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be translated as “preserve or keep alive,” rather than “make alive” or “resurrect,” as several translations prefer. It may also be hinting at something more, that God may kill and resuscitate the same person to finish out his normal life, though this interpretation seems a bit forced. The Greek, which reflects a much later time when such notions were more common, translates in a more tendentious fashion, in which resurrection is hinted at and which gives an excuse to tendentious Bible translators. Like several other additions, this passage may show Christian tampering, as Christianity used the Greek text widely in their liturgical life.

In Deuteronomy 32:39, the Hebrew verbs for “I kill and I preserve” are rendered into Greek literally as “I [shall] kill and I [shall] make alive.” All the verbs are placed in the future tense, which can easily translate the Hebrew imperfect, though the sense here would be better translated with a simple Greek present tense. Does the future suggest here that the Greek text is stressing judgment at the end of time or future life or resurrection? There really is no sure way to tell, though a great many grammatical arguments have forced this interpretation beyond credibility.

So too with Psalm 1:5 and Psalm 21 (22):30.13 Psalm 49 (LXX:48):16 was an interesting crux for us (see chap. 3): “But God will ransom my soul from the power of Sheol, for he will receive me [Selah].” The Hebrew for “for” is ki, which is rendered into Greek as hotan, meaning “when,” yielding a less ambiguous reading than the Hebrew: “God will ransom my soul from the power of Sheol when he shall receive me.” Certainly, this interpretation makes immortality far more obvious in the Greek than in the Hebrew text. But the small change also results in the implication that a beatific afterlife comes directly after death.

Similarly Proverbs 12:28 is occasionally cited as an example of life after death. The verse in Hebrew reads, “In the path of righteousness is life, but the way of path (?) leads (’al mãvvet). The Hebrew text is corrupt. Netivah (“path” or possibly “her path”) is extremely hard to interpret and seems out of context. Consequently, there is no obvious translation of this phrase into English. The Septuagint (LXX), which was not slow to find immortality in the Hebrew Bible, translates the phrase as “In the roads of righteousness is life but the roads of those remembering evil is death.” “Remembering evil” appears to refer to those fools who hold grudges or who spread libel. LXX does not pick up on any connotations of immortality in the book, in spite of its otherwise well noted proclivities to expound immortality.

Furthermore, the verse has another problem, the phrase, ’al mavvet, which has traditionally been interpreted as “to death” can be interpreted as “immortality,” since ’el usually means “to,” but can mean “not” in a few contexts. The later is usually thought to be a farfetched and somewhat tendentious interpretation, as it is not an easily understandable translation grammatically at this spot in Hebrew. Mitchell Dahood, however, pointed out that there is a similar phrase in Ugaritic (blmt, perhaps to be vocalized b’al mawwet), which usually dos mean “immortality.” This parallel has brought the previous translation into question and given great encouragement to those who would like to push the interpretation of “immortality.” As a result, just five years later, R. B. Y. Scott, translated Proverbs 12:28, “On the road of righteousness there is life, and the treading of its path is deathlessness.”14 The translation is very well expressed in English, showing Scott to be a master translator. It is at the height of the scholarly enchantment with the texts from Ugarit. But several considerations argue against his rendering and suggest that we should allow the pendulum to swing back in the original direction. First, nowhere else in Hebrew do we find this phrase used in this way. Second, and more crucial, the stylistic context of this chapter of Proverbs is very easy to describe and is quite different from the “immortality