Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [229]
Access to Paradise in This Life and the Next
THERE IS A clear parallel between the explicit theology of the Sadducees and their social class. As lords of the land, they had a relatively privileged life. They appeared to need no other rewards than those they took in this world. One might have easily imagined exactly the opposite: the aristocrats took for themselves the rewards of the next world just as they took the rewards of this life. Such was the case in Egypt of the Pharaohs, for instance. Indeed as we have just seen, the great aristocratic Jewish philosopher of Alexandria, Philo Judaeus, adopted a very Platonic notion of the immortality of the soul, which gave primacy to those with the leisure to study.
No universal logic makes any particular correlation between social class and theology inevitable. All that one can claim is that social class remains an important variable in the way religious beliefs are apprehended in any society. What explains this particular correlation between stoic indifference to the afterlife and the traditional aristocracy is Biblical tradition itself. Although the Sadducees were Hellenists, they knew and understood what the Biblical tradition is and they honored it in their own priestly way. The Pharisees characterized the Sadducees as heretics but they were not. Instead of evincing a willful heresy to the tradition of the fathers, the Sadducean position actually reflected the converse. The Sadducees knew that when the Bible is interpreted literally there is scant evidence for any afterlife worth having.
An important architectural feature in the villas of the wealthy only emphasizes the logic of Sadducean religious belief. A number of very interesting studies have been completed on the usage of the word “paradise.”22 It is a loan word into Hebrew from Persian and Greek equally. The term is well known with the meaning of pleasure garden rather than orchard. The late Hellenistic period saw different gardening styles in Persia and in the Hellenistic world. The Greeks preferred to take their leisure in walled gardens with water features but the Persians liked to hunt in enclosed gardens, which the Romans thought unmanly. The Romans also thought that wearing baggy pants like the Persians was effeminate; real men wore dresses, or togas, as they called them.
But a crucial religious corollary to ancient gardening practices has been missed by most scholars: The wealthy called their pleasure garden, with their ordered bowers and with pools and walks, a paradise (sing. paradeisos, pl. paradeisoi), as Ecclesiastes had called his gardens pardesim (sing. pardes, paradise): “I made myself gardens and parks, and planted in them all kinds of fruit trees” (Eccles 2:5). The wealthy had a paradise on earth in the back gardens of their estates. Access to a paradise was strictly confined to the wealthy and their guests. This lends an important social connotation to the use of the term “paradise” to designate the afterlife. For instance, the palaces of King Herod contain large architecturally designed gardens, complete with pools for refreshment and beauty.23 This large architectural feature was called a “paradise” (paradeisos in Greek), a pleasure garden, even by the rulers of the Hellenistic world. So, in some sense, the Herodians and Sadducees needed no paradise in the afterlife because they enjoyed paradise daily while on earth. The lower classes envisioned their lives after death in the form that the wealthiest enjoyed in this life and, to complete God’s justice, usually denied the aristocrats (whom they thought sinful) access to it.24
The Sadducees are not the faulty Bible interpreters that the rabbis wish to make of them. They needed no paradise after death because they found paradise in their backyards. They believed that is exactly what they deserved,