Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [384]
The Rabbis aver that there are heretics who do not believe in life after death. When Moses and God are speaking at Sinai, Moses asks God: “Will the dead ever be restored to life?” God, in surprise, retorts, “Have you become a heretic, Moses, that you doubt the resurrection?” “If,” said Moses, “the dead never awaken to life, then truly You are right to wreak vengeance upon Israel. But if the dead are to be restored to life hereafter, what will You say to the fathers of this nation, if they ask You what has become of the promise You have made to them?”22 Here the issue is explicitly the justification of God’s ways to man. Moses and God are depicted in a Rabbinic discussion where Moses’ arguments overcomes God’s objections.
The Targums
THE TARGUM, the translation of the Bible into Aramaic, served as Scripture for the Aramaic-speaking community, as the Septuagint did for the Greek-speaking community. Many targumim were written for use within the synagogue as Aramaic had largely replaced Hebrew in the Middle East by the third century BCE. Some of the targumim are quite ancient. They appear at Qumran, for instance, but the fragment found there do not correspond to the received texts later on. Although some targumim are indeed quite ancient, we may not have access to them.
The Targum is not just a translation of the Bible. It contains many additions and comments to the original text, which reveal the issues that occupied the ancient community. Targumim are as much Midrash as translation. As life after death is largely missing from the Hebrew Bible, the targumim take the opportunity to supply it. For instance, where the Hebrew Bible narrates the murder of Abel by Cain in Genesis 4:8, the Targum inserts a short Midrash in which they argue over resurrection, making it into the very subject of the first murder. The same is true of the argument between Jacob (Israel = the Jews) and Esau (Edom = Rome = Christianity). The same with the argument between the land and the sea as understood from “The Song At The Sea” in Exodus 15:12. Each of these Midrashim inserted into the Targum is also found in the Midrash.23
Interestingly, the figure of Lot’s wife is also crux for the issue of resurrection. The targumim to Genesis 19:26 says that she shall remain a pillar until the resurrection, when she will live again. One can speculate what this means: The Biblical story becomes a crux for the doctrine of resurrection. Does Lot’s wife not deserve the same treatment as the rest of humanity? This targum answers “yes.” It is significant that Lot’s wife receives resurrection although she is not an Israelite.24
Jewish Mysticism
THE SECOND place where the notion of an afterlife continues to have strong and important role was in Jewish mysticism.25 On the surface, a great many Jewish mystical texts look like Midrash itself. But it is Midrash devoted to a very limited number of themes. The secret purposes of the various stories only emerge in the course of reading through a great many of them. The originally apocalyptic material-the Kabod imagery, Daniel 7:13-14, enthronement of God’s principal angel in Exodus 24, Ezekiel 1, and Psalm 110-continues to be a strong theme of Jewish mysticism, even into Kabbalah, where it is caught up in the complicated richness of speculation of the sepheroth. In mysticism, many different and somewhat conflicting notions of the soul are evidenced. Mysticism portrays themes of angelic doubles who serve as guardians, as well as human transformations into sephirotic powers, and a myriad of other conceptualizations, which we cannot describe in any detail.26
The specific connection between Psalm 110 and the visions of Daniel, which is crucial in Christianity,