Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [309]
Jewish mysticism, indeed even the doctrine of resurrection itself, depends on that very peculiar passage in Daniel 12:1-3, the only apocalyptic work accepted into the Hebrew Bible. This vision served as the basis for the doctrine of resurrection in Judaism. In the much later Jewish prayer for the dead, ’El Malay Rahamim, it is directly quoted. In that prayer, a regular part of Jewish interment and memorial services, the dead are said to be in heaven, shining with the brightness of the heavens, “under the wings of the Shekhina.” The term “brightness” or “splendor” is zohar and is likely the basis for the title of the most famous book of Jewish mysticism, The Zohar, written in Spain in the High Middle Ages. So there is no question that this passage in Daniel was crucial to the later Jewish mystical tradition.
But this is only the prologue. Apocalypticism and Merkabah mysticism were not quiet contemplation. Instead they both witness to the active desire to journey to heaven and not merely out of curiosity about what was there. It was to verify that God’s promises to the apocalypticists were true and reliable: Not only could one go to heaven at the end of one’s life, some people actually went while alive, as Paul’s report in 2 Corinthians 12 shows. The importance of going during life was to demonstrate to the community by eyewitness that humans go to heaven and receive their just reward after death. It was a kind of eschatological verificationism (pace Hick).33
But that is only part of the story. Ecstatic experience was self-validating and socially valuable because of its power in confirming the society’s worldview. Since it was also RISC, it was also pleasurable, at least potentially, as an ecstatic experience. And going to heaven also conferred a number of other powers, as will be evident later. All this lies behind the mystic vocabulary for the goal of the journey: “to gaze on the King in His Beauty.” This figure on the throne, already well known to us, was a sophisticated blending of all the notions of the Glory of the Lord, the Shekhina, and the Angel of the Lord.
This enigmatic human appearance of God, discussed with appropriate self-consciousness in the Bible, is related to the so-called “Son of Man.” The preeminence of this angel is due primarily to the description of the angel of the Lord in Exodus. Exodus 23:20-21 states: “Behold, I send an angel before you, to guard you on the way and to bring you to the place which I have prepared. Give heed to him and hearken to his voice, do not rebel against him, for he will not pardon your transgression; for my name is in him.” The Bible expresses the unique status of this angel by means of its participation in the divine name.34 Thereafter in Exodus 33:18-23, Moses asks to see the Glory of God. In answer, God makes “his goodness” pass in front of him but He cautions, “You cannot see my face; for man shall not see me and live…. Behold, there is a place by me where you shall stand upon the rock; and while my glory passes by I will put you in a cleft of the rock, and I will cover you with my hand until I have passed by; then I will take away my hand and you shall see my back; but my face shall not be seen.” Yahweh himself, the angel of God, and his Glory are melded together in a peculiar way, which suggested to its readers a deep secret about the ways God manifested himself to humanity.
The heavenly “Son of Man” appears in the vision in Daniel 7:13 in which an Ancient of Days appoints a human figure (“one like a Son of Man”) to execute justice in the destruction of the evil ones. This human figure is best understood as an angel, though it is an unusual angel in that it can participate in divinity, as we will see.35 Later on in Daniel, resurrection is promised both for the