Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [87]
Burials under floorboards were also common in the Iron Age. Perhaps those buried there were more in need of care or more closely associated with the household, such as women and children. Infants were often buried in storage jars there, close to an adult.40 Twenty percent of the burials were not found either in cemeteries or settlements but in open fields. It is hard to interpret this datum. They may just have been the owners or tenants of the land. But they may also have been the community’s leaders exclusively, who were perhaps understood to be the “guardians” of the crops. The practice of placing graves in fields was still common enough in the Talmudic period that it was mentioned without special legal comment in tractate Pe’ah.41
The poor could be buried in common graves (2 Kgs 23:6). Wealthy Israelites buried their dead in family tombs, like the Canaanites (Gen 23; 2 Sam 19:38; 1 Kgs 13:22). There are no obvious mortuary temples above the graves as in the royal houses of Ugarit, which is an important but inconclusive datum. Whether for the rich or the poor, the graves were often reused, especially in Iron Age times, with the bones being pushed aside or alternatively collected in pits where they were gathered for final disposition. In the Hebrew cases, we think that the bones were pushed aside more frequently than in the Canaanite cases. It is safe to say that in most respects the customs of the ordinary Israelites in burial scarcely differed from the Canaanites at all, and we often have difficulty distinguishing them in archeological sites, especially before the end of the eighth century BCE, when the effects of the prophets and finally the Deuteronomic Reform (621 BCE) began to enforce a purified religion.42
The Soul, or Nefesh, and the Spirit, or ruaḥ
IF THE TERM “soul” (nefesh, npš, nepeš) in Hebrew means what it appears to mean, then there has to be something that survives death in the ancient Biblical world. Unlike the Canaanite cognate, the “nefesh” in Hebrew largely refers to a quality of a living person. Evidently, “nefesh” means what we would call a “soul,” generally meaning a human being’s personality or “personhood.”
The word for what survives death in ancient Hebrew is “refa’” (repa’, plural, refa’im), which essentially means “ghost” or “spirit.” Much has been made of these two word uses by scholars who question the consensus that the Hebrew Scriptures do not give us a doctrine of the afterlife.43 John W. Cooper is especially anxious to impart the notion of “an ensouled afterlife,” an intermediate state, to Hebrew thought. He is joined by James Barr who suggests in his provocative book on life after death that in Hebrew thought, the nefesh or refa’ survives death in a significant and important way.44
Yet, there are not many grounds for optimism about what lies beyond the grave nor for thinking that this was the basis of later notions of immortal souls in a a beatific afterlife. The Bible does not describe an afterlife with anywhere near the intensity of the Mesopotamians or Canaanites, and if it existed in popular religion (as seems obvious), there is little reason to suspect that it would be any more beatific than the Canaanite notions.
True, refa’ (“ghost”) is logically a survival of the identity of the person. But to call nefesh an “intermediate state” is to assume that the ancient Israelites expected an amelioration in the afterlife or an intermediate state before the prophetic “end of days.” There is no ancient evidence for an intermediate state; how the dead were to participate in “the day of the LORD,” which the prophets sometimes predicted, is not evident. First, there are centuries of