Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [430]
Each culture also produces a carrier of personal identity, whether the true image was the mummified body, the ba, the ka, the akh, the heart, body, or soul, so that the dead did not have to live in exactly the fleshly body it had on earth. The nature of the afterlife self is significant because it also helps reify the concept of self in society. Every culture designs its own vision of a perfected life and expresses it in its notions of afterlife. From this vision that is often preserved in civic monuments and literature, what was important to the social class or cult or society emerges. The afterlife becomes a mirror to the deepest hopes of the society. But the symbols are not universal; they depend on specific cultural connections made between afterlife, the disposal of the body, and the nature of the self that survives death. The symbols of the afterlife are culturally specific.
Apocalyptic Israel seemed to envision a transformed body, though the martyrology of 2 Maccabees 6-8 shows that it could also be a literal re-constitution of the physical body, especially if the physical body had been cruelly tortured, destroyed and snatched away from proper burial by evil oppressors. It was this extreme form of persecution, preventing the righteous from receiving their Biblical reward of long life, that so captured the followers of Jesus when their leader was so unjustly martyred. Bodily resurrection was fit to make Christianity into a religion whose mission was the conversion of the world.
The preexilic Biblical tradition steadfastly maintains that what occurs after death is very unimportant: For instance, the book of Job teaches only that God is responsible and will answer for His seeming injustices, not that we will survive into another more beatific afterlife. Job testifies that God will appear to answer the charges; His appearance in theophanies is proof that His covenant is an equitable arrangement for both partners, though we cannot know why He seems to punish us innocently. Job is a heroic answer to the perennial question of theodicy. But Job did not satisfy everyone.
MARTYRDOM
The answer to Job, for example, is not sufficient for those brave young Jews who died at the hands of foreign oppressors, who taunt them with the public choice of apostasy or death. In the face of the torture and death at the hands of foreign oppressors, a new notion of afterlife was born-resurrection of the body. Under the pressure of martyrdom, the death of the faithful for their faith became a public drama that overcame the evil of the oppressor and testified to the truth of the faithful. It does not really matter whether the stories actually happened and, if they did, whether they happened in the way 2 Maccabees tells us. The stories themselves serve as the revelation of a new dispensation; they are the evidence that the inquiry took place in the face of this foreign oppression.
The effect of the new revelation in apocalyptic Judaism is clear: God will restore the bodies of the martyrs which the oppressors so cruelly destroyed. This is the belief of small groups of millennialists who receive apocalyptic prophecies saying so. Not everyone in Hebrew society valued these pronouncements or thought them authentic. The dreams and visions constituted a new answer to Job in the face of real torture ending in death, not the fabled suffering of Job, ending in restoration. They were based on the stories in Daniel in which the hero is rescued by God. In the visions of Daniel, the seer confirms that even those who were not rescued by God in this life will be rescued in the next. The new prophecy from God