5. Resurrection in Ancient Judaism: Conclusion

There is much more that could be said (the reader may be surprised to learn) on the after-death beliefs of ancient Judaism. The New Testament, indeed, provides plenty more material which should properly be classified here, and we shall survey it in due course. The conclusion we can now draw ought not to be particularly controversial, though it may seem so to many who have written about Jesus’ resurrection with scant attention to the complete Jewish context—despite the fact that it provides the setting within which the early disciples’ use of the relevant language must be understood.³⁰⁵

There was a wide spectrum of belief in second-Temple Judaism regarding the fate of the dead, both in the short and the long term. By no means all Jews believed in a coming resurrection. Other views were known and (until the disappearance of the Sadducees and the post-70 ascendancy of the rabbis) taught. But there was a strong strand of resurrection belief, growing out of various biblical passages, called forth by the new circumstances of post-exilic Judaism, and expressed in a wide range of texts emanating from right across the second-Temple period and through into the rabbis.³⁰⁶

We begin by reaffirming the preliminary definition with which we began. ‘Resurrection’, with the various words that were used for it and the various stories that were told about it, was never simply a way of speaking about ‘life after death’.³⁰⁷ It was one particular story that was told about the dead: a story in which the present state of those who had died would be replaced by a future state in which they would be alive once more. As we noted at the end of chapter 1, ‘resurrection’ was a life after ‘life after death’, the second of two stages in the post-mortem programme. Resurrection was, more specifically, not the redefinition or redescription of death, a way of giving a positive interpretation to the fact that the breath and blood of a human body had ceased to function, leading quickly to corruption and decay, but the reversal or undoing or defeat of death, restoring to some kind of bodily life those who had already passed through that first stage. It belonged with a strong doctrine of Israel’s god as the good creator of the physical world. It was the affirmation of that which the pagan world denied, as we discovered throughout chapter 2.

We can see this clearly enough if we reflect for a moment on the main metaphorical meaning that ‘resurrection’ possessed in the Old Testament and some subsequent readings. Ezekiel’s dramatic picture of dry bones coming together, being clothed with skin and flesh, and finally being animated by breath, was a rich allegory for the return of Israel from exile. If no ‘return’ of any sort had ever happened, one can just about imagine somebody proposing a reinterpretation: what Ezekiel had in mind, they might say, was that you should learn to feel good about your exile, to discover the life-giving presence of YHWH within Babylon instead. But one cannot imagine too many readers of Ezekiel being taken in by this sort of thing. The point of the whole story, they would say, was that they would return to their land. If that hadn’t happened, the prophecy remained unfulfilled.

This metaphorical meaning of ‘resurrection’, then, retained a concrete referent. We must not allow current usage to mislead us into supposing that ‘metaphorical’ means ‘abstract’.³⁰⁸ Ezekiel, and possibly the original author of Isaiah 26, intended to speak of the literal and concrete return from exile, using the metaphor of corpses coming to new bodily life. They were telling the story of an actual people and an actual land—and an actual god, YHWH, the creator, whose covenant with Israel was so unbreakable, so powerful, that he would act in a new way to restore what had been lost in the exile, namely land, Temple and national life, YHWH was the god of justice, and would not for ever leave Israel to suffer oppression at the hands of the pagans. We can see how this belief sustained the national hope even when, after the geographical ‘return’, Israel remained under foreign domination through the period of the second Temple. ‘Resurrection’, at this metaphorical level, was always a revolutionary doctrine because, by means of the metaphor of the revivifying of corpses, it spoke of the concrete hope of national freedom. The twin doctrines of creation and justice sustained the national hope and, so to speak, kept the metaphor of resurrection alive.

