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By Root 2500 0

not exactly Greek nor Canaanite nor Persian, though it is generally parallel to all of them, using the native Hebrew vocabulary for resurrection together with martyrdom, as reunderstood from the ambiguous Scripture appearing in the prophets. Possibly this can be seen as part of the general process in the Hellenistic period of transferring the abode of the dead from under the earth to the heavens. But no one in the group that produced this text would have been aware of that perspective. In a sense then, the death of the saints, their “martyrdom” as the church would call its fallen heroes, has sharpened the age-old question of why the righteous suffer to the point that the writers of Daniel adapted a very popular idea in the ancient Near East, until this moment missing in the history of Israel: the notion of resurrection as a reward for saints and martyrs.

The conception of life after death that it outlines is not exactly like anything else we have seen thus far. Although it is resurrection, which might put it into the same camp as Zoroastrianism, it is not at all what Persian resurrection was. For one thing, it is not at first guaranteed to all the good. Nor does it eventually extend to the evil once they have purged themselves of their evildoing. In this text, reward is only promised to some of the good and punishment only to some of the evil. The evil will also be resurrected but they ought not to be glad of their resurrection because they regain their bodies only to be punished. Furthermore, there is a large group of ordinary Israelites who receive neither resurrection nor special punishment, who just die and are no more.

As we have seen, it is a picture of life after death adapted to the circumstances of this particular group. It is derived, as we saw in the last chapter, from putting together a number of Biblical passages in a new, inspired way and narrating a consistent new story about it. It promises punishment for the evil ones, a restored life for those who have been cut off before their natural span, and astral immortality, eternal life as an angel, to those who make others wise, evidently the principal teachers or leaders of the group, or at least those among them who were martyred. As opposed to the majority of the Persians, who saw the end of the world as an eventuality, and resurrection as the privilege of the whole human race eventually, this group expected it to happen momentarily, as the final consummation is the very next event narrated. They also think that only the very righteous-themselves-will ever attain resurrection. This is a sectarian stance, which gives us important information about the kind of group that created these documents.

The Sociology of the Daniel Group

OTTO PLÖGER argued in his now classic Theocracy and Eschatology10 that the group of people who produced this vision can be characterized as a “conventicle-spirit of deliberate separatism in that membership of the ‘true’ Israel is made to depend on the acknowledgment of a certain dogma, namely the eschatological interpretation of historical events, which meant, in effect, membership in a particular group” (Plöger, p 19). Plöger struggled to find words to express what he saw. He said that the afterlife described in Daniel is limited to those people who join the group and come to share its assumptions. Plöger wrote before sociology became more readily utilized in Biblical studies, so his description requires a further explanation.

Plöger means that the group that produced Daniel was a small group of committed religious fighters and teachers. They expected God to reward them for their suffering and for the injustices that were done to the rest of the faithful. We already know a great deal more about them: The members of the group illuminated by it are called “those who are wise” or “the wise men of the people” and help many to insight, or suffer martyrdom (Dan 11:33, 35) “but will one day shine like the stars” (Dan 12:3). And there is some suggestion that they have priestly functions.

This surprising religious ideology is not very close