Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [370]
Daniel 12 can be understood to mean that judgment will follow for some but not all humans who have ever lived. The specific identification of those groups occupies a significant part of the following Rabbinic discussion. In other words, in spite of the fact that they use a quotation from Isaiah 60, which expresses their particular view of what wholeness for the people Israel would entail, the entire organization of this discussion is based on categories of the afterlife which are implicit in Daniel 12, without actually quoting it. Everyone engaged in the discussion knows that the basic doctrine is outlined in Daniel 12 and the categories adduced-resurrected for reward, resurrected for punishment, and the great “in-between” those neither resurrected nor punished nor given further rewards. These are the logical categories derivable from Daniel 12 in Scripture and from nowhere else.
The Rabbis quickly turn to the legal connotations of the discussion, and not necessarily the most obvious one-namely, who is to be excluded from this promise? They indulge in what can only be their private ironic humor: “Those who do not believe in the world to come from the Torah are destined not to get it.” This is not a surprise because a similar ruling has appeared in a number of communities. The Tannaim state that one must believe in the doctrine which they call, literally, the “vivication of the dead, teḥiat hametim” and-this is the crucial issue to occupy the Amoraim commentators starting in 220 CE-that one must believe that the vivication of the dead is present in the Torah itself. By this, they mean that the doctrine must be derivable from the first five books of the Torah. But we know from long analysis that there are no very obvious demonstrations of beatific afterlife in Torah.
Even the phrase’s literal meaning, the “vivication of the dead” (teḥiat ha-metim), does not come from the first five books of Torah, and not from Daniel 12, but from the source of some of Daniel’s images in Isaiah 26:19:
Thy dead shall live, their bodies [literally, corpses] shall rise.
O dwellers in the dust, awake and sing for joy!
For thy dew is a dew of light,
and on the land of the shades thou wilt let it fall.
We come suddenly on what will be the technical term for “resurrection” amongst the Rabbis from this passage in Isaiah. But note that Isaiah’s description is not exactly the Rabbinic concept because the Rabbis deliberately pick the “vivication of the dead” (teḥiat hametim), not the “raising of corpses” (a hypothetical tequmat hanevelot), just as explicitly mentioned in this very place in Isaiah 26:19. They ignore the term “corpses” and instead use the first clause, which contains much less definite terms. They are not actually interested in defining the afterlife with the notion of the resurrection of the fleshly body. Like their description of the “endtime,” they would rather describe something a bit more ambiguously, not specifying exactly how God plans to bring the final consummation.
This observation helps resolve the paradox that we noted in the discussion of Josephus’ description of the Pharisees in chapter 9, “Sectarian Life.” If the Pharisees are best able to govern the remaining state of Judah after the war and share power before the war, then why should they believe in resurrection of the flesh, which is characteristic of the sectarian life of Judea? The answer to that vexing question is that they do not necessarily believe in resurrection of the dead corpses (with Isaiah), and certainly do not believe in anything like the Gospels’ view of the matter. On the other hand, they cannot risk overtly contradicting Isaiah either, instead exegeting Isaiah in such a way that Isaiah seems to say what they have in mind. They build a paradise based on the land of Israel, which the living and dead share. They are content with an ambiguity whose resolution dominates Christian thinking for four