But increasingly, from at least the third century BC (as witnessed by the LXX), the metaphor itself came to life in a new way, precisely (so it seems) through reflection on the suffering of those who withstood the pagans in the hope of national redemption. The book of Daniel bears witness to the emerging, not as we saw of a totally new idea, but of the reaffirmation in a new form of the ancient Israelite belief in the goodness and god-givenness of the created world and of bodily human life within it. By the time 2 Maccabees was written the metaphor has become literal, having now the concrete referent of re-embodiment—getting back hands, tongues, entire bodies—without losing the larger concrete referent of national restoration. Josephus’ description of the Pharisees as a philosophical school may make it look as though their belief in resurrection was simply about ‘what happens to people after they die’, and indeed his language on the subject is so imprecise that at some points it sounds as though he is simply talking about reincarnation, an endless sequence of the soul returning to another body, and then another, and another. Even this makes it clear that he is at least talking about bodies, not simply disembodied souls or spirits. The other writers who (we have argued) speak, however obliquely, about the same basic belief (Wisdom, the Scrolls), are likewise talking about the new world which Israel’s god will make, and the newly embodied human beings—i.e. the righteous—who will inhabit it. This is reflected in the popular-level belief which could generate a remark such as that ascribed to Herod Antipas in the gospels.³⁰⁹ Whatever else he believed about life after death, when he suggested that Jesus might be John the Baptist risen from the dead, he did not suppose that Jesus was a ghost.

This widespread belief in the future resurrection naturally generated a belief in an intermediate state. There were different ways of expressing this: it could even sometimes look fleetingly like a hellenistic, perhaps Platonic, theory of a continuing soul, without (as has often been suggested) strain or contradiction. ‘Resurrection’ entails some kind of belief in continuing post-mortem existence; this need not mean a belief that all humans have an immortal soul in the Platonic sense, since the belief in YHWH as creator which is necessary for belief in resurrection is also a sufficient explanation for the dead being held in some kind of continuing existence, by divine power rather than in virtue of something inalienable in their own being.

As with our survey of pagan views, we can therefore put to this range of material the worldview questions, slanting them towards the fate of the dead within the belief of the mainstream belief in resurrection. Who or what are they? They are, at present, souls, spirits or angel-like beings, held in that state of being not because they were naturally immortal but by the creative power of YHWH. Where are they? They are in the hand of the creator god; or in paradise; or in some kind of Sheol, understood now not as a final but as a temporary resting-place. What’s wrong? They are not yet re-embodied, not least because their god has not completed his purposes for the world and Israel. What’s the solution? Ultimate re-embodiment, which will be caused by YHWH’s power and spirit. What time is it? It is still ‘the present age’; the ‘age to come’ has not yet begun (except, in the case of the Essenes, in the sense of a secretly inaugurated eschatology). This contrasts, of course, not only with the pagan views surveyed in the previous chapter, but with the two other main Jewish options, that of the Sadducees and that of Philo and the others in that category. These worldview questions have their analogue in the stories that we have examined, from the biblical narratives of Ezekiel, Daniel and the others to the stories told by the rabbis, with sundry other key narratives like 2 Maccabees 7 somewhere in between. And they went with equivalent praxis and symbol: from burial customs to the fomenting of revolution, belief in resurrection influenced and energized many concrete aspects of first-century Jewish life. Resurrection was not a strange belief added on to the outside of first-century Judaism. Except for the Sadducees and those who insisted on a final disembodied state, resurrection had been woven into the very fabric of first-century Jewish praying, living, hoping and acting.

Resurrection, therefore, seems to possess two basic meanings in the second-Temple period, with considerable fluidity between them. In each case the referent is concrete: restoration of Israel (‘resurrection’ as metaphorical, denoting socio-political events and investing them with the significance that this will be an act of new creation, of covenant restoration); of human bodies (‘resurrection’ as literal, denoting actual re-embodiment). Nothing in the entire Jewish context warrants the suggestion that the discussion in 1 Corinthians 15 was about ‘resurrection in heaven’,³¹⁰ or that the Jewish literature of the period ‘speaks both of a resurrection of the body and a resurrection of the spirit without the body’.³¹¹ Some Jews speak of eternal disembodied bliss, but this is not described as ‘resurrection’; when ‘resurrection’ is spoken of, it is the second stage in post-mortem life, not the instant destiny upon death. Nothing here, either, would prepare us for the use of ‘resurrection’ to mean ‘that after his crucifixion … Jesus entered into the powerful life of God’ or ‘the passage of the human Jesus into the power of God’.³¹² Despite the protestations of some, ‘resurrection’ was not used to describe the exaltation of Enoch or Elijah.³¹³ ‘Resurrection’ in its literal sense belongs at one point on the much larger spectrum of Jewish beliefs about life after death; in its political, metaphorical sense it belongs on a spectrum of views about the future which YHWH was promising to Israel. Both senses generated and sustained nationalist revolution. The hope that YHWH would restore Israel provided the goal; the hope that he would restore human bodies (especially of those who died in the cause) removed the fear that might have undermined zeal. No wonder the aristocratic Sadducees rejected resurrection. Anyone who used the normal words for ‘resurrection’ within second-Temple Judaism would have been heard to be speaking within this strictly limited range of meaning.

