. But since it is beyond controversy that he taught the immortality of the soul rather than the resurrection of the dead, his place in our present survey can be limited to a brief statement rather than the full study he deserves.⁵⁷

Philo was a highly trained philosopher, as well as a cultured and respected senior figure within the social and political world of Alexandrian Jewry. He drew in a sophisticated way not only on Plato and Aristotle, and their successors in subsequent hellenistic philosophy, but on the Stoic and Neopythagorean writers as well. But he remained deeply Jewish, opposing any attempt to get away from the specificity, and physicality, of Jewish observances and expectations.⁵⁸ It is this remarkable cocktail of influences which, shaken together in the cosmopolitan world of Alexandria and its Jewish community, produced the powerful brew of Philo’s thought on many topics, not least the nature and destiny of human beings.

Here his thought is unambiguously dualistic. The soul is immortal—or, strictly, the soul is divided into various parts, one of which is immortal.⁵⁹ The body is a prison in which the spirit is confined, that spirit which has been breathed by God into humankind. Indeed, the body is a tomb or coffin for the soul; the soma/sema (body/tomb) pun of standard Platonic exposition emerges in Philo too.⁶⁰ There are even hints in Philo of an idea popular in the Platonism of the time, that the present world is really the Hades referred to by the Greek poets.⁶¹ One’s main calling in the present life is therefore, with God’s help, to energize the soul or spirit towards the vision of God. From this, all that remains for completeness is to be finally rescued from the body, so that the soul can return to its original non-bodily condition. This is God’s reward for those who, during their embodied phase, have remained pure from sensual defilement.⁶² Those who follow the patriarchs down this road will, after death, become equal to the angels; the immortal soul does not, after all, die, but merely departs. Like Abraham, called to leave his country and go to another one, the soul leaves its present habitation and sets off for the heavenly realms, the ‘mother city’.⁶³

Philo anticipated by nearly two centuries the labours of Alexandrian Christian thinkers like Clement and Origen, who were also concerned to bring together the insights of their faith with the intellectual culture around them. They used him a good deal, and the story of subsequent Christian wrestling with some of these problems is thus indebted, for good and ill, to this remarkable, indeed unique, Jewish thinker.⁶⁴ But for our purposes he stands as the clearest first-century Jewish exponent of the view which did not come to dominate the horizon. There is no place in his thinking, any more than there was in that of Plato himself, for the resurrection of the body.

Those familiar with discussions of the immortality of the soul in second-Temple Judaism may at this point feel that they are missing an absent friend. Where, they will say, is the Wisdom of Solomon? Surely it belongs in this category? Is it not, also, the work of an Alexandrian Jew who believed in the immortality of the soul rather than the resurrection of the body? The answer is not as obvious as is usually supposed. But to address this properly we must turn to our main category. From several angles at once we are confronted with overwhelming evidence that the small seed of Daniel 12:2–3, and the other Old Testament passages we looked at earlier, had grown into a large shrub. Changing the metaphor, resurrection was in the air. Since this was the air the early Christians were breathing when they said what they believed had happened to Jesus, it is vital that we analyse it carefully.

(ii) Resurrection in the Bible: The More Greek the Better

Along with prayer there went of course the regular reading of scripture. Without going into too much detail, we can state what seems at first a remarkable paradox, at least for those who had supposed that ‘resurrection’ was a Hebrew or Jewish notion and ‘immortality’ a Greek one: that as the Bible was translated into Greek (in Egypt, in the third century BC) the notion of resurrection became, it seems, much clearer, so that many passages which might have been at most ambiguous became clear, and some which seemed to have nothing to do with resurrection might suddenly give a hint, or more than a hint, in that direction.⁶⁸

It is impossible to tell, at this remove, what overtones different Jewish readers of the Greek Old Testament might have heard in the different words. What is more, it is quite impossible, at this stage of our knowledge of early text-forms, to be sure in any given case that when we compare even the best modern editions of the Hebrew and Greek Bibles we are in touch with either the Hebrew that the original LXX translators used or the Greek that they first wrote. In many cases it is quite possible that the LXX gives us access to an earlier Hebrew form, though in many others the LXX seems to represent a sharp move away from the original. However, with these notes of caution, certain things stand out.

First, the passages which already speak unambiguously of bodily resurrection come through loud and clear; there is no attempt to soften them. Daniel 12:2–3, 13, and the relevant passages in 2 Maccabees (e.g. 7:9, 14; 12:44) all use what became the standard ‘resurrection’ language, namely the Greek verbs anistemi and egeiro and their cognates. We find the same with Isaiah 26, both in the verse that denies resurrection (14) and the verse that affirms it (19). They both emerge clearly in the Greek: 26:14 declares that the dead will not see life (hoi nekroi zoen ou me idosin), and that ‘the doctors’ will not rise (oude iatroi ou me anastesosin).⁶⁹ In its turn, 26:19 insists that the dead will be raised (anastesontai hoi nekroi), and that those in the tombs will be aroused (egerthesontai hoi en tois mnemeiois). Similarly, the passage in Hosea (6:2) that some think (whatever its original meaning) provided a key influence for both Isaiah and Daniel, is also explicit in the Greek: on the third day we shall be raised and live in his presence (anastesometha kai zesometha enopion autou). No second-Temple reader would have doubted that this referred to bodily resurrection.

Cavallin lists other passages where, despite the lack of actual reference in the original, the translators may have intended to refer to resurrection. These include Deuteronomy 32:39, Psalms 1:5 and 21:30 (22:29).⁷⁰ In addition, he notes the striking way in which the LXX has reversed the sense of Job 14:14; instead of a blank denial of a future life (‘if a man die, shall he live again?’), the LXX declares boldly, ‘If a man dies, he shall live’ (ean apothane anthropos, zesetai). In the same way, the deeply obscure passage Job 19:26a (‘after my skin has been thus destroyed’) has been turned around: God ‘will resurrect my skin’ (anastesai to derma mou). Finally, the LXX adds a postscript to the book. After 42:17, where Job dies, an old man and full of days, it adds (42:17a LXX): ‘It is written of him that he will rise again with those whom the Lord will raise’ (gegraptai de auton palin anastesesthai meth’ hon ho kyrios anistesin). Clearly, whoever drafted the translation of LXX Job had no doubt both of the bodily resurrection and of the propriety of making sure the biblical text affirmed it.⁷¹

A similar point emerges from the LXX of Hosea 13:14. The Hebrew text asks, ‘Shall I ransom them from the power of Sheol? Shall I redeem them from Death?’ and expects the answer ‘No’. The LXX, however, has turned this into a positive statement: I shall rescue them from the hand of Hades, and I shall redeem them from Death (ek cheiros Hadou rhusomai autous kai ek thanatou lutrosomai autous). Someone who read the text in this way might well then hear overtones of resurrection in the next chapter as well: ‘I will be like the dew to Israel … they shall blossom as the vine …’⁷²

In the light of this, we may cautiously suggest some other passages in which similar influence might be present. Of course, most occurrences of anistemi and egeiro are simply regular ways of saying that someone got up, whether from sitting or lying, or ‘arose’ in the sense of ‘there arose a mighty king in Israel’.⁷³ But anastasis is the word for ‘resurrection’ in 2 Maccabees 7:14 and 12:43, and two of its other three occurrences are interesting in their own way.⁷⁴ The word anastaseos (‘of the resurrection’) has been added to the title of Psalm 65 (MT 66), and though some (including the editor in Rahlfs’s edition) have seen this as a very early Christian addition, indicating the use of this psalm in Easter liturgies, a case can be made, in the light of verse 9 (‘you hold my soul in life’), for the title reflecting a pre-Christian Jewish insight.⁷⁵ In Zephaniah 3:8, YHWH instructs his people to wait for him, for the day when he arises as a witness, gathering the nations for judgment. In the LXX this comes out as the summons to wait ‘for the day of my resurrection (eis hemeran anastaseos mou) for witness’. This could simply mean ‘the day when I arise’ in the same sense as the Hebrew. But the close connection in Jewish and Christian thought between resurrection and judgment may indicate that the translator was thinking of the day when the god-given gift of resurrection would bring the world to judgment at last. Certainly—this is a different point, but one that hovers on the edge of a discussion like this—a Christian, reading the Bible in Greek as most of them did, might well have made the connection, and might have gone even further, to guess at a hidden christological message.

That possibility (of an early Christian reading in support of a christological belief) may cautiously be explored in relation to a few of the prophecies of a coming king. God promises to David that he will ‘raise up’ his seed after him, the one of whom it is said, ‘I will be his father, and he will be my son’: any early Christian reading 2 Samuel 7:12, kai anasteso to sperma sou, would have had no difficulty identifying who the sperma was.⁷⁶ So too the various messianic promises in Jeremiah and Ezekiel could easily have been taken, and were perhaps intended by their LXX translator(s) to be taken, as indicating the resurrection through which God’s leader(s) would ‘arise’ in the age to come. God will ‘raise up’ shepherds, and especially a righteous Branch, to rule over Israel and the world.⁷⁷ ‘I will raise up one shepherd over them, my servant David,’ declares YHWH: kai anasteso ep’ autous poimena hena, ton doulon mou Dauid.⁷⁸ We should be wary of reading too much into verses like this; equally, we should be just as wary of reading too little. Who can tell, at this remove, what overtones second-Temple Jews and first-generation Christians might not have detected?

Likewise, the language of some of the psalms may be taken in a more explicit way as a prayer for resurrection. Psalm 40:11 (41:10 MT) prays: ‘Lord, be gracious to me; raise me up (anasteson me), that I may repay them.’ Psalm 138 (139 MT):18b declares that, when the Psalmist has tried to count the vast range of God’s thoughts, he will ‘come to the end’, or perhaps ‘awake’, and find himself still with God. In the LXX this has become a more explicit pointer towards a future life: exegerthen, ‘I will be raised up’ (the same verb that is used in the Theodotion version of Daniel 12:2). There may well be more hints in the same direction; these are, I suggest, straws in the wind.

The evidence of the Septuagint, then, is worth pondering, especially when we consider what, granted certain regular scholarly assumptions, we might have thought we were going to find. After all, here is a Hebrew text being translated into Greek—in Egypt, most likely. We might have expected that every reference to resurrection would have been flattened out into something more Platonic (as happened, for instance, between 2 Maccabees and 4 Maccabees). We might have expected that the translators would have introduced suggestions of either the Ben-Sirach point of view (forget about a life after death, concentrate on getting this one straight) or that of Philo (strive to attain disembodied bliss hereafter). They do not. All the indications are that those who translated the Septuagint, and those who read it thereafter (i.e. most Jews, in both Palestine and the Diaspora), would have understood the key Old Testament passages in terms of a more definite ‘resurrection’ sense than the Hebrew would necessarily warrant, and might very likely have heard overtones of ‘resurrection’ in many places where the Hebrew would not have suggested it. When, in this context, we find stories about those who suffered and died in loyalty to God and his law, we should not be surprised to hear that they spoke boldly about the newly embodied hope that would await them in the future.

One such story is that of the Maccabaean martyrs, as related in 2 Maccabees.

(iii) New Life for the Martyrs: 2 Maccabees

The second book of Maccabees begins where Daniel left off, with the promise of new bodily life, at some future date, for those who had died horrible deaths out of loyalty to Israel’s god and the law. This book provides far and away the clearest picture of the promise of resurrection anywhere in the period.⁷⁹

The context is that of pagan persecution. The Syrian tyrant Antiochus Epiphanes, as part of his drive to bring Judaism into line with his imperial ambitions, is attempting to make loyal Jews disobey their god-given laws (specifically, the prohibition on eating pork), under pain of torture and death. The story focuses on a mother and her seven sons, who refuse to eat the unclean food, and are tortured one by one. As they go to their various gruesome deaths, several of them make specific promises to their torturers about the form that their divine vindication will take:

You accursed wretch, [said the second brother,] you dismiss us from this present life, but the King of the universe will raise us up to an everlasting renewal of life, because we have died for his laws.⁸⁰

[The third brother] put out his tongue and courageously stretched forth his hands, and said nobly, ‘I got these from Heaven, and because of his laws I disdain them, and from him I hope to get them back again.’⁸¹

When he was near death, [the fourth brother] said, ‘One cannot but choose to die at the hands of mortals and to cherish the hope God gives of being raised again by him. But for you there will be no resurrection to life!’⁸²

[The mother] encouraged each of them in the language of their ancestors. Filled with a noble spirit, she … said to them, ‘I do not know how you came into being in my womb. It was not I who gave you life and breath, nor I who set in order the elements within each of you. Therefore the Creator of the world, who shaped the beginning of humankind and devised the origin of all things, will in his mercy give life and breath back to you again, since you now forget yourselves for the sake of his laws.’⁸³

[The mother spoke secretly to the youngest son:] ‘I beg you, my child, to look at the heaven and the earth and see everything that is in them, and recognize that God did not make them out of things that existed. And in the same way the human race came into being. Do not fear this butcher, but prove worthy of your brothers. Accept death, so that in God’s mercy I may get you back again along with your brothers.’⁸⁴

[The youngest son said,] ‘You … will not escape the hands of God. For we are suffering because of our own sins. And if our living Lord is angry for a little while, to rebuke and discipline us, he will again be reconciled with his own servants … For our brothers after enduring a brief suffering have drunk of everflowing life, under God’s covenant; but you, by the judgment of God, will receive just punishment for your arrogance. I, like my brothers, give up body and life for the laws of our ancestors, appealing to God to show mercy soon to our nation and by trials and plagues to make you confess that he alone is God, and through me and my brothers to bring to an end the wrath of the Almighty that has justly fallen on our whole nation.’⁸⁵

This remarkable chapter draws together the strands we observed in Daniel 12. The martyrs’ suffering is redemptive for the nation; there seems to be an element of Isaiah 53 in the final flourish of the youngest brother. Their loyalty will be rewarded, and the torturers’ brutality punished, by the god of justice. The new life they will receive, which is seen in very ‘bodily’ terms, is the gift of the creator god who made them and all the world in the first place. And the resurrection they await is not the same as the ‘everflowing life’ they have already drunk.⁸⁶ It is still awaited. The writer of 2 Maccabees did not suppose that the brothers and the mother had already been given their hands, tongues and whole bodies back again. Their resurrection would surely happen, but it certainly had not happened yet. It is simply nonsense to describe this belief, as does one recent writer, as ‘a resolute view of death as resurrection’.⁸⁷ Resurrection is never a redescription of death, but always its overthrow and reversal.

