Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [75]
All the myths we discussed in previous chapters took place in illo tempore, in that other mythical time, set off by epic poetry in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Canaan. The primeval history in the Bible is a mythical time too but it pretends, in contrast to the epic poetry we have surveyed, to be attached to our own time by unbroken genealogies and continuous prose narrative. In comparison to the cultures we have just reviewed, the first eleven chapters of Genesis are written in the same brief, concise prose narrative, designed to seem just as everyday as the events in the marketplaces of Israel.
Or, looked at another way, the events happening in the marketplaces and courts of Israel were meant to be just as important to history as the temptation of Adam and Eve in mythic time; they are all part of the same historical and moral drama.1
In the first instance this means that the rich geographical and climatic mythologies of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Canaan, which link the natural world with death and regeneration, would take a backseat in Hebrew thought. We have no great epics that explain in narrative form why the rivers flood or the crops alternate or the dew suffices when the rains stop. Instead these are all due to the direct guidance of the one god, YHWH, the Holy One of Israel. YHWH is not so much present in the events of nature as He is the director of them. And He is present in an entirely new area of human endeavor which we have not seen before: He is the God of history. It is YHWH who directs the events which happen to Israel, as well as the fates of other nations.
The Bible suggests that the people Israel and its God, whose proper name is YHWH, usually designated by the word “LORD” in English Bibles, have entered into a specific agreement called a “covenant” (Hebrew: Berîth). The agreement says that YHWH will look after the people if they keep His laws, which include worshiping Him, Him alone, and observing a variety of laws for the religious, social, and moral benefit of the people, at least as those values were understood at that time. This covenant has a history; recounting the history of the covenant, in fact, is what creates the historical narrative of the Hebrew Bible. It also means that fortune and misfortune depend on controllable variables-the behavior of the people.
Not only does this make people responsible for their own fortunes in nature, it also has consequences for the conception of the self. In place of locating themselves geographically in the great forces of nature, the Israelites locate themselves in the unique history of Israel and, later, in the history of the dispersed Jewish people. That necessarily makes each individual more aware of the unique aspects of public and private moral experience. The Bible demythologizes nature and mythologizes history.
The Bible tells us that the Israelites found the path to the exclusive worship of YHWH difficult. Reading the Bible historically and in line with archeology shows us that it was even harder than it seems from the text alone. Archeology suggests that YHWH’S cult really did not take hold completely until after the Israelites returned from Babylonian captivity in 539 BCE and that, indeed, much of the writing of Bible was edited or formulated then.
Why the Silence about the Afterlife?
IT COULD BE that Hebrew culture foresaw no significant afterlife for the dead, that the covenant had nothing to say about the afterlife except to warn against believing that another god could supply one. That belief would make the Hebrews absolutely unique among world cultures and especially strange in the ancient Near East, where elaborate ideas about postmortem existence and even more elaborate rituals were everywhere part of literature, myth, and social life.