Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [369]
Neither Judaism nor Christianity wanted to promulgate that aristocratic view of salvation. In fact, we shall see that the Tannaitic conception is neither the one (resurrection of the body) nor the other (immortality of the soul) but an innovation that allows for Israel’s ultimate felicity and good ethical practice on earth. Prophecy is cited but it is not the prophecy itself which is the basis of the doctrine. Rather, it is the way the prophecy is exegeted: What allows for Israel’s felicity is the exegesis of Isaiah 60-66. It is part of the exegetical skills of the Rabbis that they can balance these new issues in the culture and yet derive it all from a credible and holy source so that it has cultural credibility.
Isaiah 60-66 has already surfaced in discussions of the afterlife but it has never been used in this way, without any reference to the evils which may befall those who are not included. Instead, the Rabbis envision a future that applies to everyone in Israel. This is also the reason that Daniel 12 is not quoted in the Mishnah; Daniel 12 is the only place where resurrection is clearly promised in the Hebrew Bible and it promises a very different, more sectarian kind of end-of-days, where only the members of the sect will receive resurrection, and maybe only some of them. So the Tannaim look for other proof-texts. Instead, they take Isaiah 60 as their primary text, which talks not about afterlife but about inheriting the land forever.
Even that was a wildly fantastic notion, given their current state. So they do not take the passage to refer to this world, rather the world to come, the Olam haba’ (‘olārn habbā’). They will reclaim their land forever. This may be an early Zionist sentiment. But it is not political Zionism. It is translated to the afterlife. Evidently, the Rabbis felt that all Israel would receive the gift of the land in the resurrection, in contradiction with the various sectarians traditions, which they must have known very well. There is no explanation for this new, more universal understanding of resurrection. Perhaps they felt that Israel had itself experienced a martyrdom in the tribulations it had undergone in the Roman Wars. Perhaps it was chauvinism, a privilege for its unique prophetic rank in the world. Perhaps it was merely a dream to recover the lost homeland. But, for whatever reason, they believed that the whole of Israel would receive the gift of the land of Israel in the resurrection. They claimed that the disasters that overtook Israel, in particular the destruction of the Second Temple, were due to “senseless hatreds.” They were evidently setting out to make sure that no more senseless hatreds divide the nation further, bringing further catastophes upon them. They gave up the first century sectarian notion that divine justice adheres only to one’s sectarian brothers and suggest that God’s promises are now “catholic” for Israel.
Furthermore, the quotation from Isaiah 60:21, which surely was not about eternal life or resurrection in its original context, suggests that, for the purposes of this part of the Tannaitic discussion, “the world to come” may mean something as simple as all Israel, those alive and deceased, living eternally on this earth as masters of Israel’s own land. The inflow of the exiles from all parts of the Roman Empire, whence they had been removed as slaves, was part of their idealized view of the future.