A similar incident, if anything more grisly yet, occurs in 2 Maccabees 14. A Jew called Razis, one of the elders in Jerusalem, was about to be arrested by Nicanor as a leading loyalist. When he found himself surrounded, he fell on his own sword, rather than suffer the outrages of the soldiers:

But in the heat of the struggle he did not hit exactly, and the crowd was now rushing in through the doors. He courageously ran up on the wall, and bravely threw himself down into the crowd. But as they quickly drew back, a space opened and he fell in the middle of the empty space. Still alive and aflame with anger, he rose, and though his blood gushed forth and his wounds were severe he ran through the crowd; and standing upon a steep rock, with his blood now completely drained from him, he tore out his entrails, took them in both hands and hurled them at the crowd, calling upon the Lord of life and spirit to give them back to him again.⁸⁸

This tale has the same underlying point: the creator god, the one who gives ‘life and spirit’, or perhaps ‘life and breath’ (the reference is surely to Genesis 2, as in Ezekiel 37) will perform a mighty act of new creation, in which the martyrs will be given new bodies.

The one final mention of resurrection in 2 Maccabees is less dramatic but equally interesting. Judas Maccabaeus and his companions discover that those who had died in the battle against Gorgias’ troops had been wearing idolatrous tokens under their robes. This, Judas and the others concluded, was the reason they had been killed. Judas’s response was to praise the righteous judge for bringing this to light; to pray that the sin might be blotted out; and to take up a collection so that a sin offering could be made in Jerusalem. In doing this, comments the writer, Judas ‘acted very well and honourably, taking account of the resurrection’:

For if he were not expecting that those who had fallen would rise again, it would have been superfluous and foolish to pray for the dead. But if he was looking to the splendid reward that is laid up for those who fall asleep in godliness, it was a holy and pious thought. Therefore he made atonement for the dead, so that they might be delivered from their sin.⁸⁹

This passage has, of course, been a happy hunting-ground for later theologians wondering about the validity or otherwise of praying for the dead, and has also been invoked as a possible background for Paul’s comment about people being baptized on behalf of the dead.⁹⁰ But for our present purposes the point is, again, that the resurrection had not yet taken place, but Judas and his companions believed that it would in the future. The secret idolaters were now, after their deaths, in some kind of intermediate state; they needed to be forgiven their sin, so that when the resurrection happened they would be able to join with the martyrs and all the righteous. Resurrection belief, throughout 2 Maccabees, means new bodily life, a life which comes after the ‘life after death’ that dead people currently experience.⁹¹ And the whole book is introduced with the reported prayer, from the time of Nehemiah, that God would gather the scattered people of Israel, punish the Gentiles for their arrogance and oppression, and plant his people in the holy place.⁹² Resurrection, in other words, is both the personal hope of the righteous individual and the national hope for faithful Israel.

(iv) Judgment and Life in God’s New World: Resurrection and Apocalyptic

The contemporary enthusiasm for apocalyptic has produced almost as much confusion as the preceding distaste for it. Studies of the material from every conceivable angle abound, and the dawn of the third Christian millennium has added extra fuel to a fire of interest, even obsession, that was already burning brightly.⁹³ And in the middle of the texts and their subject-matter we find frequent reference to the purposes of Israel’s god for his people after their death. In keeping with the genre and style of apocalyptic writing, these references are often cryptic; but again and again the hope they express, as we might expect from the spiritual heirs of Daniel and Ezekiel, is not for a permanently disembodied immortality but for a resurrection at some time still in the future.

We begin with the longest and most convoluted of these works: the Ethiopic book of Enoch (known as 1 Enoch).⁹⁴ The book, which is a composite work, dated variously during the last two centuries or so BC (with some parts possibly later still), opens with a great judgment scene. God will come forth from his dwelling; the earth shall be rent asunder; all will be judged, including the righteous:

But for the righteous he will make peace, and he will keep safe the chosen, and mercy will be upon them. They will all belong to God, and will prosper and be blessed, and the light of God will shine upon them.⁹⁵

Though this does not mention resurrection as such, it clearly envisages (as do several subsequent passages) that the righteous dead are at the moment still awaiting this final judgment, and that when it comes it will effect a change of state for them with a new dimension of blessing.⁹⁶ This is spelled out in 5.7, which predicts that ‘to the elect there shall be light, joy, and peace, and they shall inherit the earth’. This vision of future blessing for the righteous, and the whole world, is elaborated further in 10.17–11.2; it is both a very much this-worldly time of prosperity and one from which all injustice and wickedness have been banished. It is hard to imagine such a state without the fresh mighty act of God which the book predicts. When we reach chapter 25, the vision of the tree of life introduces the idea of a this-worldly paradise. The angel declares to Enoch:

‘As for this fragrant tree, not a single human being has the authority to touch it until the great judgment, when he shall take vengeance on all and conclude everything forever. This is for the righteous and the pious. And the elect will be presented with its fruit for life. He will plant it in the direction of the northeast, upon the holy place, in the direction of the house of the Lord, the Eternal King. Then they shall be glad and rejoice in gladness, and they shall enter into the holy place; its fragrance shall penetrate their bones, long life will they live on earth, such as your fathers lived in their days.’

At that moment [Enoch now comments], I blessed the God of Glory, the Eternal King, for he has prepared such things for the righteous people, as he had created them and given it to them.⁹⁷

The vision of the new Jerusalem (chapters 26–7) has the same emphasis on a future this-worldly state of blessedness. This is not quite so explicit in the description of the home of the righteous in the next (and most likely independent) section of the book, the ‘Similitudes’ (chapters 37–71); in chapter 39 the holy ones dwell with the angels, in a special dwelling place ‘underneath the wings of the Lord of the Spirits’.⁹⁸ In chapter 51, however, there is an explicit description of the future resurrection, set within the promise for all creation to be renewed:

In those days the earth will return that which has been entrusted to it, and Sheol will return that which has been entrusted to it, that which it has received, and destruction will return what it owes. And he will choose the righteous and holy from among them, for the day has come near that they must be saved … And in those days the mountains will leap like rams, and the hills will skip like lambs satisfied with milk, and all will become angels in heaven. Their faces will shine with joy [or: like kids satiated with milk. And the faces of all the angels in heaven shall glow with joy], for in those days the Chosen One will have risen; and the earth will rejoice, and the righteous will dwell upon it, and the chosen will go and walk upon it.⁹⁹

Here there is no doubt: this is resurrection, linked somehow to the rising of the mysterious ‘Chosen One’. This much-discussed figure, also called ‘the son of man’, will sit on a glorious throne, in a judgment scene reminiscent of Daniel 12 and Isaiah 52–3:¹⁰⁰

The righteous and elect ones shall be saved on that day; and from thenceforth they shall never see the faces of the sinners and the oppressors. The Lord of the Spirits will abide over them; they shall eat and rest and rise with that Son of Man forever and ever. The righteous and elect ones shall rise from the earth and shall cease being of downcast face. They shall wear the garments of glory …¹⁰¹

The next section of the book (chapters 72–82) concerns the secrets of the heavenly luminaries. The subsequent division (chapters 83–90), ‘The Dream Visions’, has Enoch telling his son, Methuselah, his visions of the future, providing a swift and symbolic overview of the history of Israel from his own day to the time of the Maccabaean crisis. Following prophetic precedent (e.g. Ezekiel 34), he sees the people of Israel as sheep and lambs, harried by vultures and other birds of prey, but defended and eventually rescued by ‘the Lord of the sheep’. At that time (in other words, after the events of 167–164 BC), the sheep, including those who have died, are regathered and brought to the house of the Lord of the sheep (90.33). This is the prelude to the messianic kingdom.

The book’s final section (chapters 91–107) sets out the ‘two ways’ of the righteous and sinner (a familiar theme in works as otherwise distinct as the Qumran Community Rule and the Didache). Like the larger book of which it now forms part, it opens with a great scene of judgment, in which, among many other things, ‘The righteous will rise from sleep, and wisdom will rise and will be given to them.’¹⁰² Other similar descriptions follow, more florid than theologically precise,¹⁰³ and, as before, more concerned with the vivid judgment awaiting sinners. But the message remains the same: the present time is a period of waiting, in which both the living and the already dead await a still-future judgment. In that context, the righteous dead, whose souls are in Sheol, are told not to be anxious.¹⁰⁴ The sinners will suppose that they have celebrated a triumph over them (102:6–11); but God has prepared wonderful things for them:

The spirits of those who died in righteousness shall live and rejoice; their spirits shall not perish; nor their memorial from before the face of the Great One unto all the generations of the world.¹⁰⁵

More specifically, with clear echoes of Daniel 12,

In heaven the angels will remember you for good before the glory of the Great One; and your names shall be written before the glory of the Great One. Be hopeful, because formerly you have pined away through evil and toil. But now you shall shine like the lights of heaven, and you shall be seen; and the windows of heaven shall be opened for you. Your cry shall be heard. Cry for judgment, and it shall appear for you … Be hopeful, and do not abandon your hope, because there shall be a fire for you; are about to be making a great rejoicing like the angels of heaven.¹⁰⁶

The book ends with a final judgment scene, in which the righteous are transformed as well as revivified:

And now I will call the spirits of the good who are of the generation of light, and I will transform those who were born in darkness, who in the flesh were not recompensed with honour, as was fitting to their faith. And I will bring out into shining light those who love my holy name, and I will set each one on the throne of his honour. And they will shine for times without number, for righteousness is the judgment of God, for with the faithful he will keep faith in the dwelling of upright paths. And they will see those who were born in darkness thrown into darkness, while the righteous shine. And the sinners will cry out as they see them shining, but they themselves will go where days and times have been written down for them.¹⁰⁷

Thus, though again the imagery does not always permit precision, it is quite clear that those who have died, both righteous and wicked, are presently awaiting a future day when their fate will become not only permanent but also public and visible. They have not, in other words, passed at death into a permanent state of either blessedness or woe; the wider context from chapter 91 onwards, particularly chapter 102, suggests that after their period of waiting they will indeed rise again to a newly embodied life. This may after all be the intention of the passage in Pseudo-Phocylides we examined earlier.¹⁰⁸ Though there is no reason to suppose that 1 Enoch, with all its varied parts, contains a single doctrine on this topic, as a whole it supports something like the view of resurrection we find in Daniel and 2 Maccabees, and also shows the various ways in which something like this could be said, not least ways which could include the transformation, as well as revivification, of the righteous dead (thus making a distinction between the righteous, who are raised to be transformed, and the wicked, who are raised to be judged).

Other shorter apocalypses make their distinct contribution.¹⁰⁹ The Testament of Moses speaks of Israel being exalted to the heights, and fixed firmly in the starry heaven, from where they will look on God’s judgment of those who have oppressed them.¹¹⁰ This seems clearly dependent both on Daniel 12:3 (the righteous shining like stars) and on Isaiah 52:13 (the servant being exalted).¹¹¹ Scholars are divided as to whether this designates an otherworldly salvation or whether it is drawing on extravagant biblical metaphors to explain the significance of a this-worldly redemption, i.e. resurrection. In my judgment, the allusion to Daniel 12, whose teaching is after all clear on the subject of bodily resurrection, settles the issue in favour of the latter.¹¹²

The Apocalypse of Moses is clearer.¹¹³ When Adam dies, God sends the archangel Michael to tell Seth not to attempt to revive him. Oil from the tree of mercy will be given at the end of times, when

all flesh from Adam up to that great day shall be raised, such as shall be the holy people; then to them shall be given every joy of Paradise and God shall be in their midst.¹¹⁴

Seth will witness Adam’s soul making ‘its fearful upward journey’ (13.6), but this will not be the end of the matter. God calls to Adam’s dead body, and says:

I told you that you are dust and to dust you shall return. Now I promise to you the resurrection; I shall raise you on the last day in the resurrection with every man of your seed.¹¹⁵

When, in her turn, Eve dies, and the book comes to an end, Michael tells Seth how to conduct burials—and incidentally reveals a standard way in which, in this period, belief in the soul leaving the body at death and belief in the future resurrection were combined:

Thus you shall prepare for burial each man who dies until the day of resurrection. And do not mourn more than six days; on the seventh day rest and be glad in it, for on that day both God and we angels rejoice in the migration from the earth of a righteous soul.¹¹⁶

A further statement of a similar position, from roughly the same period, is found in Sibylline Oracles 4.179–92:

But when everything is already dusty ashes,

and God puts to sleep the unspeakable fire, even as he kindled it,

God himself will again fashion the bones and ashes of men

and he will raise up mortals again as they were before.

