Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [74]
We are used to reading the Bible as discursive literature, meant for us and our moral improvement. The Bible cannot be fully understood without seeing it in its historical context-Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Canaan for the First Israelite Commonwealth period (ca. 1200 BCE-586 BCE), Persia and Greece for the Second Temple period (515 BCE-70 CE). In this context, it is not the familiar guide to our moral lives but a strange and sometimes off-putting window into a culture that vanished long ago. In such an environment, it would be out of place to expect discursive arguments for or against the pagan world’s notions of our ultimate ends. Instead, the Bible will rely on its own narratives and myths to express similarity and contrast with the environment in which it was written. Reading the Bible, we must be sensitive to both the constitutive and the polemical role of mythical narratives.
The Bible, as its name implies (Ta Biblia in Greek, meaning “the little books”), is not a single work but collective work, an anthology selected from a greater output of ancient Israelite literary works for a specific, theological purpose. One of those purposes was to show the sinfulness of Canaanite culture. Another was to narrate the covenant between God and his people Israel. Yet, when we look behind the voice of the redactor, or the editor, we often see a great deal of similarity between Israel and the cultures around it. For example, Psalm 29 seems equally at home in a Canaanite context, and Psalm 104 has an uncanny resemblance to Akhenaten’s Hymn to Aten, so close, in fact, that several verses seem like direct borrowings.
That the Bible lacks a concrete narrative of the afterlife, as we have seen so often manifested in the pagan cultures around it, must, we suspect, not be just accidental or deficient; it must be part of the Biblical polemic against its environment. In contrast to the plethora of different ideas about life after death, in the great river cultures surrounding Israel, early Bible traditions seem uninterested in the notion of an afterlife. Practically every scholar who systematically surveys the oldest sections of the Biblical text is impressed with the lack of a beatific notion of the hereafter for anyone.
But that is not all that is missing: Virtually the entire mythological framework of cosmological discussion in the ancient world is lacking and the traces that remain are transformed. Everything-rain and dew, crops and increase of flocks, and historical events as well-is due to the Lord, the God of Israel. Gone is the exuberant pantheon of exalted, loving, quarreling, and warring gods. Gone too is most of the epic poetry, with its rich texture of myth glorifying the gods and ancient kings. Unlike the other ancients who reveled in the time of the gods, the illud tempus (Latin for “that time”), a mythical time at the beginning of the world when the gods and humans encountered each other directly, the Bible links the mythical past with the story of its historical figures by means of sturdy and understated prose. Everything seems to be part of the same story and narrative. The closest we get to in illo tempore (“in that time”) in the Bible is the so-called “J” source of the Pentateuch where God manifests himself directly to a few well-chosen people, in charming literary tales.
In place of the booming multiverse ruled over by unpredictable gods of the nations around them, the writers of the Bible eventually offered, in their mythology, a universe under the direction