Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [89]
In many ways, the ancient Hebrews thought of “soul” like “spirit,” though “spirit” is something that a few chosen messengers explicitly share with the deity (i.e., “the spirit of God was upon me”), in creation, in life, and perhaps later after death, but only on specific occasions. The Bible does not tell us how the spirit manifested in humans in any explicit way. It was one of the many mysterious qualities in the life of the Hebrew. When discussing the meaning of a human life, the Bible always talks about life before the grave and usually concentrates on the issue of descendants, land, and the favor of the Lord. Life after death was not a significant part of the First Temple conversation about the meaning of life, but proper burial is.
In short, the ancient Hebrew notion of “soul” has no relationship to the Pythagorean and Platonic notion of an immortal soul, which is deathless by nature and capable of attaining bodiless felicity.47 Later on, the Hebrews used the word “nefesh,” which they had been using for centuries, to do the work of the Greek notion of the word “soul” and when they wanted to express an intermediary step for the dead before they resurrected. Therefore, all these later examples will be ambiguous and difficult for us to parse because the same word can stand for either the Greek immortal soul, the intermediary state without a Greek sense of immortality, or both alternately, or even at once, in the same document. Yet, even in the Hellenistic period, many Jews spoke of the body/soul as the unity in a person.
Explicit Revivifications in the First Temple Period
THERE ARE several revivifications in the Hebrew Bible. In the Elijah-Elisha cycle, three different people are, at least, resuscitated from the dead: the son of the widow of Zarephath (1 Kgs 17:17-24), the son of the Shunamite woman (2 Kgs 4:18-37), and the man who was thrown into Elisha’s grave (2 Kgs 13:20-21). These are all treated as resuscitations. They rise from the dead to live out their normal lives. They are miracles, nevertheless, extraordinary events which are worthy of special note and not the common fate of humanity. God is even praised as the author of miraculous resuscitations in Deuteronomy 32:39 and 1 Samuel 2:6 (see 2 Kgs 5:7).48 None of them are specifically mentioned as the reward for a good life, though the mothers are praised. None are signs of a coming resurrection for all. They simply show the power of God over death and the extent of God’s favor to the prophets.
The notion that God is the author of all life and death is found in several places in the Psalms and never more poigantly than in Psalm 104:29-30:
When you hide your face, they are dismayed;
when you take away their breath49 (ruaḥ), they die and
return to their dust.
When you send forth your spirit,50 they are created;
and you renew the face of the ground.
According to Psalms, human being is purely a terrestrial creature who exists only at the pleasure of the deity.51 In essence, when the Lord gives His breath to a person, that person lives. If He removes it, that person dies.
The Rewards of the Covenant
WHAT IS MOST obvious in the history of preexilic Israelite thought is that reward and punishment are certainties in this life. It is possession of the land, many offspring, length of days, and a favored life that is promised by God for obedience to his covenant. As God says to Abraham in Genesis: “As for you yourself, you shall go to your fathers in peace; you shall be buried in a good old age” (Gen 15:15).
Land, length of days, descendants, and a happy life is what the covenant promises to the Israelites. The prophets communicate the same concept, unlike Deuteronomy, in the technical language of treaties, but in the broader language of a covenantal agreement. Many prophets speak directly of covenant