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and by his sword, upon all flesh;

and those slain by the LORD shall be many.

• • •

“For as the new heavens and the new earth

which I will make

shall remain before me, says the LORD;

so shall your descendants and your name remain.

From new moon to new moon,

and from sabbath to sabbath,

all flesh shall come to worship before me,

says the LORD. (Isa 66:1, 12-16, 22-23)

This prophecy begins with God reminding the Jews that he does not need a Temple. Then, it prophesies that Israel will regain its prosperity. God will be like a woman nursing her children, giving Israel suck, a very daring metaphor. Then he will “make their bones flourish like the grass,” an extraordinarily portentious phrase for the notion of resurrection, whose importance has been all but ignored in scholarship. Immediately thereafter, the prophet saw the end of the world; God would protect his righteous and deliver the sinners to perdition. He would come in fiery chariotry with his angelic hosts to accomplish it. Then would come the new heaven and the new earth. Within this passage is the scriptural root of Israelite notions of the resurrection of the dead, though the atmosphere in which it developed was Persian. It took centuries before the root produced a plant-the book of Daniel, in which the concept of bodily resurrection finally flowers.

If there are further Babylonian, Canaanite, and Persian elements to this vision of judgment, they have been so well-incorporated into the historical description of the plight of Israel and the special providence of its God as to be inseparable. This vision serves as the basis for the apocalyptic end of time in which resurrection is promised. But that interpretation developed only in 168 BCE. In that vision, we shall see that the remnant of those who returned, as well as those who remained true to the covenant with YHWH, will serve as the community of those who are saved, just as in the paradisial vision of the Persian Empire.

5

Greek and Classical Views of Life After Death and Ascent to the Heavens

IN CONTRAST TO our investigations of previous cultures, there is no dearth of evidence about the Greek afterlife. Unlike our records of the fertile crescent, we have a vast body of extant Greek literature. There are, to be sure, important and nagging lacunae in our knowledge, especially at the beginnings, and there is a great deal more about ordinary life that we would like to know. But by comparison to the textual evidence of ancient Near Eastern cultures, we have ample amounts of information about Greek thinking on life after death as well as important information about customs and changes in Greek sensibilites over the centuries.

When it comes to Greek notions of the afterlife, we have whole categories of evidence: not the least of which are drama and epic, travel narratives, essays, philosophy, and religious writings, not to forget our considerable archeological remains. Any plan of attack in dealing with Greco-Roman evidence must be even more selective: to look briefly at the most important phenomena in Greek culture and then pick those things which most affect the citizens of Judea. Foremost among this will be Plato’s notions of the afterlife, which penetrated Jewish culture deeply. Other aspects of Greek culture are also important because they form part of the great multicultural Hellenistic syncretism in which Judaism lived.

Greek culture and the religious texts it produced continued over millennia and spread to many different lands. Greek views of life after death underwent considerable evolution and variation. But even from the beginning, the Greeks had several different and conflicting views of death and the final disposition of the soul. After the development of the philosophical schools, varied and often conflicting conceptions of life after death continued within the culture, forming a not altogether logical amalgamation of different views. These broad views have been surveyed by an imposing number of different scholars; their very good and thorough work