And then there will be a judgment over which God himself will preside,

judging the world again.

As many as sinned by impiety, these will a mound of earth cover,

and broad Tartarus and the repulsive recesses of Gehenna.

But as many as are pious, they will live on earth again

when God gives spirit and life and favor

to these pious ones. Then they will all see themselves

beholding the delightful and pleasant light of the sun.

Oh most blessed, whatever man will live to that time.¹¹⁷

What all these otherwise quite varied statements have in common is the placing of resurrection within a judgment scene. In other words, this belief is not a general statement about the likely ultimate destination of human beings, but arises, as with Daniel and 2 Maccabees, in the context of God’s judgment on the wicked and his vindication of the righteous.

The same is true for the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs (which may well include Christian interpolations, but cannot be ruled out as evidence for pre- and non-Christian Judaism). The Testament of Levi predicts the coming of a new priest, to replace the wicked ones upon whom judgment has fallen, and declares that ‘his star shall rise in heaven like a king’, and that he ‘will shine forth like the sun in the earth’, bringing peace and joy to earth and heaven.¹¹⁸ The Testament of Judah also envisages the coming of a Messiah, after whose saving work Abraham, Isaac and Jacob will be resurrected to life, with the twelve patriarchs themselves acting as chiefs in Israel. At that time

those who died in sorrow shall be raised in joy;

and those who died in poverty for the Lord’s sake shall be made rich;

those who died on account of the Lord shall be wakened to life.¹¹⁹

In the same way, Zebulun tells his children not to grieve because he is dying. He will rise again amongst them as a leader among their sons, and will be glad in the midst of his tribe, while fire will rain down on the wicked.¹²⁰ Finally, Benjamin, the youngest brother, gives similar testimony to his children:

Then you will see Enoch and Seth and Abraham and Isaac and Jacob being raised up at the right hand in great joy. Then shall we also be raised, each of us over our tribe, and we shall prostrate ourselves before the heavenly king. Then all shall be changed, some destined for glory, others for dishonor, for the Lord first judges Israel for the wrong she has committed and then he shall do the same for all the nations.¹²¹

An allusion to Daniel is again likely, this time because of the double resurrection, both to glory and to shame. Throughout these writings, resurrection is God’s way of firmly setting the world, and Israel, to rights after the long years of earthly injustice and the even longer years in which the righteous have waited, after death, for final vindication.

This longing for judgment and vindication, plentifully evident during the period between the Maccabaean crisis and AD 70 when most of the above texts were taking shape, was renewed in the period immediately after the disaster of 70, when the bright hope of revolution, of the kingdom of God coming on earth as in heaven, was snuffed out by the ruthless might of Rome. Two apocalypses from this period, perhaps not surprisingly, turn to the promise of resurrection in their longing for the covenant god to act at last.

Fourth Ezra consists of a series of vivid visions, with interpretations, concerning the destruction and rebuilding of Jerusalem.¹²² The first vision issues in a discussion between ‘Ezra’ and the angel Uriel, in which Ezra is rebuked for impatience; the angel points out that ‘the souls of the righteous in their chambers’ are not being impatient about how long they have to wait for their reward. The chambers of souls in Hades, Uriel explains, are like the womb of a pregnant woman. As the birthpangs make the woman eager to give birth, so these chambers are eager to give back that which has been committed to them.¹²³ The same belief about the future of those currently dead underlies various passages in the second vision also.¹²⁴

The third vision gives rise to the prediction of the coming messianic age, when the messianic son of god will be revealed and celebrate his kingdom for four hundred years. After this he will die, and the world will return to a primordial silence. Then, after seven days,

the world, which is not yet awake, shall be roused, and that which is corruptible shall perish. And the earth shall give up those who are asleep in it; and the chambers shall give up the souls which have been committed to them.¹²⁵

Then shall follow a great judgment scene, in which ‘the nations that have been raised from the dead’ will be addressed by the Most High, who will reveal to them the delights of paradise on the one hand and the torments of hell on the other.¹²⁶ There follows a description of the state of the dead before the final judgment, in which one of the delights of the faithful is that it will be shown to them ‘how their face is to shine like the sun, and how they are to be made like the light of the stars, being incorruptible from then on’—yet another allusion to Daniel 12.¹²⁷ At the moment, they are resting, watched over by angels, awaiting the glory of the last days.¹²⁸ In those days, ‘death itself will be gone, hell will have fled, corruption will be forgotten, sorrows will have passed away, and the treasure of immortality will be made manifest’.¹²⁹ All this occurs, in context, within the vision of an entire new world order, in which Israel’s wrongs will be righted, evil will be punished, Jerusalem will be rebuilt, and Israel’s god, the creator, will be seen to be righteous.

The final apocalypse to be considered here is the Syriac Apocalypse of Baruch, known as 2 Baruch to distinguish it from the book of the same name found in the Apocrypha. Here too we find visions of judgment on the nations and the rebuilding of Jerusalem after the cataclysm of AD 70. In the middle of this, the angel speaking to ‘Baruch’ promises that

it will happen after these things when the time of the appearance of the anointed One has been fulfilled and he returns with glory, that then all who sleep in hope of him will rise. And it will happen at that time that those treasuries will be opened in which the number of the souls of the righteous were kept, and they will go out and the multitudes of the souls will appear together, in one assemblage, of one mind.¹³⁰

At that time, ‘dust will be called, and told, “Give back that which does not belong to you and raise up all that you have kept until its own time” ’ (42.8). Once again, the context is that of judgment:

For the earth will surely give back the dead at that time; it receives them now in order to keep them, not changing anything in their form. But as it has received them so it will give them back. And as I have delivered them to it so it will raise them. For then it will be necessary to show those who live that the dead are living again, and that those who went away have come back. And it will be that when they have recognized each other, those who know each other at this moment, then my judgment will be strong, and those things which have been spoken of before will come.¹³¹

At that time, those who are condemned will see that the people they have been lording it over will be changed into a more glorious form, into the glory (in fact) of the angels; while they, the damned, will be changed into ‘startling visions and horrible shapes’ (51.5). This gives rise to a remarkable passage about the new forms the righteous will take:

They will live in the heights of that world and they will be like the angels and will be equal to the stars. And they will be changed into any shape which they wished, from beauty to loveliness, and from light to the splendor of glory. For the extents of Paradise will be spread out for them, and to them will be shown the beauty of the majesty of the living beings under the throne, as well as all the hosts of the angels … and the excellence of the righteous will then be greater than that of the angels.¹³²

This passage has sometimes been appealed to in support of the idea of an ‘immaterial’ resurrection (and hence as a possible antecedent of Paul’s ‘spiritual body’ in 1 Corinthians 15) but this will not do.¹³³ The immediately previous chapters in 2 Baruch make it clear that this is indeed ‘resurrection’. Some kind of radical transformation is obviously envisaged, but this passage hardly indicates that the shift in question is from a material existence to a non-material one. The careful distinction between the righteous and the angels in 51.12 should also be noted. The text is noteworthy, though, as providing the only clear anticipation of what we do find in the New Testament: the sense that resurrection will involve some kind of life-enhancing transformation.¹³⁴

Finally, though it is not an apocalypse, we may add to this section the Psalms of Solomon, a work most likely from the first century BC, and showing strong traces of a revolutionary Pharisaism. ‘The destruction of the sinner is forever,’ declares the Psalmist,

and he will not be remembered when God visits the righteous. This is the share of sinners forever, but those who fear the Lord shall rise up to eternal life, and their life shall be in the Lord’s light, and it shall never end.¹³⁵

Other passages, though not so explicit, hint at the same theme—and, once more, set it within a fierce longing for divine judgment on the enemies of Israel, and vindication for the righteous.¹³⁶

Resurrection thus belongs clearly within one regular apocalyptic construal of the future that Israel’s god has in store. Judgment must fall, because the wicked have been getting away with violence and oppression for far too long; when it does, bringing with it a great change in the entire cosmic order, then those who have died, whose souls are resting patiently, will be raised to new life. Many of these apocalypses, as we have seen, allude to Daniel 12 in making the point. And all of them, in doing so, hold together what we have seen so closely interwoven in the key biblical texts: the hope of Israel for liberation from pagan oppression, and the hope of the righteous individual for a newly embodied, and probably significantly transformed, existence.

(v) Resurrection as the Vindication of the Suffering Wise: The Wisdom of Solomon

The old assumption that Greeks believed in immortality while Jews believed in resurrection is not merely historically inaccurate; it is conceptually muddled. And where concepts are muddled, texts are misread. Nowhere is this so evident as in the treatment of a central and important book which may well be from more or less exactly the same period as very early Christianity, namely the Wisdom of Solomon.¹³⁷ There are signs that Paul knew Wisdom, alluding to it, and perhaps in oblique dialogue with it, at several points in Romans.¹³⁸ This is not to say that the early Christians relied on Wisdom as a major source of ideas. But studying the way in which the book actually works is an object lesson in understanding first-century texts. This should help us later on.

Wisdom clearly teaches the immortality of the soul; therefore, it has regularly been assumed, it cannot simultaneously teach the resurrection of the body. That assumption remains widespread in current scholarship.¹³⁹ It has often been challenged, more often in fact than one might suppose from reading some scholars. In earlier times, Thomas Aquinas insisted that Wisdom believed in resurrection; in more recent times, the massive scholarship of Émile Puech has been brought to bear at the same point.¹⁴⁰ Yet the assumption persists, and cannot, it seems, be rooted out simply by detailed suggestions about some of the particular texts involved. A further assumption may be involved here: the quite erroneous idea that ‘wisdom’ and ‘apocalyptic’ are precise and discrete categories, and that no thinker or writer of the period could belong to both at the same time.¹⁴¹

The argument for a different understanding of Wisdom must be made at three levels. First, we must look briefly at the concepts involved. Then (the bulk of the argument) we must examine the underlying story-line of the book. Finally, and briefly once more, we must investigate the wider context within which the book seems to be set.

The first of these should by now be straightforward. The concepts ‘resurrection’ and ‘immortality’ are not in themselves antithetical.¹⁴² Of course, if the word ‘immortality’ is used as a shorthand for wholesale Platonism, then resurrection is out of the question. Scholars have often allowed themselves to forget that Platonic ‘immortality’ (in which a pre-existent immortal soul comes to live for a while in a mortal body, from which it is happily released at death) is not the only meaning of the word ‘immortality’ itself. By itself, the word simply means ‘a state in which death is not possible’; unless one adopts a Platonic position ahead of time, this cannot of itself be limited to disembodied states. Resurrection, in fact, is one form or type of ‘immortality’; that is what Paul is saying in 1 Corinthians 15:53–4. He is not ‘combining’ two disparate beliefs; he is simply describing resurrection itself, a new bodily life in which there can be no more death.¹⁴³ Likewise, any Jew who believed in resurrection, from Daniel to the Pharisees and beyond, naturally believed also in an intermediate state in which some kind of personal identity was guaranteed between physical death and the physical re-embodiment of resurrection. This, too, is a form of ‘immortality’. Unless we were to suppose that ‘resurrection’ denoted some kind of newly embodied existence into which one went immediately upon death—and there is no evidence that any Jews of this period believed in such a thing—it is clear that some kind of ongoing existence is assumed. Granted how the word ‘immortality’ has been used, it may be a misleading label to use for this intermediate state; but in so far as that state involves some kind of personal identity which has not been removed by bodily death the term is not inappropriate.¹⁴⁴

This kind of continuing state is exactly what is in view in Wisdom 3:1–4, a passage which itself enjoys an ongoing life (in the form of anthems and readings at funerals and memorial services) in the Christian church, long after the rest of the book has been laid to rest, to be nibbled at by the worms and moles of scholarship. It is a consoling passage, and by itself it seems to teach the non-bodily final destiny we meet in Philo and elsewhere:

¹ But the souls of the righteous are in god’s hand,

and no torture will ever touch them.

² To the eyes of those without understanding, they appeared to have died,

and their departure was thought to be evil,

³ and their journey away from us to be their ruin;

but they are in peace.

⁴ For even though they seemed in human eyes to be punished,

their hope is full of immortality.

This is a warm and moving account of the present state of the righteous after death. The picture of the souls being in god’s hand has connections with many other Jewish texts, both biblical and from the writer’s own day.¹⁴⁵

But this passage cannot so easily be lifted out of its context. Its context is a story, a story in which these verses are one moment in a sequence. Unfortunately, many readers of the book, treating it as a philosophical discourse about ‘wisdom’, organized into separate ‘topics’, have ignored this narrative, producing ‘analyses’ which carefully put asunder what the writer was equally careful to join together, or simply treating the text as a ragbag of isolated sayings on detached topics.¹⁴⁶ What has then happened is that, spotting the word ‘immortality’ here and there, and assuming the disjunction noted above, scholars have concluded that the text cannot teach anything else.

The narrative offered in chapters 1–5, within which we must highlight the smaller, and focal, story of 1:16–3:10, is about the actions and respective fates of the ‘righteous’ and the ‘wicked’. It is told, ostensibly, as a warning to the rulers of the earth (1:1; 6:1–11, 21, 24), and this setting may be more than simply a fictitious framework for more general teaching. The story is put into the mouth of Solomon, the wise king of old. He understood wisdom, and his kingdom was established; the book is urging the world’s present rulers to do the same. Chapter 6 thus draws together the lesson of chapters 1–5, leading in to the central section of the book, the praise and commendation of Wisdom herself (chapters 7–9). This in turn introduces a retelling of the story of Israel from Adam to the Exodus (chapters 10–19), to which we shall return.

