Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [96]
THE SONG OF SONGS 8:6
In a different way a famous passage in the Song of Songs tells us an enormous amount about Hebrew views of the afterlife with an almost casual remark:
Set me as a seal upon your heart,
as a seal upon your arm;
for love is strong as death,
passion fierce as the grave.
Its flashes are flashes of fire,
a raging flame. (Songs 8:6)
Marvin Pope, in his translation of The Song of Songs, has especially shown the Canaanite background to the love poetry in The Song of Songs.57 The nut-garden and the two lovers, consolidating death with love, may be part of the ritual surrounding the memorialization of the rpa’um, in Hebrew the “Refa’im.” Is this an explicit reference to presumed sexual license in the marzeaḥ ritual? Pope may well be right in his version; there are certainly many difficulties in understanding the passage. In addition, the poem contains marks of the presence of Canaanite gods (i.e., the word “reshef,” also the name of a Canaanite god, occurs twice in v 6b). But the basic meaning is also clear to all without positing a marzeaḥ. The Canaanite context is scarcely predominant even to those who have read the ancient Hebrew documents.
More important than the message the poem proclaims about love is the message it gives about mortality. We normally assume that love is stronger than death. But this passage says nothing of the sort. Certainly not a paean to undying love, the passage actually assumes a mortal world in which death holds sway. In that context, to say that it is love-embodied, passion included-which can, in a desperate contest, be the equal of death is not an optimistic statement for us in the Christian west. This is a striking contrast to European and American poetic tropes where love conquers all, even death. This sentiment is not so in Hebrew thought. Death is the strongest force on earth other than God Himself. Not even love can conquer death, though love can briefly make a beautiful and awesome conflagration. The references to seals in Song of Songs are obscure but the passage says that love and lovemaking can equal death in power by making life worthwhile. It is the statement, rather, of a person who has accepted a fatalistic world and found in it one thing which gives partial consolation to short, and often painful human lives.
The Garden of Eden as a Myth of Lost Immortality: Our Myth or Theirs?
THE ISRAELITES tried to banish the nature myths of Canaan and the native ancestor worship after a great deal of trouble. But the Israelites also valorized an historical myth of YHWH’S covenant that bears investigating in the context of life after death. The creation stories in Genesis, indeed the first eleven chapters of Genesis totally, are nothing other than myths retold as if they were history. Ironically, however, the effect of the myth has been much stronger on our society than on that of the Israelites. The Israelites do not mention the garden of Eden often in subsequent literature. But we have so overlaid the story of the garden of Eden with commentary, so remythologized the story, that the Hebrews themselves would likely find it unrecognizable, if not embarrassing.
No story in history has had a more important effect on Western thought than the story of the garden of Eden. In its Christian version especially, it has been the source of the West’s assumptions about life, death, immortality, and sexuality. But, a great deal of what we associate with the story is actually absent from the text. These associations have been supplied by various interpretive contexts over the centuries. To take a trivial example, the “apple” of Western iconography is entirely absent from the Hebrew text. So is Satan absent, just as he is absent in Job. This time not even the word “Satan” appears in the text. This has not stopped Western culture from seeing the snake