Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [429]
FIRST TEMPLE ISRAELITE AND CANAANITE RELIGIONS
All this was rejected by the Biblical writers, though there are hints that Babylonian and Canaanite afterlife notions were very popular in Israel. If we had only the documents of the Bible, the First Temple period would have only had the most vague and unarticulated notion of the afterlife. This looks unique in human experience until we realize that we are looking at Israelite culture through the lens of editors who chose what would survive out of the ancient writings. They were not happy with Canaanite views of the afterlife, which were idolatrous and immoral. In the end, Israelite notions of the afterlife emphasize the same truth as the Mesopotamian and Canaanite ones: Like us, animals have earthly life; we have life and, if we act properly, we will gain wisdom; but only God has immortality.
SECOND TEMPLE JUDAISM
When the Jews came into contact with Greece and Persia, everything changed. By the time the Persians and the Greeks made contact with Jewish culture, both had developed significant myths that spoke of conquering death. The Jews listened to the Greek and Persians more attentively than they listened to the Canaanites. Though both Greece and Persia linked feasting with the dead in their ancient past, both imperial cultures also developed high philosophical understandings of the afterlife that avoided the sins the prophets decried.
It is likely Persia eventually influenced the invention of a beatific afterlife in Israel. The religion of the Persians left us uncertain evidence about influence during the time of Ezekiel (sixth-century BCE) when Zoroastrianism was growing important in Bactria in the East. But by the time the visions of the book of Daniel were written (168 BCE), Zoroastrianism was virtually the national religion of the elite Persian rulers and left us clear evidence of bodily resurrection and a beatific afterlife. These surely stimulated and encouraged similar notions in Jewish life, though we lack proof of how the transfer took place.
Unlike the Persians, the Greeks left footnotes when they influenced Hebrew thought. Greek culture contains a long meditation on the notion that the soul could separate from the body. Where the soul went was the major focus of Greek speculation. The early Greeks could envision a hero’s choice of fame over immortality, the very choice which Odysseus makes at the beginning of the Odyssey; they could envision a ritual process of immortalization in the Eleusinian Mysteries, perhaps aided by drug-induced experience, making this mystery religion into a weekend “rave.” Or they could believe the proofs of the immortality of the soul offered by Plato’s Socrates.
All these notions were adopted into Israelite culture, after being retailored for adoption into a monotheistic scheme. The most long-lasting Greek contribution to Jewish culture was from the aristocratic, Platonist intellectual elite of Greek society that said that the soul was immortal. In return for a life of moderation and intellectual development, the soul went upward to receive its astral rewards.
The elaborate funeral rites of the Egyptians suggest that the method of body disposal had a great deal to do with how afterlife was interpreted, that the afterlife somehow begins as a meditation on the recognition that we die and the body dissolves in a culturally supervised way. In Egypt, where the body was preserved by mummification, the person after death was a living image. Afterlife was conceived of as bodily in roughly the same way as we inhabit this life, though the glorified spirit could take up residence in the stars at the same time. In Mesopotamia and Canaan, including ancient Israel, the body was buried, yielding notions of a pale