Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [181]
These motifs of earthly salvation and deliverance occur in a number of other Jewish Scriptures, including Isaiah 61:1-4, which explains the prophet’s vocation to bring good tidings and proclaim liberty to the captives. Thus, the prophet took on the role of announcing the good tidings which God will bring (see also Ps 145:14; Isa 35:5; 42:7; as well as many places in apocalyptic literature). In the Qumran community God is pictured, not only as doing all this but also as raising the dead, certainly the most miraculous of all the “good news.” It affirms resurrection, even though the original psalm actually emphasized that men die, implying that only God lives forever.
In the Qumran passage it is the LORD who does these wonderful things, which now include resurrection, in a way that is reminiscent of the contemporary Jewish prayerbook. In Matthew 11:4-6, a similar group of signs fulfilled is understood to foretell the coming end time and, from the context, it turns out to be Jesus who fulfills them, not God directly. The newly published passage puts the Dead Sea Scrolls clearly in line with those in the first century who accepted resurrection, including Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism. It caused considerable scholarly stir and readjustment of theories about the Dead Sea sectarians. For instance, it completely undermines any theory that the Dead Sea Scroll sectarians could have been Sadducees, although still priestly in their approach to Judaism. The Sadducees, in fact, stood with the Hellenistic world in a number of ways as clients of the Romans when possible. The Qumranites were clearly very critical of the behavior of the Sadducees (as well as the Pharisees).
Even more interesting, these new scrolls tell us something very important about Josephus, something that we had strongly suspected for a long time. It confirms the suspicion that Josephus was writing very tendentiously on this topic, figuring the beliefs of the Essenes in Hellenistic form. Josephus does not stress resurrection because his Hellenized Roman community would not have understood resurrection of the body and certainly would not have perceived resurrection of the body as worth attaining. They may even have known it as the belief of their arch-enemies the Persians, and so would have been even more contemptuous of it. Josephus would certainly not want to stress a belief which the Jews had in common with the enemies of the Roman order. Instead, Josephus says that they believe the soul to be imprisoned in the body for life but once released from the bonds of the flesh, they rejoice and are borne aloft (J.W. 2.155), suggesting a heavenly journey like the Romans’ and not unlike that found in the Enoch books, which were represented at Qumran. Good souls receive a reward in an abode beyond the ocean, a kind of paradise, says Josephus, not unlike the Greek notion of the Isles of the Blessed. Evil persons are sent to never-ending punishment in the murky dungeon of the world.
When the passages on resurrection were published, Josephus’ strategy as a writer became clearer. All of this research was synthesized in an enormous and prescient, two-volume French work by Émile Puech.18 Puech actually published long before all the scrolls came out, anticipating the direct evidence of resurrection, so his book is a masterpiece of scholarly reconstruction. He probably had access to all the scrolls from the Dead Sea but he did not find any overt notions of resurrection, as we know exist today. Instead, through a series of very astute inferences, Puech demonstrated in detail that the Dead Sea Scrolls sectarians believed in resurrection of the dead, that it was combined with ascension to heaven, and that Josephus was translating