Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [169]
In this depiction, Enoch sees to the farthest west, where the sun goes down. The West is where the dead were located in Egyptian lore and the sun is the messenger to the dead in all the nations surrounding Israel. But in this depiction, in the far West, Enoch finds a great pit in which four different categories of dead are awaiting judgment. These are therefore temporary holding pens for the dead, not a permanent prison, as the judgment is still in the future. The dead are in a kind of intermediary state. Yet we already know their final disposition by the kinds of conditions in which they wait. It looks like a kind of heavenly, judicial bureacracy.
The writer of this passage was well acquainted with how ancient empires disposed of their war captives. The scene resembles nothing so much as a Mesopotamian frieze of the taking of a city after a siege, an image that the Assyrians especially valued because it demonstrated their overwhelming power. The inhabitants, those who are not killed outright, are divided up into various groups for their final disposal. Because this is a narrative journey and not merely a prophecy like Daniel, we are treated to a horrifying scene, meant to instill repentance in any who might hear it.
In back of it seems to be real experience with foreign ruling powers. Truly, the taking of a city would have been one of the most horrifying scenes of war that anyone of that time could have imagined. In any event, the heavenly scene then represents compensation for the indignities which the Jews and especially the pious among them had to endure, with God figured as the ultimate conqueror and bringer of justice. The Israelites of Second Temple times lived in a big empire or a complex of client states rather than as a completely independant country. But they lived on the border where skirmishes between empires sometimes happened. In fact, colonial and post colonial theory will help us understand the varieties of religious and social movements that arose in Second Temple times. Those responses will be outlined in the next few chapters. But one thing is clear: Unlike most of the Greek examples already discussed, this afterlife definitely contains punishments for sinners and rewards for the righteous, with no equivocation.
The presence of Abel in this Enoch vision is very important. He has become more than the first murder victim. In this context, Abel was the prototype of martyrs. Finally, there is the compartment for those who will remain in death forever, not being either good enough to be resurrected nor bad enough to be punished eternally. These categories seem to be dictated by the features of Israelite culture and law, as well as a reflection of the prophecy of Daniel 12 itself, which discusses the very good and the very bad but seemingly leaves the ordinary people dead forever. The Greek version of v 13b makes this clear when it says: “They shall not be punished on the day of judgment and they shall not be raised hence.” The Zoroastrians also exercised their imaginations on this intermediate group. They are not the persecutors nor the zealously pious. They are