The story told in chapters 1–5 is a classic Jewish narrative of how the wicked are triumphing at present and of how the divine judgment will overtake them in the future. It describes the wicked mulling over the way of the world, and coming to the conclusion that, since death is the end of everything, they may as well live for the moment (1:16–2:9). What is more, they observe the righteous man, and resent his presence and his witness to a different way of life; whereupon they plot against him (there is a fluidity here between a singular ‘righteous man’ and ‘righteous people’ in the plural). The righteous man claims to be the child of the creator; well, they think, let’s put this to the test. Let’s torture and kill him, and see what will become of him then. He claims that there will be a ‘visitation’, some kind of future event which will prove him right.¹⁴⁷ They do not believe this for a moment; they have made a compact with death itself (1:16), despite the fact that, as the writer insists, death is a mere intruder into the creator’s beautiful and wholesome creation (1:12–15). ‘God did not make death,’ declares the writer (1:13).¹⁴⁸

Already the historian will be forming hypotheses. Who are these wicked people? Are they Sadducees, seen from a Pharisaic point of view—rich, powerful aristocrats, persecuting the poor? Are they Epicurean philosophers, or even some variety of atheist?¹⁴⁹ Or are they, as seems likely to me, simply Gentiles seen from a Jewish point of view, perhaps more particularly from the viewpoint of a Jewish community feeling itself under threat or attack? The rhetoric of the ‘wicked’ in 1:16–2:20 is easily comprehensible as a Jewish summary of many of the viewpoints we have outlined in chapter 2 above; and the contemptuous description of the ‘righteous’, put into the mouth of the ‘wicked’ in 2:12–20, is exactly the sort of thing that Jews would have understood as the pagan critique of them, not least in a place like Alexandria in the first century.¹⁵⁰ In particular, the challenge they offer to the ‘righteous man’ is that they will put to the test his claim to be god’s child. This forms an important sub-theme of the entire book, and eventually emerges as the point of the Exodus, in which the creator god reveals before the pagan Egyptians that Israel really is his firstborn son.¹⁵¹

The writer pauses, at the end of the speech of the ‘wicked’, to reflect on their ignorance of the way the world actually is, and of the purposes of the creator. Death never was the creator’s intention; therefore, he implies, death will not have the last word. The creator has made us for incorruption (aphtharsia, an important word for Paul as well), making us in the image of his own eternity.¹⁵² This brings the writer to the point where he can disclose what is in fact the case. The righteous, though they may have been killed by the wicked, have not, as the wicked suppose, disappeared for ever. At present they are at peace, in the hand of god, away from all possibility of torment. This has brought us back to the famous passage quoted above (3:1–4), which continues with a reflection on how Israel’s god tests the righteous like gold in a furnace, and accepts their suffering and death as a sacrificial burnt offering (3:5–6). But the writer is not content with drawing attention to the present state of the ‘righteous’. He wants his readers to focus on what is going to happen next.

This is where, in my judgment, the most serious misreadings of the text have occurred.¹⁵³ Wisdom 3:1–10 offers a two-stage description of what happens after the death of the ‘righteous’: a story in which the present existence ‘in the hand of god’ is merely the prelude to what is about to happen:

⁷ And at the time of their visitation they will shine forth,

and run about like sparks in the stubble.

⁸ They will judge nations, and rule over peoples,

and the Lord will be their king for ever.

⁹ Those who trust in him will understand truth,

and those who are loyal and faithful will remain with him in love;

for his grace and mercy are upon his chosen ones.¹⁵⁴

¹⁰ But the ungodly will receive their reward according to their own reasonings,

because they disregarded the righteous, and rebelled against the Lord.¹⁵⁵

It should be clear that verses 7–10 are describing a further event which follows upon the state described in verses 1–4.¹⁵⁶ The passage is not simply a second, parallel description, a reinterpretation.¹⁵⁷ After all, the ‘souls’ in verse 4 still have a ‘hope full of immortality’; this implies that they have not yet fully attained to it. The mainstream reading of the passage has not, in fact, taken seriously enough the writer’s own polemic against death itself (1:12–16; 2:23–4), based firmly on the typical Jewish belief in the goodness of the created world (1:14), a point which is reiterated at the end of the book when creation itself comes to the aid of the Israelites as they escape from Egypt.¹⁵⁸ There is always the danger that commentators will agree with the wicked in making an alliance with death—a position adopted unwittingly, it seems, by Alan Segal, when, intending to summarize 3:1–4, he says that there is here ‘no obvious end of time with a judgment’ (there would have been, had he continued a few verses further) and, tellingly, that ‘there is no remedy for death, in that no one returns from it.’¹⁵⁹ That, of course, is what, according to the writer, the wicked have been saying (2:1–5); the present passage is written, not to support that point of view, but to refute it. Clearly, if exegesis stands the text on its head like this, something has gone badly wrong. Segal declares that the work ‘uses a Greek notion of immortality in describing the more traditionally Jewish notion of resurrection for martyrs’.¹⁶⁰ I shall now argue that the work does describe resurrection, and that any Greek borrowing (which after all pervades all Judaism throughout the period) is held firmly within this essentially Jewish notion. ‘Immortality’ is pressed into service, in fact, to enable the picture of resurrection to attain clarity.

To return for a moment to the picture of the righteous, with their souls safe in the hand of the creator god (3:1–4). They seemed to the unrighteous to have died, says the writer; the sinners, after all, have declared their belief that death is the end of everything (2:1–5), and this contrast between appearance and reality is noted elsewhere in both pagan and Jewish writings.¹⁶¹ The reality, though, is that the righteous have come through a time of fierce testing, through which their god has regarded them as a sacrificial offering.¹⁶² Now they are at peace. Their hope is for immortality, a deathless life to which they look forward.¹⁶³ Though there are some puzzles here, the author clearly believes, as a general point, that the soul is not naturally immortal, but can attain immortality through obtaining wisdom.¹⁶⁴

The end of the story, though, only now comes into view. Verses 7–10 describe a further event: the future status of the righteous.¹⁶⁵ We must take this step by step; the case is not cumulative, since the logic of the entire passage hinges on this reading, but the details add considerable weight to the narrative structure.

‘The time of their visitation’ (v. 7) clearly refers to an event still in the future.¹⁶⁶ Within the book, ‘visitation’ (episkope) is a regular word for a day of judgment on which the creator will condemn the wicked and vindicate the righteous. This is the moment which the righteous had spoken of, causing the wicked to mock, and to put them to the test (2:20). It is referred to again a few verses after the present passage (3:13), and then once more in the immediate setting (4:15)¹⁶⁷ and twice later in the book (14:11; 19:15). On each occasion it refers to a divine ‘visitation’ through which justice will be done, whether positively or negatively. The word is frequent in the LXX, with the same range of meaning;¹⁶⁸ the New Testament offers two examples of the word in this sense, both striking.¹⁶⁹ When evildoers, especially idolators, act boastfully and wickedly, there will eventually be a ‘visitation’ in which God will put things to rights. In the present context, the point is that verse 7 cannot be reinterpreting the events of verses 1–4 from another point of view. It must be adding a new point: that, after a time of rest, something new will happen to the righteous.

But what is this ‘something new’? They will ‘shine forth’, declares the writer, ‘and run like sparks through the stubble’. This, too, cannot be assimilated to 3:1–4. It is not simply suggesting that, in their post-mortem state, the souls of the righteous have become like stars. It is not a reference to ‘astral immortality’.¹⁷⁰ As in Daniel 12:3, what is described here is not the state upon which the righteous enter immediately after death. Rather, it is the glorious, prestigious new condition in which they will reappear upon the earth, ruling and judging the nations. The word for ‘they will shine forth’ (analampsousin) is very close to the Theodotion version of Daniel 12:3 (eklampsousin), and the image is similar to passages in I Enoch where resurrection is certainly in view.¹⁷¹ The rare Greek verb analampo does indeed mean ‘shine forth’, and can be used of the shining of the sun; but it is also used metaphorically to mean ‘flame up’, as of envy, or ‘blaze up’ with enthusiasm. In one interesting passage, Plutarch uses it of Brutus ‘reviving,’ ‘coming to himself’.¹⁷² This, I suggest, is something like the required sense here. The righteous, whose souls are presently in the hands of their maker, have not yet attained the ultimate goal. At the time of their ‘visitation’ they will ‘revive’, and attain the same kind of glory as the ‘wise’ in Daniel 12:2–3 (which, as most agree, stands closely behind Wisdom 2–3); in other words, they will be set in authority over the created order. This is at once confirmed in the following verses. Indeed, the coherence of the whole sequence of thought, read this way, provides a strong argument in its favour.

‘Running like sparks through the stubble’ does not evoke some kind of astral or celestial bliss or glory, but rather speaks of judgment, as in Isaiah 5:24 and Obadiah 18.¹⁷³ The image thus prepares us for the next verse, in which the righteous will judge nations and rule over peoples, taking on the role marked out for the eschatological people of YHWH in (for instance) Daniel 7:22, Sirach 4:15 and 1QpHab 5:4. The whole point is that this is not happening at the moment, i.e. in the time described in 3:1–4; at the moment, the righteous seem to be lost and gone, and the wicked are celebrating their disappearance; but they will return as the masters of the world. This is more or less the same image that we find in the royal Psalms such as 72 and 89:19–37, and in such prophetic passages as Isaiah 11:1–10. We are thus not surprised when, at the equivalent point in the larger narrative, the righteous are given kingly crowns and diadems (Wisdom 5:15). This is familiar ground, not least from the Danielic picture of the suffering ‘saints of the most high’ who receive the kingdom and judge the nations.

We are, in fact, in the middle of what we might call ‘kingdom-of-god’ theology, in the classic apocalyptic mode.¹⁷⁴ If Wisdom 3:8b had not referred explicitly to Israel’s god becoming king, we might have been tempted to use the phrase ourselves as a summary of the drift of the whole passage. ‘The Lord will be their king’, or ‘the Lord will reign over them as king’, for ever. This sends us back once again to a long biblical tradition in which YHWH’s coming kingdom will mean, very explicitly, the overthrow of the wicked, especially the pagan nations, and the vindication of the righteous, which normally means Israel.¹⁷⁵ The reign of YHWH will be universal, and universally effective for justice against evildoers and vindication of the righteous. That is what the present passage is about, as verse 10 makes abundantly clear.

This means that 3:9 cannot simply refer to the blissful state, abiding in God’s loving presence, which has already been referred to in 3:1 and 3:3. It is a new moment in the story, especially if the longer reading of v. 9 is accepted.¹⁷⁶ The entire sequence of thought is in fact spelling out, making more precise, what we find again and again in the book of Daniel, reaching its climactic statements in chapter 7 and in 12:1–3. The links between Wisdom 2–3 and Daniel have often been noted, but this lesson has seldom been drawn out as it should have been; similarly, the links to Isaiah 53 should by now not only be clear, as many have suggested, but should be allowed their full weight.¹⁷⁷ The present passage does not mention the word ‘resurrection’—perhaps because the author really does want to address an audience which will include pagans, and he knows full well that ‘resurrection’ denotes something that all pagans firmly deny.¹⁷⁸ But that it teaches the same as Daniel does about the ultimate fate of God’s people there should now be no doubt.

When the judgment scene reappears in 4:16–5:23, after the ‘aside’ about the behaviour of the wicked and the righteous (3:11–4:15), we have once more a clear sense of being on the ground marked out by Daniel and the later apocalyptic writers. The wicked, who are at present mocking the righteous, both living and departed, will have to face the consequences of their deeds and words. The righteous, whom they thought dead and gone, will confront them once more, since they will ‘stand with great confidence’ in the presence of their oppressors; the word ‘stand’ (stesetai) does not by itself indicate resurrection, but it is closely cognate with the word that would have done (anastasis), and since the point is that formerly dead people are now, surprisingly, confronting and judging the wicked, it is safe to say that resurrection is what is meant.¹⁷⁹ The scene is linked with the earlier one not least by the puzzlement of the wicked at discovering that the righteous really are the children of the creator god.¹⁸⁰ The wicked then turn out to be insubstantial, like wind or smoke; they have embraced the pagan way, and the pagan fate has come upon them.¹⁸¹ The righteous, meanwhile, are rewarded with crowns and diadems, because YHWH will do what he promised in Isaiah 59:17–18, namely, putting on his armour and winning the decisive victory. Interestingly, creation itself will join in the battle on the side of righteousness (5:20), as it will in the retold Exodus narrative later in the book. There is no suggestion that all this is what is ‘really’ going on while the souls of the righteous are in God’s hand, out of sight; on the contrary, the logic of the entire narrative, in which the wicked (having thought they had seen the last of the righteous) are confronted with them back again, insists that it is a further stage, a new moment of decisive judgment, a ‘visitation’ from God.