Talk of resurrection, though, remained unspecific about details. The large-scale prophetic pictures of a renewed Israel in a renewed creation were never worked out in details about precise forms of government, in the sociopolitical equivalents of Ezekiel’s astonishingly detailed picture of the rebuilt Temple. The many references to resurrection never describe exactly what the risen body will be like: Daniel declares that the righteous will shine like stars, the Wisdom of Solomon that they will shine forth and run like sparks through the stubble, but the texts that drew on these and similar ideas do not allow us to be clear as to whether this was meant literally (human beings shining like torches) or whether this was an image for world rulership, like the promises of David’s kingdom being like the sun and the moon.³¹⁴ Nowhere do the pre-70 texts discuss how the body will be like, or unlike, the present one. Though by the time of Jesus it appears that most Jews believed in resurrection, there was no clarity as to what precisely it would look like or what sort of continuity and discontinuity there would be with present existence. This, as we shall see, is one of the striking contrasts between mainstream Jewish belief and the virtually uniform early Christian hope.

Of course, the rabbis do discuss, as we have seen, the questions of what and how: will the new bodies be clothed or unclothed? will there be sexual relations in the world to come? will God start with the bones, as in Ezekiel, or with the skin, as in Job? and so forth. It might be tempting to suggest that these questions assume more significance only after the two great disasters of AD 70 and 135—only, in other words, when the dream of political and social independence has disappeared. But this would not be strictly true. Unless we are to adopt an extremely sceptical approach to the traditions about Gamaliel II, for instance, we have to say that these questions were already alive in the first century, however much they may have been emphasized more in the later period. And, as we shall see, they are important for the early Christian movement as well.³¹⁵ But it remains the case that resurrection, in the world of second-Temple Judaism, was about the restoration of Israel on the one hand and the newly embodied life of all YHWH’s people on the other, with close connections between the two; and that it was thought of as the great event that YHWH would accomplish at the very end of ‘the present age’, the event which would constitute the ‘age to come’, ha ‘olam haba. All of this was concentrated, for many Jews, in the stories of the righteous martyrs, those who had suffered and died for YHWH and Torah. Because YHWH was the creator, and because he was the god of justice, the martyrs would be raised, and Israel as a whole would be vindicated.

But nobody imagined that any individuals had already been raised, or would be raised in advance of the great last day. There are no traditions about prophets being raised to new bodily life; the closest we come to that is Elijah, who had gone bodily to heaven and would return to herald the new age. There are no traditions about a Messiah being raised to life: most Jews of this period hoped for resurrection, many Jews of this period hoped for a Messiah, but nobody put those two hopes together until the early Christians did so.³¹⁶ It may be obvious, but it needs saying: however exalted Abraham, Isaac and Jacob may have been in Jewish thought, nobody imagined they had been raised from the dead. However important Moses, David, Elijah and the prophets may have been, nobody claimed that they were alive again in the ‘resurrection’ sense. The martyrs were honoured, venerated even; but nobody said they had been raised from the dead. The world of Judaism had generated, from its rich scriptural origins, a rich variety of beliefs about what happened, and would happen, to the dead. But it was quite unprepared for the new mutation that sprang up, like a totally unexpected plant, within the already well-stocked garden.