Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [368]
Similar traditions also suggest that prayer, confession, and deeds of loving kindness have the same effect in atoning for Israel’s collective sins. In the end, this notion will yield the multicultural assertion that we are all martyrs because we all die and the righteous of all nations will receive a place in the world to come. That notion can be seen developing in the Rabbinic texts.11
Mishnah Sanhedrin 10
THE TANNAITIC notion of life after death is discussed extensively only in Mishnah tractate Sanhedrin in chapter 10, where the Rabbis face directly the issue of what awaits after death. One should not expect the same kind of organized philosophical treatise as in the Church Fathers. The Mishnah is the result of a communal discussion about law and procedure, more a legal document than a theological one. It is a theoretical discussion taking place between Rabbis of different generations, whose opinions are compared one to another, in order to come up with a consistent practice. Here they seem to discuss both what will happen to individuals after death and to Israel at the end-time:
Mishnah 1: All Israelites have a share in the world to come, for it is written, “Thy people also shall be all righteous, they shall inherit the land for ever; the branch of my planting, the work of my hands that I may be glorified” (Isa 60:21). And these are they that have no share in the world to come: he that says that there is no resurrection of the dead prescribed in the Torah, and [he that says] that the Torah is not from Heaven, and an Epicurean. R. Akiba says: Also he that reads the books of the “outsiders,” or that utters charms over a wound and says, I will put none of the diseases upon thee which I have put upon the Egyptians; for I am the Lord that heals you. (Exod 15:28) Abba Saul says: also he that pronounces the Name with it proper letters.
If the Tannaim counted the Pharisees as their forebears they still developed their own Rabbinic thought in amazingly different ways. For instance, Josephus recounts that the Pharisees thought that the souls of the good alone went to another body. This could be an explicit exegesis of Daniel 12: “And many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt” (Dan 12:2).
But not Sanhedrin 10 Mishnah 1. It is quite different. Rather it states that “all Israel will be righteous, they will have a share in the world to come, and they will all live in the land of Israel forever,” not merely the members of the Pharisaic sect or the Tannaim. This is an important difference. Until now resurrection was a reward given only to the the members of the sect or the martyrs or the elected ones, which always followed some sectarian, denominational, or philosophical lines. Daniel only promised resurrection to “some” and suggested that most people will simply die.
The reward itself is not well described. All Israel will return to the land but is it an ideal land on this earth, or a reconstituted earth, or is it a heavenly Israel? Will death disappear? It is a Zionist hope but it is also idealized. Because the passage says “forever,” one might assume that death will disappear. The subsequent discussion clarifies that the reconstituted Israel will include all those long dead, as it discusses a number of primeval personages including dead kings of Judah and Israel. It is certainly not like any of the visions of resurrection that we saw in the Jewish or Christian apocrypha or the apocalyptic literature.
This doctrine also differs from immortality of the soul. Immortality of the soul