Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [150]
If it is true that both Greek and Roman societies from Plato to Plutarch, practically from one end of Greco-Roman philosophy to the other, know of the journey to the heavens, it is also true that the Romans adapted the motif and structure to express some enduring and important thoughts about their government and their rule. It was during the Hellenistic and Roman periods that the fundamental shift of ultimate human reward took place. The shift was only partly based on the notion that the heavens contained the ultimate reward for the righteous, while the underworld contained the punishment for the evil. Along with this moralizing of the pagan afterlife came also a great deal of astronomy, astrology, and cosmology, all of which helped to make plausible a human destiny in the stars.
It is quite possible that Hebrew and oriental thought influenced this pagan synthesis. Eastern astronomy and astrology certainly influenced the cosmology. The earth became the center of an onion of heavenly spheres, usually seen as seven in number, corresponding to the number of respective powers. Whenever Platonic notions are emphasized, the ultimate home of humans can be seen as the realm where the stars and ideas dwell, in the unchanging heavens. So although earthly life is still valued as important for civic duty, some interest applies to the afterlife for the first time in pagan intellectual life. In some way, voyage to the unchanging stars can be seen as a viable alternative to earthly existence. The heavens become the realm of ultimate salvation (soteria, salvatio) in the later Roman world.64
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Second Temple Judaism
The Rise of a Beatific Afterlife in the Bible
FOR WE MUST needs die, and are as water spilt on the ground, which cannot be gathered up again; neither doth God respect any person: yet doth he devise means, that his banished be not expelled from him. (2 Sam 14:14)
Here is the classic King James Version of the advice of the wise woman of Tekoa to David. The first part of the verse is clear and poignant. Our lives are like water spilt on the ground. Life is lost as it is lived; it cannot be recovered. Yet the second phrase of the passage seems more portentous and has been translated, as here, to say something more about God’s rescue of the righteous from the abandonment of death. The word nefesh (soul) occurs in the text in a way that can be capitalized upon by later thinkers. The Hebrew is, in fact, not so much uncertain as part of a difficult argument. In context, it is part of a ruse, planned by Joab, to convince David to allow Absalom to return from exile. The woman seems to mean that King David should be just as lenient as God since, as David has himself judged, God desires the survival of a sole surviving son. Because the situation is parallel to the banishment of Absalom, it is equally an argument for allowing Absalom to return from exile without further punishment, a point which the wise woman immediately presses upon David.
The original meaning is not likely to go beyond the sad realization that everyone passes from God’s sight, mitigated by the comfort that God mercifully can preserve the seed of a family for the next generation. Indeed, the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Bible) points out that God will take the exiled as well. Yet the King James Version, basing itself partly on the Vulgate, translates the passage in a more generalized and a very much more hopeful way. The Vulgate is certainly one major step in the direction of the hereafter. A beatific afterlife is so powerful an incentive in life that once it has entered Christian life, it is hard to imagine that it was not always present in the Hebrew text.1 But it was not.
Furthermore, life after death did not enter Jewish thought immediately after the Jews met the Persians and the Greeks. The right social and historical situation had to arise before