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The stylistic context is this: Each couplet in this chapter and the next is made up of antithetical statements, expressing the familiar, two-path theme of righteousness and folly. Each couplet contrasts the wise person with the fool in an antithetic way. This translation would violate that almost invariable form; the more traditional translation leaves that antithetic scheme intact. Rather, it looks like this is a place where the Septuagint’s translation is correct because it had an earlier reading, which had become corrupted and undecipherable by the time of the Masoretes. Thus, this is a case where the exact Hebrew text has been lost but the Greek LXX has preserved the basic meaning, that fits the context of these chapters. ’Al mavvet means “to death” and not “to immortality.”

Psalm 65 (66): 1, 9 receives “of the resurrection” in the Septuagint without any Hebrew equivalent in the Masoretic Text. This seems to be an early Christian gloss, as the psalm was used liturgically by Christians in the feast of the resurrection. The Greek rendering of verse 9a likewise has “for my soul” in place of the Hebrew “our soul” and “to life” in place of the Hebrew “in life.” This suggest an innovative Greek interpretation of a deathless state for the individual soul, a personal immortality, whereas the Hebrew version speaks of deliverance for the whole person in this life. Like the previous example, it is likely a gloss inserted by Christians to make their own beliefs more obvious.

Job 14:14 has been rendered in such a way as to directly contradict the Hebrew text. Job asked whether a person shall live again. His answer was “No!” But the LXX answers “Yes.” The Greek translates the answer: “I will wait until I exist again. Then You shall call and I will listen to You.” All these clear departures from the Hebrew text add resurrection into the text. None unambiguously insert the immortality of the soul, though Psalm 49 may have hinted at it. If these interpretations were inserted by the Jewish community, one would expect a mixture of doctrines to occur because immortality of the soul was available and discussed frequently by Hellenistic Jews; but the early Christian community was only interested in the resurrection of the dead. Since the passages most likely imply resurrection of some sort; the nature of the change strongly suggests that they are Christian interpolations.15

The Immortality of the Soul in Israel

THE JEWISH community of the diaspora was familiar with Greek notions of immortality of the soul because some of them had studied Greek philosophy. In order to fill in the portrait of the afterlife in Second Temple Judaism, we have to leave the sectarian, religious revolutionary context of the doctrine of resurrection and visit with the aristocracy. The immortality of the soul was explicitly borrowed from Platonism. It tended to interest Jews who lived in quite different neighborhoods from those who cherished resurrection. The immortality of the soul was, at first, a very intellectual notion in Jewry; in this period, intellectuals mostly lived in the very best neighborhoods.

The vector for the innovation was a group of affluent Jews who had Greek educations and who valued Greek literacy, advancing far beyond use of serviceable Greek in pursuit of commerce and trade. Not even all the aristocracy adopted these notions and those who did, did so slowly over centuries. The classes of Judea and Jews in general who adopted the idea of the immortality of the soul, with its attendant assumptions about memory and consciousness, were not the same as those who adopted notions of resurrection.

Jews liked immortality of the soul for the same reason that Greeks did. Immortality of the soul appealed to the intellectual elite because it valorized their intellectual pursuits. It was mainly adopted by classes of people who were not only rich but beholden to Greek rule, deeply involved in Greek intellectual ideas, and who were attempting to combine Judaism with the Greek intellectual currents