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The Covenant as the Reason for Moral Discernment

SIMILAR STORIES of coming to knowledge are found in Gilgamesh. Enkidu is shown learning from the prostitute, who effects his estrangement from the animals. Adapa is even misled into giving up mortality by a different god’s trick. The Bible has inherited a number of stories from Babylonia and elsewhere, tailoring them to its own task. The Bible, by comparison with Gilgamesh, is not interested nearly so much in the issue of immortality. Instead it emphasizes the issue of coming to moral discernment. It does so because its main themes-one God and covenant-are furthered by this treatment. Monotheism and protection against idolatry lead to the deemphasizing of alternative religions and their possible opponent divinities. There can be no realm of the dead in a monotheistic system, unless that realm is squarely within the power of God.

Even more important, the covenant theme of the Hebrew Bible demands that humans have moral discernment. The covenant is a formal agreement between God and humanity. It demands that human beings enter into the agreement of their own choice. In order to enter the covenant one needs moral discernment. It is absolutely necessary for the task. Thus, the story of Adam and Eve, far from being just the story of how we lost immortality, is more aptly entitled “the story of how we can live well,” having received the critical faculty of moral discernment and thus having evolved the aptitude to obey the covenant.

Notice that the covenant does not promise life after death beyond the commemoration of history and progeny to follow us afterwards. Life is the reward of the covenant, explicitly, not afterlife-certainly not the afterlife of Egypt, Mesopotamia, or Canaan. The Bible’s intuition about life is that it should be lived heroically without illusions of fantasies afterwards and certainly without the disgusting rites that characterize its neighbors’ views. The most obvious winners in this battle are the priests of YHWH who serve in Jerusalem. Their institution and their interpretation of Israelite history are what succeeds when this polemic is successful. The First Temple period may not have witnessed a pure Yahwism but, from the perspective of the later priests living in Second Temple times who redacted the Bible, this was the meaning of the conflicts between Israel and the Canaanites during the First Temple times.

Since we know that ultimately both Judaism and Christianity in its own way develop a notion of the hereafter which is moral and beatific, we need to ask ourselves a naive question: Could it really be that God spent so much time giving His prophets messages of antagonism to the notion of Canaanite afterlife only to reverse Himself later on? Changes in the concept of the afterlife over time argue against taking it literally. But reversals in the idea and existence of afterlife raise skeptical thoughts against the whole enterprise of describing heaven and hell as literal places where we literally go. Instead we must look to more sophisticated notions of the function and structure of the beliefs and defining the work they are designed to accomplish, both in society and in the development of our own consciousnesses.

PART TWO

FROM CLIMATE TO THE SELF

4

Iranian Views of the Afterlife and Ascent to the Heavens

Reconstitution of the Jewish State and Borrowed Institutions

SO FAR WE have traced Biblical traditions of the afterlife in the First Temple period, within its ancient Near Eastern cultural context: Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Canaan. Now we turn to the far more articulated and manifold notions of the afterlife in the Second Temple period. To do so, we must trace the afterlife notions of two more cultures-Persia and Greece-which had an important effect on Second Temple Israel (539 BCE-70 CE). In some sense, the material for the innovative Jewish notions of the afterlife come from Iran and Greece, though Jewish culture tailored the cloth to its own measurements. On the subject