What then of the other passages, further on in the book, which assert the immortality of the soul, and perhaps a more Platonic view of the body? It does appear that in chapters 8 and 9 the author, meditating on Wisdom and urging his readers to seek her, does use expressions that have more in common with Philo than with the biblical tradition. Wisdom 8:13 speaks of Wisdom conferring immortality. In 8:19–20 the writer (speaking in the mouth of Solomon) speaks of a good soul falling to his lot, and then at once corrects himself: ‘or rather, being good, I entered an undefiled body’. Some have supposed that this was an allusion to the theory of transmigration.¹⁸² Others have suggested that the writer over-corrected, and did not intend verse 20 to be taken strictly as it sounds.¹⁸³ Certainly the mention of an ‘undefiled’ body sits uncomfortably alongside 9:15, which states that ‘a perishable body weighs down the soul, and this earthy tent burdens the thoughtful mind’—a sentence which readers of Paul will find interestingly familiar from 2 Corinthians 4:16–5:5.¹⁸⁴ But the main contrast does not seem to be the Platonic one between an immortal soul and a dispensable body; rather, the problem—as with Paul—is that the present body is ‘perishable’, doomed to die. To complain about such a body is not to long for a disembodied existence, but rather for a body worthy of the inner life that is already there. If we take seriously what was said about death in the first three chapters, it should be clear that, unless the writer has changed his mind quite drastically, death, which for a Platonist would be a good thing to be warmly welcomed, freeing one from the nuisance and evil of a material body, is to be regarded as an enemy, an intruder into God’s good world. Wisdom 8 and 9, however, no doubt in implicit dialogue with the same world of thought as Philo, has certainly used expressions which by themselves could be taken in various different ways. This is not true, though, of 16:13, which picks up the biblical emphasis that YHWH is the one who truly has the power of life and death; he brings mortals down to the gates of Hades and back again.¹⁸⁵ This is again a different point, but emphasizes the strong Jewish belief in YHWH as the Lord of creation.

The book reaches its denouement in the great retelling of the Exodus in chapters 16–19. Here at last we see where it has all been going, what the scenes between the wicked and the righteous were pointing towards. The Egyptians hold the Israelites in their power (17:2), but the plagues come upon them, while for the Israelites there is light and protection (18:1–4). This corresponds, more or less, to 3:1–4 within chapters 1–5. And this, too, is but the prelude to the final scene, when Israel’s god judges the Egyptians and rescues the Israelites, bringing death on the former but not on the latter (18:5–13). It is this that makes the Egyptians declare that Israel really is god’s child after all (18:13).¹⁸⁶ Meanwhile, the created world, which is not a gloomy, evil place, as in Platonism, but is the good creation of the good creator, as in 1:14, fights on Israel’s side. It renews itself, behaving in unexpected ways, and enables the liberation of YHWH’s people to take place despite all the forces ranged against them.¹⁸⁷

Finally, we must enquire about the implicit setting of this remarkable book. Though certainty is impossible, I agree with Winston and others who have urged that it be read as a coded message both to Israel and her potential or actual persecutors in a time of danger and distress. The god who acted at the Exodus to rescue Israel from the pagan Egyptians can and will do so again. Death, the greatest weapon of the tyrant, is an intruder in the creator’s world, and YHWH has it in his power to overcome it and not only restore the righteous to life but install them as rulers, judges and kings.

It may not be possible at this remove, and without new evidence, to decide whether the implied opponents, from the ‘wicked’ in the early chapters to the Egyptians in the closing scenes, are the pagan Egyptians of the writer’s day (assuming for the sake of argument that he lives in Egypt, possibly in Alexandria), or the Romans, or simply the pagan world in general.¹⁸⁸ But we should not screen out the political dimension from the book, which after all announces right at the start its intention of addressing the world’s rulers (1:1), and returns to the theme when introducing the central section (6:1–11). Just as scholars have recently been rediscovering the political implications of Paul’s writings, so now it may be time to read Wisdom not simply as a philosophical treatise but as a coded warning to would-be pagan oppressors of the Jews, and as a coded encouragement to Jewish readers, urging them to stand firm and trust their god for eventual vindication.¹⁸⁹ If we think of the Maccabaean crisis, and the very different ways it was used in subsequent writing; of the Roman takeover in 63 BC, and the reflection of that in various works; of the turbulent events in Palestine, Egypt and elsewhere in the first half of the first century AD; and of the awful catastrophe of AD 70 itself—then it will not be difficult to imagine situations in which the book would be read, and read eagerly, not as a cool, detached essay about how to gain immortality through the pursuit of Wisdom, but as an exciting and dramatic call to courage and perhaps even resistance. And, once disciplined historical imagination has got that far, it is only a short step to suppose that this was what the writer intended.

We can, then, confirm and strengthen the proposal of Puech, Gilbert and others. The Wisdom of Solomon certainly does teach ‘immortality’, but it is (a) an immortality which is attained through wisdom, not innate in a pre-existent soul (leaving 8:19–20 as a remaining puzzle, but not allowing it to veto what the rest of the work, in form and shape as well as content, actually says); and (b), probably more important, an immortality which would ultimately consist not in a disembodied soul but in a renewed bodily life, when at last the soul is given a body to match it (9:15). The time when ‘the souls of the righteous are in god’s hand’ (3:1) is simply the temporary period of rest during which they are looked after, like Daniel going to his ‘rest’, or the souls under the altar in Revelation, until the time when they, like him, rise for their reward, and indeed for their rule over the world.¹⁹⁰ There is no ‘tension’ here between two different doctrines.¹⁹¹ To suggest such a thing is simply to fail to see how the story works, and how those who believe in a final resurrection necessarily also believe in an intermediate time when those to be raised in the future are kept alive not by an innate immortality but by the power and love of Israel’s god.¹⁹² Exactly this sequence, in not dissimilar language to that of chapter 3, is what we find in the near-contemporary Pseudo-Philo (see below).

This in turn leads to a reflection on how the full picture emerged within Judaism. It is unlikely that a quasi-Platonic belief in continuing disembodied existence after death could lead to a belief in resurrection, as Barr suggests; such a move would be cutting off the branch it had just begun to sit on.¹⁹³ Rather, it seems probable that the emerging belief in resurrection (grounded, as we have seen, in the same belief in YHWH as creator as characterized ancient Israel) precipitated further reflection on the continuing identity of the people of YHWH in between bodily death and resurrection. For that task, hellenistic language about the soul lay ready to hand. It was capable of being imported without necessarily bringing all its latent Platonic baggage with it.

Like the martyrs in 2 Maccabees, the ‘righteous’ described in chapters 2–5 are faithful Jews who hold fast to their god in the face of torture and death, and are finally declared to be truly his children through the resurrection, the great event for which the Exodus from Egypt was the prototype. The resonances set up by this theme are of enormous importance not only for understanding second-Temple Judaism in general, but for grasping the heart of its extraordinary mutation, early Christianity.

(vi) Resurrection, in Other Words: Josephus

The statements of Josephus (c. AD 37–100) on the resurrection have frequently been discussed, and are not controversial in the way that the Wisdom of Solomon has been. It will be sufficient here to set out the key passages and draw the relevant conclusions.¹⁹⁴ We begin with passages in which Josephus, so far as we can tell, intends to express his own beliefs.

In the early days of the Jewish revolt against Rome, Josephus, as a young army commander, found himself involved in the fall of Jotapata.¹⁹⁵ Those with him urge him to commit suicide rather than surrender to the Romans.¹⁹⁶ He, however, argues vehemently that suicide is a crime. We receive our life from the creator god, and his gifts ought not to be scorned.¹⁹⁷ Surely you know, he says,

that people who depart from this life in accordance with nature’s law, thus repaying what god had lent them, when the giver wants to claim it back again, win everlasting fame. Their houses and families are secure. Their souls remain without blemish, and obedient, and receive the most holy place in heaven. From there, when the ages come round again [ek peritropes aionon], they come back again to live instead in holy bodies. But when people lay hands upon themselves in a fit of madness, the darker regions of Hades receive their souls; and god, their father, pays back their descendants for the arrogant acts of their parents.¹⁹⁸

A very similar picture, again expounded by Josephus as his own belief, is found in Against Apion. People who live in accordance with the Jewish law, he boasts, do not do so for silver or gold, or for public marks of acclamation. No:

Every person, trusting in the evidence of their own conscience, on the basis of the lawgiver’s prophecies and the strong faithfulness of god, is persuaded that if they observe the laws and, if necessary, are prepared to die for them, god has given them a renewed existence [genesthai te palin], and to receive a new life out of the renewal [ek peritropes].¹⁹⁹

In the first of these passages we have a clear two-stage personal eschatology, just as I have argued in relation to Wisdom 3. First, the souls go to heaven. Then they return, to live in a new kind of body, a holy one. By the phrase ‘when the ages come round again’, literally ‘out of the turning around of the ages’, Josephus does not, I take it, mean to refer either to transmigration in the strict, Platonic sense, nor to the Stoic doctrine of the world being consumed by fire and everything beginning all over again, but to ‘the age to come’ in the normal rabbinic sense.²⁰⁰ Though this has been shortened in the second passage to ‘out of the renewal’ or ‘out of the turning around’, we should not doubt that the same two-age doctrine is what he has in mind. In the second passage, too, Josephus makes the strong claim that belief in resurrection is supported not only by conscience and the faithfulness of God, but by ‘the lawgiver’s prophecies’. As we have seen in the rabbis, and shall see in the New Testament, the question of whether the resurrection was prophesied by Moses himself was at the heart of at least some first-century debate on the subject. Josephus is here adopting a clear-cut Pharisaic position, both on the content of the belief and on its biblical basis. And, as with the Wisdom of Solomon, a belief in resurrection entails, of course, a belief in some sort of continuity between the person who dies and the person who will receive a new body in God’s new age; and this continuity is provided easily enough by a belief in the immortality of the soul. Josephus certainly believed in this, and it stands in no tension, for reasons already given, with resurrection.²⁰¹

When, however, Josephus is describing the official positions of the ‘schools’ or ‘philosophies’, he does his best to make them correspond to the three major schools of greco-roman thought, the Stoic, the Epicurean and the Pythagorean.²⁰² He aligns the Epicureans with the Sadducees, and the Pythagoreans with the Essenes, which means that he wants to be able, for his apologetic reasons, to describe the Pharisaic belief in terms similar to the Stoics. Thus he declares that the Pharisees attribute everything to Fate and to the deity, while humans have the task of co-operating with Fate.²⁰³ When it comes to the soul and the future life,

[the Pharisees] hold that every soul is immortal, but that only the souls of the virtuous pass on into another body, while those of the wicked are punished with an everlasting vengeance.²⁰⁴

Meanwhile the Sadducees, he says, want nothing to do with any of these ideas.²⁰⁵ This again could conceivably mean transmigration or reincarnation, as some indeed have suggested.²⁰⁶ But in the context of the earlier passages we are safe in concluding that Josephus is referring to the doctrine of bodily resurrection, even though using language which by itself would be capable of connoting other views—understandable enough when seeking to communicate with non-Jews, whose age-old disbelief in resurrection Josephus would know well enough. It was not part of his purpose, at this point at least, to make the leading Jewish sect look ridiculous to his readers.²⁰⁷

This tendency, to make the Pharisees appear like a hellenistic philosophical school, is visible again in the equivalent passage in the Antiquities:

They believe that souls have immortal power, and that there are rewards and punishments under the earth for those who have done well or badly in their life. Evil souls receive eternal imprisonment, while virtuous ones have an easy route to a new life.²⁰⁸

Feldman, in his note in the Loeb edition, is right to point out that the doctrine Josephus is describing is unmistakably the Pharisaic belief in resurrection, not (as some have suggested), reincarnation or transmigration.²⁰⁹ That, in describing this belief, he uses language which would remind pagan hearers of those views is quite another thing.²¹⁰ The word for ‘to a new life’, literally ‘to a living again’, is anabioun, cognate with anabiosis in 2 Maccabees 7:9, which certainly refers to the resurrection.²¹¹ However, the idea of rewards and punishments ‘under the earth’, hypo chthonos, is clearly an accommodation to pagan thought-forms, since Josephus earlier said that the righteous go first to heaven and thence to a new life. The main thrust, though—the underlying story-line—remains, as in 2 Maccabees and Wisdom 3, a two-stage personal journey for the righteous at least: first, they go to the place of the dead; then (in this case by an ‘easy passage’), they come into a new mode of life.

This is the view which we should assume lies behind the teaching of the sages on risking death for Israel’s god and the Torah. Josephus describes the learned doctors, obviously Pharisees, egging on the young men to pull down the eagle which Herod had set up at the Temple gate.²¹² Even if this is risky, they say,

it is a noble deed to die for the law of your country, for the souls of those who come to such an end attain immortality, and an everlasting sense of bliss.²¹³

As in Wisdom, we note, such people attain immortality; they do not, so it seems, possess it automatically, as in Plato. The longer version of the same incident in the Antiquities adds a few more elements:

Those who are about to die in order to preserve and safeguard their ancestral way of life regard the virtue they acquire in death far more profitable than the pleasure of going on living. For, since they gain eternal fame and glory for themselves, they will be praised by those alive at the moment, and will leave the continuing memorial of their lives to subsequent generations. Moreover (said the teachers), even people who live lives free of danger cannot escape the chance of death. Those who strive for virtue, then, do well to accept their fate with praise and honour when they depart this life. For death comes much more easily to those who risk danger for an upright cause; and, at the same time, they win for their children, and their surviving male and female relatives, whoever they may be, the benefit of the renown they have won.²¹⁴

If this was all we had to go on, we would never suppose Josephus was thinking about resurrection; but from all we know of the incident concerned, and the virtual certainty that the ‘doctors’ in question were Pharisees, we cannot doubt that the actual speeches were far more reminiscent of the mother’s words to the seven sons in 2 Maccabees, rather than, as here, the sort of thing Greek or Roman teachers might say to people who were about to act, and probably die, in a noble cause.

