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The Rabbis certainly believe that God will do what He wills; but they are not tailoring their doctrine to explain martyrdom.12 Rather they want a more general doctrine. To the Rabbis as to the Christians, human life is sacred. But Rabbinic policy is not to encourage martyrdom, indeed one might violate many commandments, including the food laws, to avoid martyrdom. The commandments one should not commit are murder, incest, adultery, blasphemy, apostasy, or idolatry (b. Sanh. 74a). According to this ruling, neither Eleazar, nor the woman and her seven sons, needed to endure martyrdom. But the issue is moot because they also judge that no law can be broken as a sign of apostasy. One is to undergo martyrdom rather than apostatize.

The general rule is: Breaking food laws is preferrable to martyrdom. But there are cases where martyrdom cannot be avoided. Death should be accepted as necessary and inevitable in that case. When necessary, one should die ’al qiddush ha-shem, “for the sanctification of God’s name,” which is explicitly the technical Rabbinic vocabulary for martyrdom and refers to reciting the Shema (Deut 6:4) prayer at death. A person who does so is called a Qadosh, a “holy one,” (even “a saint”) just as the angels are called. Martyrdom was closely associated with human transmogrification into angels. But, to the Rabbis, martyrdom should be avoided, if possible.

The deliberate ambiguity in the definition of the afterlife and the lack of enthusiasm for martyrdom are connected. The Rabbis do not seem to care much whether resurrection is as literal, fleshly body, or as a perfected, spiritual body. Evidently, they believed that the nature of the resurrection was for God to define. Their job was to try to figure out his ethical will before that. While they concede the necessity of martyrdom, they do not see it as an earthly good, rather an ordeal that is sometimes unavoidable. The greater skepticism about resurrection and the lack of enthusiasm for martyrdom are structurally related.

This may explain why the most famous ex-Pharisee of the Western world-namely, Paul-did not believe in fleshly resurrection either. He believed that God would bring the consummation about as He wills and that the “resurrection body” is a “spiritual entity,” a body but not a corruptible body. Perhaps Paul was again an accurate witness to the state of Rabbinic thinking in his own century.13 We can translate teḥiat ha-metim as “vivication of the dead,” even “resurrection of the dead,” but not “resurrection of the flesh.”

This perception goes a long way towards answering our sociological quandary in reading Josephus: Why should the Pharisees, who sometimes share the reins of government, propound a doctrine that was characteristic of only the most extreme sectarians? The answer is that they do not; they do not tie themselves down to the specificity of the millenarian position. They pick a term and a pastoral vision of the end that is deliberately ambiguous. Like Paul, resurrection of the body for the Rabbis might not mean the fleshly body, at least in its corpselike form, but the “metamorphosis” or more properly a “summorphosis” of the corporeal body into a heavenly and spiritual body-like the angels, a sexually resolved and completed body. They do not pretend to know exactly what God has in mind for His faithful. It could be like the angelomorphism of the sectarians and Christians. But it was not necessarily a transformation of the martyr only. All Israel qualified for the reward. And, if necessary, it might be describable in a variety of other ways.

What Happened to the Villains of Yore?

WHAT OCCUPIES the Tannaim’s attention next is the Biblical basis for the doctrine, not what the phrase means. They are expert exegetes, and they want to know what Scripture says. In the Mishnah-what is often quintessentially held up as a literature of casuistry, a literature that discusses subtly what right and wrong are and what the various punishments are for infractions against justice-there