Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [165]
The notion of life after death developed in the land of Israel to explain the martyrdom of the righteous for their religious views. The original idea of resurrection was possibly borrowed from Zoroastrianism. But that hardly describes its essence, structure, or function in Israelite life. The point is: The doctrine of judgment and rewards and punishments in the afterlife was first articulated because it was necessary that the doctrine develop to help people understand the implications of their faith. Wherever the idea comes from, it was tailored to Jewish sensibilities by the time it appeared in Jewish culture. It was there to resolve an important moral, political, and social issue in the time period of Daniel. We will need to return to these texts many times in coming chapters, to fully explore the implications of these short and puzzling texts.
Babylonian Influence, the Enoch Legends, and the Son of Man
BESIDES ZOROASTRIAN and continuing Canaanite influences, ancient Mesopotamian influences are also much in evidence in Second Temple times. First exiled to Babylon by force and then returned to the land of Israel as a part of a great Persian world empire, the Jews were as able as anyone on earth to appreciate the importance of Babylonian wisdom. Babylonian traditions are absorbed in many different parts of the Bible and in various extrabiblical works. Like all the other traditions that were borrowed into Judaism, they were adapted specifically to Hebrew purposes. The reason that these traditions show up in the Enoch literature is apparently due to the Maccabees themselves. They caused a schism in the priesthood. When they took over the role of high priest as well as king, they alienated a group of priests who retreated to the desert and eventually set up the community which used the Dead Sea Scrolls as its library. The displaced or separatist priests, the Zadokites who were actually the founding priesthood of the Second Temple, developed their own traditions, which we see in the Enoch literature.21
The Biblical figure of Enoch in Genesis 4 and 5 seems to parallel the Mesopotamian traditions of Enmeduranki and Adapa, wise men who traveled to heaven and founded divinatory priesthoods and ecstatic prophetic guilds, as we have seen in previous chapters. The receipt of these notions in Israel appears in a few verses about Enoch in Genesis, the visions in Daniel 7-13, the enormous pseudepigraphical literature we know as 1 Enoch, 2 Enoch, 3 Enoch, and many of the new pseudepigraphical works we find in the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Enoch literature itself evinces sure signs of composite authorship, with each book sometimes containing five or six different independent blocks of traditions, which can often be shown to have circulated separately. The enormous variety in this Jewish material can be shown to be based on the Mesopotamian traditions which we surveyed earlier. All this suggests a long and fruitful period of interaction between Israel and Mesopotamian religion, in a variety of different contexts, rather than one confined only to the Second Temple period:22
When Jared had lived a hundred and sixty-two years he became the father of Enoch. Jared lived after the birth of Enoch eight hundred years, and had other sons and daughters. Thus all the days of Jared were nine hundred and sixty-two years; and he died. When Enoch had lived sixty-five years, he became the father of Methuselah. Enoch walked with God after the birth of Methuselah three hundred years, and had