That is, in fact, what is going on. Throughout his work, Josephus is trying to explain to his audience that the mainstream Jewish teachers, the ‘schools’, were really philosophers, and that it was a different group, the ‘fourth philosophy’, who were to blame for the disasters that had befallen his countrymen. They were the revolutionaries, the brigands, the wild and lawless men who pulled down the national life into the vortex of their own crazy dreams.²¹⁵ Since, on his own showing, a large number of his fellow Jews were caught up in this movement, he has his work cut out to narrow down the field and find a small group to name and shame in this way, but he does his best.

We should not be surprised, then, that when the arch-ringleader of the revolutionaries, Eleazar, the leader of the Sicarii on Masada, makes his last great speech, Josephus puts into his mouth quite different views from those set out above. Josephus himself had stayed within the bounds of Judaism; Eleazar will appear as a pagan philosopher. Josephus had spoken strongly against suicide; Eleazar will advocate it:

Life, not death, is man’s misfortune. For it is death which gives liberty to the soul and permits it to depart to its own pure abode, there to be free from all calamity; but so long as it is imprisoned in a mortal body and tainted with all its miseries, it is, in sober truth, dead, for association with what is mortal ill befits that which is divine. True, the soul possesses great capacity, even while incarcerated in the body … But it is not until, freed from the weight that drags it down to earth and clings about it, the soul is restored to its proper sphere, that it enjoys a blessed energy and a power untrammelled on every side, remaining, like God himself, invisible to human eyes. For even while in the body it is withdrawn from view: unperceived it comes and unseen it again departs, itself of a nature one and incorruptible, but a cause of change to the body. For whatever the soul has touched lives and flourishes, whatever it abandons withers and dies; so abundant is her wealth of immortality.²¹⁶

And Eleazar goes on to speak of death in terms of sleep—not to make the point, as in Daniel and the New Testament, that those who sleep may wake again to a new day,²¹⁷ but to celebrate the fact, widely recognized in paganism, that during sleep humans become independent, with new powers of travel, knowledge of the future, and intercourse with divine beings.²¹⁸ Even if we do not go all the way with Morton Smith’s caustic description of this speech as ‘Josephus’ last insult to his dead opponents’, we can certainly agree that it sounds a lot less like a hard-line revolutionary Jewish leader and a lot more like a pagan philosopher.²¹⁹ Josephus is managing simultaneously to distance himself from the revolutionaries and to portray them, too, in their final hours, in a manner that might after all have some appeal to a Roman audience, despite all the trouble they had caused. They were not good Jews; he wants to make that clear; but they may command some respect nevertheless—from their fellow pagans!²²⁰

Josephus, then, is important in three ways for our present purposes. First, his own views, as reported in the first two passages quoted, are significant: he was a highly educated first-century Jew, and we should suppose him typical of many. And the view he espouses is clear. It is a two-age cosmic eschatology, consisting of ‘the present age’ and ‘the age to come’, coupled with a two-stage personal eschatology, in which the righteous soul lives in heaven with Israel’s god after death until, in the age to come, it receives a new body. ‘Resurrection’, while it denotes this final event, connotes not simply this eventual bodily ‘life after death’ as opposed to a non-bodily one; it connotes the process whereby that end is achieved, namely, an initial stage of disembodied rest with Israel’s god followed by some kind of re-embodiment. This re-embodiment, Josephus says, will be into a holy and renewed body—perhaps the closest that we come in non-Christian Judaism to the picture of transformed embodiment we find in Christianity. What is more, this new life has been promised by the Bible, by Moses himself; and the promise is underwritten by the creator’s own power.

Second, Josephus’ description of the Pharisees’ belief is important, when we ‘decode’ his statements and place them alongside what we know of the Pharisees from elsewhere, not least from the subsequent rabbinic writings. As we would have deduced from passages like Acts 23, the Pharisees shared the view of 2 Maccabees and such books as 1 Enoch and 4 Ezra.

Third, Josephus is a good example of the phenomenon I argued for in the Wisdom of Solomon, namely, the way in which the idea of resurrection can be present even when the word is not. He does not use ‘resurrection’, either for his own view or when describing that of the Pharisees; I have suggested that this may be because the word was regularly used in the ancient world to describe something that all sensible pagans (Josephus’ target audience) believed could not, did not, and never would happen. He did not want them to mock either him or those Jewish ‘schools’ of thought he was anxious to commend. That is why his description of the Pharisees’ viewpoint sounds from time to time more like some version of transmigration, a variant on a known pagan possibility, rather than a shocking Jewish innovation.

It is important for understanding early Christian language, and the fresh shaping it received, that we grasp the double point, stated in a preliminary way at the end of chapter 1 and now exemplified by a good many texts. (a) Belief in resurrection is characterized, not necessarily by the presence of the word, but by a two-age cosmic and personal eschatology ending with a new embodiment. Where that story is being told, we have resurrection. (b) The word ‘resurrection’ and its cognates, in Hebrew or Greek, is never used to denote something other than this position. The belief can occur without the word, but never the other way round. ‘Resurrection’ is never a way of re-describing death itself, or of ‘coming to terms’ with it as though it were not after all particularly significant. (Nor, strictly, does it refer to the first stage of the process, but always the second, which brings the first with it as its necessary preliminary.) It is always a way of reaffirming, as does Wisdom 1–3, the goodness of the world, the nature of death as an evil intrusion into it, and the creator’s promise to overcome death by the gift of new bodily life.

(vii) Resurrection at Qumran?

Learning to ‘decode’ Josephus comes in handy when we address the question of whether the Essenes believed in resurrection.²²¹ Josephus indicates that they do not; but Hippolytus, writing in the early third century, says they do (or at least did). The natural reaction to this—that Hippolytus was writing much later, and that Josephus claims to have himself spent time with the sect—should be restrained, precisely because of Josephus’ strategy of presenting the Jewish groups as philosophical ‘schools’, with his description of the Essenes matching the Pythagoreans in various ways.²²² The task of the historian is then to compare these two non-Essene sources with one another, and with the writings from Qumran. The first part of this is easier than the second, and may be done briefly as follows.²²³

We begin with Josephus. After his description of the Essenes’ suffering and martyrdom during the revolt against Rome, he explains their cheerful bravery thus:

For it is a fixed belief of theirs that the body is corruptible and its constituent matter impermanent, but that the soul is immortal and imperishable. Emanating from the finest ether, these souls become entangled, as it were, in the prison-house of the body, to which they are dragged down by a sort of natural spell; but when once they are released from the bonds of the flesh, then, as though liberated from a long servitude, they rejoice and are borne aloft. Sharing the belief of the sons of Greece, they maintain that for virtuous souls there is reserved an abode beyond the ocean, a place which is not oppressed by rain or snow or heat, but is refreshed by the ever gentle breath of the west wind coming in from the ocean; while they relegate base souls to a murky and tempestuous dungeon, big with never-ending punishments.

The Greeks, I imagine, had the same conception when they set apart the isles of the blessed for their brave men, whom they call heroes and demigods, and the region of the impious for the souls of the wicked down in Hades, where, as their mythologists tell, persons such as Sisyphus, Tantalus, Ixion, and Tityus are undergoing punishment. Their aim was first to establish the doctrine of the immortality of the soul, and secondly to promote virtue and to deter from vice; for the good are made better in their lifetime by the hope of a reward after death, and the passions of the wicked are restrained by the fear that, even though they escape detection while alive, they will undergo never-ending punishment after their decease.

Such are the theological views of the Essenes concerning the soul, whereby they irresistibly attract all who have once tasted their philosophy.²²⁴

The Essenes ‘attract all’, do they? All, it seems, except Josephus himself, since he says that he followed the discipline of the sect for a while before moving on—though as he claims to have done the same with the Pharisees and Sadducees, and then to have spent three years with the ascetic Bannus, all before the age of nineteen, we may doubt whether he knew quite as much about it all as he likes to make out.²²⁵ The flourish at the end of the paragraph, together with the double mention of ‘the Greeks’, and the frequent allusions to classical works and beliefs such as we studied in chapter 2, indicate well enough what he is doing: he is projecting on to the comfortably blank screen of the Essenes (blank so far as his readers are concerned) the beliefs of post-Platonic Hellenism, not least those handed down by the Pythagoreans. But any student of the Dead Sea Scrolls, reading this account, would be forced to come to the conclusion that either the Essenes did not write the Scrolls after all, or that the documents dealing with the topics Josephus mentions have yet to come to light (perhaps they are still in a basement cupboard in Jerusalem or Harvard?), or that Josephus was making it all up in the service of a quite different agenda. Since the last suggestion is the one most commonly adopted, that opens the way for a reconsideration not only of Hippolytus’ evidence but also, of course, for a closer examination of the Scrolls themselves.

In fact, there are two indications within Josephus’ own accounts that he, too, knew of a different Essene viewpoint. In the passage immediately prior to the one quoted at length above, he says something which could reflect a view more like that of 2 Maccabees:

Smiling in their agonies and mildly deriding their tormentors, they cheerfully resigned their souls, confident that they would receive them back again.²²⁶

The final phrase reads hos palin komioumenoi, ‘as those about to receive them again’. This is the same verb, in a similar phrase, as we find twice in the famous passage in 2 Maccabees 7. The third brother declares that he got his tongue and hands from God, and hopes to get them back again from him (tauta palin elpizo komisasthai). The mother urges the youngest son willingly to accept death, so that in God’s mercy she may get him back again (komisomai se) along with his brothers.²²⁷ The way Josephus has put it, it looks as though the Essene martyrs are saying the same thing the other way round: they are happy to have their souls taken away, because they believe that they will receive them back again. This implies, totally against the grain of the following section, that the individual consists primarily of the body, which will be deprived of its animating soul for a while but will then receive it back again. My guess—it can only be that—is that Josephus was here echoing, whether consciously or otherwise, the language either of 2 Maccabees or of similar martyrological texts now lost to us, and is providing evidence, albeit oblique, that the Essenes did in fact face death at the hands of the Romans with a very similar belief to that with which the seven brothers faced death at the hands of Antiochus Epiphanes.²²⁸

This may perhaps be strengthened by the second hint, though here again certainty is impossible. It is usual to refer to the brief account of Essene belief in the Antiquities as if it simply repeated what was said at more length in the War, but there is a hint of something else besides. In Feldman’s translation, the passage reads:

[The Essenes] regard the soul as immortal and believe that they ought to strive especially to draw near to righteousness.²²⁹

But the final phrase has always been recognised as problematic.²³⁰ It reads perimacheton hegoumenoi tou dikaiou ten prosodon, literally ‘considering the prosodos of righteousness to be worth fighting for’. The word prosodos certainly can mean ‘approach’, but it can also mean ‘payment’, ‘return on investment’, and does so in some classical philosophical texts.²³¹ Several interpreters have taken it in this sense, so that the sentence means ‘they believe that the future rewards of righteousness are worth striving for’—which looks like a way of referring not simply to a blissful disembodied immortality, though that would still be possible, but to a more solid ‘reward’ in the sense of resurrection. Feldman has to work hard, in a long note, to explain why he has translated it in the other sense, especially since it would be more natural, in Greek, to say prosodon pros to dikaion if one meant ‘to draw near to righteousness’. Feldman relies, in fact, rather heavily on the assumed beliefs of the Essenes as reconstructed in the early days of Scrolls scholarship.²³² Since this question should now be regarded as at least open (see below), the balance of probability in my judgment tilts towards regarding this phrase as indicating an Essene belief in future post-mortem rewards. Once again, we should not be beguiled into the old antithesis of ‘immortality’ versus ‘resurrection’; for a future resurrection to happen, there needs to be continuity between the present life and the future one, and, as in the Wisdom of Solomon, one obvious way of describing this continuity is by using the language of the ‘soul’. I suggest, therefore, that despite Josephus’ ‘official’ account in War Book 2 of a thoroughly hellenized Essene belief in a future disembodied bliss, even he may include tell-tale hints of a different view.

That different view might well, then, be the one set out by Hippolytus:

Now the doctrine of the resurrection has also derived support among them; for they acknowledge both that the flesh will rise again, and that it will be immortal, in the same manner as the soul is already imperishable. And they maintain that the soul, when separated in the present life, [departs] into one place, which is well ventilated and lightsome, where, they say, it rests until judgment. And this locality the Greeks were acquainted with by hearsay, and called it ‘Isles of the Blessed.’ And there are other tenets of these which many of the Greeks have appropriated, and thus have from time to time formed their own opinions … Now they affirm that there will be both a judgment and a conflagration of the universe, and that the wicked will be eternally punished.²³³

Hippolytus, of course, is no more ‘neutral’ than Josephus. His own agenda, in this passage and elsewhere, is to suggest that everything worthwhile that was believed by the Greeks had been learned from the Jews in the first place. Thus, whereas Josephus is treating the Essenes as a Greek philosophical school, Hippolytus is treating them as a source of Greek wisdom. He seems to be simultaneously aware of Josephus’ account (Josephus was after all read more by Christians than by Jews in Hippolytus’ day) but firmly correcting it: the ‘Isles of the Blessed’ are a temporary resting-place where the immortal soul waits to receive its newly immortal body.²³⁴ The notion of ‘immortal flesh’ only sounds strange to ears accustomed to the siren voices that insist on a strict disjunction between immortality and resurrection;²³⁵ Paul speaks of the dead being ‘raised incorruptible’, and Hippolytus was of course roughly contemporary with Tertullian, who insisted strongly on ‘the resurrection of the flesh’.²³⁶ All in all, it seems preferable to conclude, with Puech, that Hippolytus reflects the true state of affairs here at least more accurately than Josephus, whether or not he has introduced various errors on the way.²³⁷

I conclude that the external evidence about the Essenes, reading between the lines of the two main sources, points firmly in the direction that they believed (like the Pharisees, and like the author of Wisdom) in the righteous at least having souls that survived bodily death. At the same time, the evidence points, less firmly but with a definite possibility, towards a belief in a new bodily life the other side of a period of temporary disembodiment; in other words, to a two-stage personal eschatology. We must now test this against the evidence of the Scrolls themselves.

All students of the Scrolls, and of the question of life after death in second-Temple Judaism, are massively indebted to Émile Puech, whose two-volume work on Essene beliefs about the future will remain a standard text for a long time to come.²³⁸ Though disagreements will persist, we are safe in concluding that if any of the existing Qumran texts carry any scent of resurrection, Puech will have sniffed it out and brought it to light. We need not, therefore, repeat his exhaustive survey of all possible evidence, and can simply focus on the three key texts upon which his case principally rests.²³⁹

The best known of these is the striking prediction in 4Q521:

The heavens and the earth will listen to his Messiah, and none therein will stray from the commandments of the holy ones. Seekers of the Lord, strengthen yourselves in his service! All you hopeful in your heart, will you not find the Lord in this? For the Lord will consider the pious and call the righteous by name. Over the poor his spirit will hover and will renew the faithful with his power. And he will glorify the pious on the throne of the eternal kingdom. He who liberates the captives, restores sight to the blind, straightens the crooked. And for ever I will cleave to the hopeful and in his mercy … And the fruit will not be delayed for anyone. And the Lord will perform marvellous acts such as have never been, as he said; for he will heal the wounded and will make the dead live, he will bring good news to the poor, he will lead … and enrich the hungry …

… see all the Lord has made: the earth and all that is in it, the seas and all they contain, and all the reservoirs of waters and torrents … those who do what is good before the Lord … like these, the accursed. And they shall be for death … he who gives life to the dead of his people. We shall give thanks and announce to you … of the Lord, who …²⁴⁰

This tantalizingly fragmentary text speaks of the work of the coming Messiah, and does so in language not dissimilar to Matthew 11:2–6/Luke 7:18–23, with obvious echoes of biblical prophecies.²⁴¹ The prediction that the Messiah will make the dead live (line 12 of fragment 2, italicized in the first extract) does not seem to be a prophecy of eventual resurrection in the sense intended by Daniel 12, but rather of the sort of actions performed by Elijah and Elisha—and, according to the gospels, by Jesus—in bringing back into the present life some who had just died: a dramatic extension of ‘healing’, in fact. However, the italicized phrase in the second extract reads much more like the standard prayer formula noted above from the Shemoneh Esre: God is praised as the life-giver, the one who will raise the dead.²⁴²

The second pieces of evidence are found in the Hymns:

Then at the time of judgment

the sword of God shall hasten,

and all the sons of his truth shall awake

to overthrow wickedness;

all the sons of iniquity shall be no more …²⁴³

… Hoist a banner,

O you who lie in the dust!

O bodies gnawed by works,

raise up an ensign for (the destruction of wickedness]!

[The sinful shall] be destroyed

in the battles against the ungodly.²⁴⁴

For the sake of thy glory

thou hast purified man of sin

that he may be made holy for thee,

with no abominable uncleanness

and no guilty wickedness;

that he may be one with the children of thy truth

and partake of the lot of thy holy ones;

that bodies gnawed by worms may be raised from the dust

to the counsel of thy truth,

and that the perverse spirit may be lifted

to the understanding which comes from thee;

that he may stand before thee

with the everlasting host

and with thy spirits of holiness,

to be renewed together with all the living

and to rejoice together with them that know.²⁴⁵

It is not clear from the context whether these passages are to be taken metaphorically, as a vivid way of speaking of the coming victory over evil, or literally, as denoting the concrete event of bodily resurrection. But other passages in the earlier poem which speak of the Community as a tree putting down deep roots, growing its branches as an everlasting plantation, covering the world with its shade, watered by the streams of Eden, and so forth, do suggest that here we have an exalted vision of the age to come within which is found a prediction of the dust-dwellers rising to newly embodied life, echoing Daniel 12:2 and perhaps also Job 19:26.²⁴⁶ The idea of the sons of truth awakening and judging the wicked is close to the picture we observed in Wisdom 3:7–8, which in turn sends us to the Aramaic Apocalypse in which God’s people, or perhaps God’s Messiah, will exercise a kingdom ‘like the sparks of a vision’.²⁴⁷ And the second poem we have quoted begins (after the normal opening lacuna) with praise to God because of what he does with ‘dust’.²⁴⁸ These do seem to be straws in the wind, indicating that, if the question came up (not that it seems to have done very often), some at least of the Qumran Community would have agreed with the Pharisees rather than the Sadducees on the question of resurrection.²⁴⁹ However, even if this is so, it is a matter of note that despite the considerable volume of finds the belief in question rates so little mention.

The final passages which may point in the same direction are in the so-called Pseudo-Ezekiel (4Q 385, 385c, 386, 391). The key passage, emerging variously from these fragments, develops the picture of resurrection from Ezekiel 37 as a prophecy of how the true Israelites will be rewarded in the future for their loyalty to YHWH:

I have seen many in Israel, O Lord, who love your name and walk on the paths of justice. When will these things happen? And how will they be rewarded for their loyalty? And YHWH said to me: I will make the children of Israel see and they will know that I am YHWH. And he said, Son of man, prophesy over the bones, and say, May a bone connect with its bone … [the text continues, following Ezekiel 37] … and they will live, and a large crowd of men will rise and bless YHWH of hosts who caused them to live.²⁵⁰

Here there seems to be no question: Ezekiel 37 is being seen, not simply as a metaphor for the return from exile, but as a prophecy of actual resurrection. This is, so far as I know, the earliest post-biblical text to take Ezekiel in this way, anticipating the usage of some of the later rabbis.

It remains the case, of course, that the great majority of the finds from Qumran say nothing whatever about the future fate of the dead, and this must indicate that the question was not a point of contention for the sect as it was for the Pharisees and Sadducees. The Essenes are anxious to rule out all sorts of other Jewish opinions, legal rulings and so on, but they never argue either against those who insist on belief in resurrection or against those who deny it. Where the belief appears, it emerges not so much as a topic of controversy, marking the writer out against opponents, but as the natural outgrowth of a belief in the sovereignty of YHWH over all evil, death included. To that extent I agree with Puech: the Essenes’ future hope was an extension, beyond death and into the future world, of their present religious experience.²⁵¹

At the same time, it is important to stress that for Qumran the vision of the age to come, and the life of the blessed within it, was far more splendid than simply a return to something more or less like the present world. ‘All the glory of Adam’ would belong to the redeemed.²⁵² No theory is developed as to what precisely is involved or how it will be accomplished. The main concerns of the sect lie with present purity rather than future destiny.

(ix) Pharisees, Rabbis and Targumim

If the Pharisees were the most popular of the Jewish parties and pressure groups at the turn of the eras, the events of AD 70 left their heirs and successors, the rabbis, with the field to themselves.²⁵⁸ The beliefs and practices they developed in the century or so before the compilation of the Mishnah (roughly AD 200) and the two Talmuds (roughly AD 400) were rooted in earlier thought and life, though they were of course developed to meet new situations and debates. The two crises of AD 70 and 135 brought major changes, as the rabbis adjusted to living in a world where social and political revolution against pagan overlordship had become unthinkable—where crushing defeat of two large and popular revolts had forced a change from a kingdom-focus to a Torah-focus, from (more or less) politics to piety.²⁵⁹ There are signs that this had an effect on what was already a widespread and strongly held belief in resurrection.²⁶⁰

We begin with the earlier period, from the time of the Maccabaean crisis and thereafter. The exchanges between Pharisees and Sadducees which form the backdrop for the debates reported in the early Christian writings, and for the ‘philosophical’ descriptions in Josephus, certainly reflect positions that had been taken up well before the turn of the eras.²⁶¹ The liturgical traditions in which God is praised as the one who gives life to the dead certainly date from this early time. Segal speaks of the ‘innumerable’ references to the resurrection which are found dotted through the Jewish prayer book.²⁶² The second benediction in the Amidah, the Shemoneh Esre, is only one among many; at random, I turn up the concluding service from the liturgy for the Day of Atonement, and find, ‘Thou art also faithful to revive the dead. Blessed art thou, O Lord, who revivest the dead.’²⁶³ We might also note the morning prayer found in the Babylonian Talmud Berakoth 60b, which ends by praising God for ‘restoring souls to dead corpses’, where the word for ‘soul’, neshamah, is not an immortal part of the human being, but is the breath which returns to God upon death and which is then given back to bring about resurrection.²⁶⁴ Returning to the Amidah, the second benediction is mentioned in the Mishnah, which interprets it in terms of ‘the power of rain’; the Talmud later explains this as drawing a parallel between the way rain brings life to the world and resurrection brings life to the dead.²⁶⁵ Nobody, I think, doubts that these prayers, or something like them, take us back to the liturgical life of the late second-Temple period, and hence to the thinking, believing and debating of the period even earlier than that.

Further evidence of this is found in the debates reported from the second century BC, following the dictum of Antigonus of Soko, the first rabbi to be named in the great list in Aboth.²⁶⁶ ‘You should not’, he declared, ‘be like slaves serving the master for the sake of receiving a gift, but like slaves serving the master without any prospect of receiving a gift.’ According to a later tradition, preserved in a double form, two of Antigonus’ pupils, Zadok and Boethos, debated what this might mean, and concluded that it ruled out all doctrines of a future life, especially the idea of a resurrection in which rewards might be given. They became, according to this tradition, the founders of the Sadducees and the Boethians respectively, both denying the future world and the resurrection. This incident, preserved (of course) in rabbinic tradition, indicates what the Pharisees thought they were up against. It also provides a telling illustration of the comparative novelty of resurrection belief; Zadok and Boethos reasoned that if resurrection had been a mainstream teaching from earlier days, Antigonus could not have spoken thus.²⁶⁷

This leads us to the major rabbinic statements of the doctrine of resurrection from the Mishnaic period (AD 70–200). The best known is a warning: those who do not believe in the age to come, and more specifically in the resurrection, will forfeit it:

All Israelites have a share in the world to come, for it is written, The people also shall be all righteous, they shall inherit the land for ever; the branch of my planting, the work of my hands that I may be glorified. And these are the ones who have no share in the world to come: he that says that there is no resurrection of the dead [prescribed in the Law], and he that says the Law is not from Heaven, and an Epicurean. Rabbi Akiba says: Also he that reads the heretical books, or that utters charms over a wound … Abba Saul says: Also he that pronounces the Name with its proper letters.²⁶⁸

The phrase ‘prescribed in the Law’ is missing from several important manuscripts, and probably reflects one strand of debate; clearly there is quite a difference between denying the resurrection altogether and denying that it is taught in the Five Books of Moses (though in practice the same people probably did both).²⁶⁹ Since, however, the section goes on to note the additions of Akiba (early second century) and Saul (mid-second century), we can be sure that the basic list—denial of resurrection, of the god-givenness of Torah, and of moral and spiritual values altogether—is from at least the middle of the first century and probably earlier than that. As Urbach says, the mention of resurrection in this passage indicates, not the beginning of this belief, but ‘the struggle for its acceptance against its opponents’.²⁷⁰ Subsequent passages in the same Mishnah tractate presuppose that the life of the world to come will involve resurrection. Thus, for instance, we find a discussion of whether the men of Sodom and the wilderness generation will ‘stand’ in the judgment, and Eliezer’s telling quotation of 1 Samuel 2:6 to prove that the company of Korah, who went down alive into Sheol, will be brought back again: ‘The Lord kills and makes alive, he brings down to Sheol and brings up.’²⁷¹

The other well-known Mishnaic passage may be a later addition, not being found even in some of the early printed versions:

Rabbi Phineas b. Jair says: Heedfulness leads to cleanliness, and cleanliness leads to purity, and purity leads to abstinence, and abstinence leads to holiness, and holiness leads to humility, and humility leads to the shunning of sin, and the shunning of sin leads to saintliness, and saintliness leads to the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit leads to the resurrection of the dead. And the resurrection of the dead shall come through Elijah of blessed memory.²⁷²

The passage, though extremely stylized,²⁷³ introduces two points of interest for the student of Jewish and Christian thought on the resurrection: the agency of the Holy Spirit in the resurrection, and the activity of Elijah, promised in Malachi 4:5, in bringing about the age to come and thereby also the resurrection of the dead.²⁷⁴ For our purposes, though, it is enough to note that the resurrection is assumed to be the ultimate prize, the reward for a life of holiness and Torah-observance. There is no indication of any serious dissent from this judgment in Pharisaic and rabbinic thought during the final century BC or the early centuries AD.²⁷⁵

The same conclusion may be affirmed, albeit cautiously, from the evidence of practices of the time in relation to death. David Daube has catalogued the ways in which, during the two centuries spanning the turn of the eras, the Pharisees effected far-reaching changes in the methods used to execute those guilty of capital offences. Stoning was moderated; burning was to be done by forcing burning liquid down the throat; strangling was by a particular method; all was in aid of leaving the bone structure intact. The body was important, and its most durable parts, the bones, were to be rescued from destruction. Cremation was avoided for the same reason.²⁷⁶ In the same way, secondary burial, involving the careful preserving, folding and storage of the entire skeleton, was widely practised in the period.²⁷⁷ While this may have been partly due to actual or perceived shortage of space, there is every reason to suppose that belief in the importance of the bones for future resurrection played a significant part.²⁷⁸ In the same way, the evident desire on the part of Diaspora Jews to be buried in Palestine is a pointer to the belief that the resurrection of the dead would take place there.²⁷⁹ This appears, too, in the remarkable theory that was developed, according to which the bones of Jews buried outside the Holy Land would roll through underground tunnels in order to arrive there for the resurrection.²⁸⁰ This seems to be, among other things, a novel way of combining the metaphorical meaning of Ezekiel 37 (return from exile) with a literal reading (bodily resurrection).

Before we move into the later rabbinic discussions, which are revealing in themselves, it is worth pausing to note the shape of the belief that is implied throughout this survey. The resurrection of the dead, though confidently expected, has not yet occurred. The dead, righteous and wicked alike, are still dead. There is room for doubt over whether all of them will in the end be raised; one of the greatest areas of disagreement among both rabbis and Christians is whether all the dead will be raised (with the wicked being raised in order to face their judgment) or whether only the righteous will be raised at all. But there can be no room for doubt that those who believed in the future resurrection believed also that the dead were alive in some intermediate state, place or manner. The language of souls being stored away in cupboards, or dwelling in a temporary Paradise, is as we saw developed in one or two writings of this period; there seems to have been no precision about the exact terminology to be employed, but clearly some kind of intermediate state was as popular a belief as resurrection itself. And—a point that could have saved scholars a lot of trouble—this does not imply anything peculiar in terms of combining ‘resurrection’ and ‘immortality’, of putting together supposedly ‘Jewish’ and ‘Greek’ ideas. This is still a hangover from the old half-truth with which the previous chapter opened. Part of the Pharisaic belief in future bodily resurrection is the belief that some sort of continuing personal identity, however hard it may be to describe, is necessary if the person being raised at the last day is after all to be identical with the person who has died. If that is not the case, the whole theological rationale for resurrection, namely, the reward of justice in the future life, collapses in ruins. The fact that both the major Pharisaic schools maintained some version of the intermediate state is indicated well enough by their debate as to whether, in the case of those who were neither extremely virtuous nor extremely wicked, this state would be pleasant or unpleasant.²⁸¹

The justice of the creator god is, in fact, one of the central tenets that underlie the later rabbinic discussions of the resurrection. These focus on three questions: how will YHWH accomplish it? what will the body be like (clothed or naked; the same or changed)? and, particularly, which texts in the Bible predict it?²⁸²

The question of how YHWH will accomplish resurrection is the subject of a fascinating debate between the Pharisaic/rabbinic schools of Hillel and Shammai, reported in Genesis Rabbah 14:5 and Leviticus Rabbah 14:9.²⁸³ The two schools are debating whether YHWH will make the new body by starting with skin and flesh and firming them up until finally sinews and bones are formed (the opinion of the Hillelites), or whether YHWH will start with the bones (the opinion of the Shammaites) and work outwards from there. The Shammaites, of course, claim Ezekiel 37 on their side, interpreting that passage as the LXX had perhaps already done.²⁸⁴ The Hillelites, more tenuously perhaps, claim Job 10:10, reading the passage firmly in the future tense (‘You will pour me out like milk and curdle me like cheese; you will clothe me with skin and flesh, and knit me together with bones and sinews’).

It is impossible to tell at what period the debate is supposed to have taken place, and it is by no means clear what subtexts, if any, we should listen for in the usual areas of politics or purity. The main difference on the surface seems to be that whereas the Shammaites insist on physical continuity between the previous body and the future one, the Hillelites allow that God will make a totally new creation—since the skin and flesh will of course have corrupted completely—and thus make space for the classic problems experienced by most people who have tried to think through, let alone explain to anyone else, what precisely bodily resurrection entails. What, one is asked, will happen to people who are burnt to ashes and then scattered far and wide? What about those who are dismembered so that their bones now lie hundreds of miles apart? It is not implausible to suppose that the Hillelites, though not weakening the basic Pharisaic emphasis on the bodiliness, the physicality, of the final product, are allowing for the difficult cases to which, as they can perhaps see, the Shammaite position is exposed. But the point for our purposes is precisely that there is no weakening of the emphasis on the eventual physicality of the resurrection body. There is no warrant for saying, as one commentator does, that the Hillelite point of view may be interpreted to be ‘less literalistic and more “spiritual” than the Shammaite position’.²⁸⁵

Other aspects of the question ‘how’ are discussed in the famous passage from the Babylonian Talmud tractate Sanhedrin, 90a—92b. Several parallels or analogies are cited from the natural world to show that, though surprising, the creation of the resurrection body is not to be deemed inconceivable. A brief (no doubt fictitious) dialogue between the Roman emperor and the daughter of Gamaliel II (late first century) is used as a showcase for one such point. The emperor asks how dust can come to life, and Gamaliel’s daughter replies with a counter-question: there are two potters in town, one making pots from water and one from clay; which is superior? The one who makes them from water, replies the emperor. Well, replies the girl, when God creates humans from water, how much the more can he do so from clay.²⁸⁶ This story is followed by another analogy: if flesh and blood can break and repair a piece of glass, how much more can the Holy One repair the flesh and blood that was created by his spirit in the first place.²⁸⁷ The examples then tail off a bit, citing the appearance of moles out of the earth, and of snails which suddenly appear after rain.²⁸⁸

More significant for the reader of the New Testament is the illustration that appears quite often: the resurrection of the body is like the corn rising from the seed. This is regularly employed, as Paul uses it in 1 Corinthians 15, to answer the question: what sort of body will it be? Will it be the same or different? Will it come naked or clothed? A further dialogue is staged, this time between Rabbi Meir (a disciple of Akiba, i.e. mid-second century) and Queen Cleopatra (standing here for a devout enquirer). Meir’s answer is that, as the seed of wheat is sown naked but appears clothed, so the resurrection body will be all the more clothed because it was already clothed when buried.²⁸⁹ The bodies will, though, be recognizable, to the extent that (in one account) those who have suffered wounds or deformities will, to begin with, retain them in order that they can be identified. Once that is done, however, they will be healed.²⁹⁰

The final question, again with implications for the student of early Christianity, is the biblical support that the Pharisees, and then the rabbis, were able to claim. Nobody doubted that Daniel 12 spoke of bodily resurrection; by the first century some at least were reading Ezekiel in that way, though with metaphorical overtones of return from exile still audible as well. But the key question which the Sadducees pressed on the Pharisees (and, it appears, on Jesus), was: can you find resurrection in the Torah itself, in the narrower sense of the Five Books of Moses?²⁹¹

The answer was an emphatic ‘Yes—once you know what you are looking for.’ The main Talmudic discussion (Sanhedrin 90–92) offers plenty of examples. Gamaliel II (late first century) is cited as using Deuteronomy 31:16, where YHWH promises Moses that he will sleep with his fathers and will rise.²⁹² The Sadducees object that it is not Moses who will ‘rise’ in this text, but the people who will ‘rise up’ to do evil, which to us at this remove seems reasonable; but the same text is used by Gamaliel’s contemporary Joshua ben Hananiah and, a century later, by Simeon ben Yohai.²⁹³ In the same passage, Gamaliel rehearses texts from the prophets and writings as well (Isaiah 26, an obvious passage; Song of Songs 7:10, less obvious to us, but speaking of people whose lips move during sleep, which some rabbis interpreted to refer to the lips of a dead teacher moving silently in the tomb when someone quotes his sayings).²⁹⁴ But Gamaliel then returns to Deuteronomy, this time to 11:9 since YHWH swore to the patriarchs that he would give the land to them, not merely to their descendants, the oath could only be fulfilled by their being raised from the dead.²⁹⁵ A slightly different kind of argument is the use of Numbers 18:28 (‘you shall give YHWH’s portion to Aaron the priest’) to indicate that Aaron will be alive again in the future and will receive the offering from the Israelites.²⁹⁶ Other passages from the Five Books that were employed include Numbers 15:31 (the remaining guilt of the offender will be accountable in the world to come); Deuteronomy 32:39 (YHWH declares, ‘I kill and I make alive; I wound and I heal’); and Deuteronomy 33:6 (‘may Reuben live, and not die out’).

Among the more ingenious of the exegeses from other parts of scripture we find Psalm 50:4, where God ‘calls to the heavens above, and to the earth, that he may judge his people’. The soul of the deceased, says the commentator, is presently in heaven, and the body on earth, and for the purposes of judgment God will summon both to come back together.²⁹⁷ This is later in origin, but it well exemplifies the kind of reading that was employed from the Pharisaic period onwards. Exactly the same concern for the rejoining of soul and body for the purposes of judgment is found in the parable of Rabbi Judah in Sanhedrin 91a—b, where the human being is likened to two men working together (a lame man sitting on a blind man’s shoulders in order to steal figs). Neither could have managed it without the other, just as the soul and the body by themselves cannot act responsibly; but God will bring them together again, and judge them as a unity.

The Targums, though again very difficult to date, give some final tell-tale indications of where the emphasis lay in mainstream rabbinic teaching from the late second-Temple period through to the Amoraic period (the time between Mishnah and Talmud).²⁹⁸ The Targumists fastened on to the biblical statements about YHWH ‘killing and making alive’, and interpreted them consistently with a clear ‘resurrection’ meaning.²⁹⁹ The famous line in 1 Samuel 25:29 (‘The life of my lord shall be bound in the bundle of the living under the care of YHWH your God; but the lives of your enemies he shall sling out as from the hollow of a sling’), the first part of which is found in various funerary inscriptions from this period, is interpreted in the Targum in terms of the soul of the departed being kept in the ‘treasury’ (gnz, as in ‘genizah’) of the life of the age to come. In other words, the souls of the righteous are looked after in an intermediate state and/or place until the time of the resurrection, while the souls of the wicked are dispatched to Gehenna or somewhere equally unpleasant.³⁰⁰ In one case the Targum—like Paul in two separate passages—speaks of the trumpet which will sound to wake the dead.³⁰¹ The last mentioned is one of various passages which explicitly link the resurrection of the dead with the return from exile.

One of the more striking Targumic interpretations of a ‘resurrection’ passage is that of Hosea 6:2. Where the Masoretic text has ‘After two days he will revive us; on the third day he will raise us up, and we shall live in his presence’, the Targum has ‘He will revive us for the days of consolation which are to come; on the day of the resurrection of the dead he will raise us and we shall live in his presence’. This is one of several Jewish texts, from the Bible through to the second-Temple period and beyond, which speak of the ‘third day’ as the time when Israel’s god will accomplish his work of salvation and/or resurrection.³⁰²

A further twist is provided where the LXX and Targum make independent but parallel adjustments to the biblical text. In Psalm 1:5, where the Masoretic text declares that the ungodly will not be able to ‘stand’ in the judgment, the LXX declares that they will not ‘rise again’, ouk anastesontai; the Targum, meanwhile, interprets this as ‘shall not be justified’. The parallel of resurrection and justification points to a world of thought which readers of Paul will readily understand.

Finally, one of the most blatant denials of resurrection to be found in the Old Testament, that in Job 14:12–14, has been altered in the Targum, as in the LXX, so that it only denies the future life of the wicked, leaving the way clear for a resurrection of the righteous—which may indeed be mentioned in the Targum on Job 19:25–6, though this passage, like its Masoretic original, is obscure.³⁰³ As with the main rabbinic writings themselves, so with the Targumim; there is no question but that they insist, again and again, on interpreting scripture in the direction of bodily resurrection.

The rabbinic explanations of the resurrection, and biblical proofs for it, show extremely clearly what was and what was not meant by resurrection throughout this period. Resurrection, the ‘making alive of the dead’, was not simply about ‘life after death’; it was about a new, embodied life after ‘life after death’. Nobody supposed that the patriarchs, Moses, Reuben or anyone else had yet been given this resurrection life. The point of demonstrating that there were promises yet outstanding to the patriarchs was that God must be capable of fulfilling them in the world yet to come.

Nor was this ‘making alive’ anything to do with the present religious experience of Israel. All the wonderful literature of Jewish meditation, prayer and mysticism, all the powerful sense of the presence and help of Israel’s god—none of this was taken to mean that the resurrection had occurred; simply that it would do so, because this god was both the creator and the judge. When the Sages of the Herodian period and afterwards saw it as one of their chief tasks to instruct the people about the resurrection of the dead, it was this future bodily renewal that they had in mind.³⁰⁴ And in offering that instruction the teachers seem to have developed, in line with other writings that affirm ultimate resurrection, various ways of talking about an intermediate state, which, though they may sometimes use the language of the ‘soul’, seem more or less innocent of any developed Platonic idea of the soul as an (or the) immortal element of all human beings. Souls that wait in cupboards until the resurrection—or even souls that remain ‘in the hand of God’ during that period—are not the same kind of thing as the pre-existent beings of Plato’s Phaedrus and elsewhere. By the time that early Christianity burst upon an unsuspecting world, both Jewish and Greek, the Jewish belief in bodily resurrection had made its way into the consciousness, not least the Greek-speaking Bible-reading consciousness, of Jews both in Palestine and in the Diaspora. When the New Testament writers spoke of resurrection, both their own and that of Jesus, this is the grid of language-use within which they must have assumed their words made sense.