Resurrection in the Torah: A Second Look
If the understanding of the self of older Israelite literature
is taken
into account, the affinities of biblical narrative with the doctrine of
the resurrection of the dead are greater than first appears.
By Jon. D. Levenson
About the Author: Jon Levenson is surely the most interesting and incisive biblical exegete among contemporary Jewish thinkers. Moving easily among modern methods of biblical study, midrash and other traditional Jewish commentary, and traditional Christian commentary, his writings are influential well beyond the borders of Judaism itself, read with fascination by Christian exegetes and systematic theologians, and indeed by unbelievers and those of more distant religious affiliation. Particularly theses developed in The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son: The Transformation of Child Sacrifice in Judaism and Christianity (1993) have provoked intense discussion, and shape the reading of Scripture even where his theses themselves are not accepted. He received his bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees from Harvard, where he now serves as the Alfred A. List Professor of Jewish Studies. Before returning to Harvard, he taught at Wellesley (1975-1982) and at the University of Chicago (1982-1988).
I.
Although it is often said that the rabbinic Judaism of Late Antiquity defined itself by deeds, not creeds, by observances, that is, and not by beliefs, there are a few texts that specify doctrines that a faithful Jew must accept.1 The best known among these is in the Mishnah, the first law code of rabbinic Judaism, promulgated about 200 CE:
All Israelites have a share in the world-to-come, as it is written:
“ And your people, all of them righteous,
Shall possess the land for all time;
They are the shoot that I planted,
My handiwork in which I glory.” (Isa. 60:21)2And these are the ones who do not have a share in the world-to-come: He who says that the resurrection of the dead is not in the Torah, [he who says] that the Torah is not from Heaven, and the skeptic.
Rabbi Akiva says: Also he that reads in the outside books, and he who utters an incantation over a wound, saying, “I will not bring upon you any of the diseases that I brought upon the Egyptians, for I the LORD am your healer.” (Exod. 15:26)
Abba Saul says, “Also he who pronounces the Name according to its letters.” (M. Sanh. 10:1)
The first item in this catalogue of heresies stands out for its insistence that the believer attribute a scriptural warrant to the orthodoxy in question. It is not sufficient simply to accept the doctrine that the dead shall arise; the Jew must also believe that the Torah itself so teaches.3 Surely, few examples of exegesis in Late Antiquity are more baffling than this. For little eschatology appears in the Pentateuch, and that which does envisions no revivification of individuals but focuses instead only on national triumph and vindication.4 We whose view of the text is highly indebted to three centuries of historical criticism instinctively regard this effort to find a prediction of a general resurrection in the Pentateuch as misguided, for we know that the doctrine in question takes shape and moves to the fore only late in the period of the Second Temple (that is, after 300 BCE).5 But were this skepticism only a product of modern critical thinking, the Tannaitic rabbis—not to mention their Pharisaic predecessors and New Testament contemporaries—would hardly have exerted themselves so strenuously to oppose it. Indeed, the effect of critical historical thinking is to vindicate the opposition to the rabbinic belief in resurrection, opposition represented, as is well known, by the Sadducees, but by others as well. The rabbis certainly had their work cut out for them.
One strategy they employed was to give a future interpretation to verses that seem at first glance to speak of past events. For example, the preface to the Song of the Sea reads:
Then sang Moses and the Israelites this song to the LORD. (Exod. 15:1a)
The Mekilta de-Rabbi Ishmael, an early midrash collection on parts of Exodus, observing correctly that “sometimes the word ‘then’ refers to the past and sometimes to the future age,” places our verse in the former category: at that moment, having crossed the sea, Moses and the Israelites sang the ensuing celebratory hymn. Rabbi Judah ha-Nasi, the redactor of the Mishnah, dissents, however:
“Then Moses sang” is not written here, but rather “Then Moses will sing.” Thus we are instructed that the resurrection of the dead can be derived from the Torah. (Mek., Shirata 1)
The dissent is premised upon a point of Hebrew grammar that changed in the transition from the biblical language to the rabbinic. In rabbinic Hebrew, if the prefix conjugation of verbs that are not in a narrative sequence have a tense value at all, it is usually future. In biblical Hebrew, in contrast, the matter was more complicated. After certain words, such as az (“then”) or terem (“not yet”), the prefix conjugation often (but not always) refers to the past (cf. Num. 21:17; Deut. 4:41; Josh. 8:30; 10:12; 22:1; 1 Kgs. 3:16; 8:1).6 Rabbi Judah ha-Nasi’s point is that if the Torah wanted us to understand Moses’ singing as having already occurred, it would have used the suffix conjugation (sar), which in rabbinic Hebrew (but not biblical) is the regular form for past tense narration. Hence, the singing in question must refer to the future—to a time, that is, after Moses has already died and, if the verse is to be proven true, resurrected as well.
This interpretation makes for exceedingly bad philology, to be sure, but also for rich and powerful theology. (Here, I cannot resist the remark that had the ancients adhered to scientific philology, they would never have made many of their most profound theological observations about the Bible.) For Rabbi Judah ha-Nasi’s reading places the celebratory hymn in the eschatological future, and in so doing, it presents the resurrection of the dead as a radical reversal of the sort attested in the other verses that use “then” (’az) in an eschatological sense, cleverly listed in the Mekilta. These verses speak of Israel seeing and “glowing” as the wealth of nations passes to them and their temple (Isa. 60:5); of the light of redemption bursting upon them, as the LORD comes to their rescue and their vindication (58:8); of the lame leaping like a deer (35:6); of the eyes of the blind being opened and the ears of the deaf unstopped (v. 5); of maidens dancing gaily when God has turned “mourning to joy” (Jer. 31:13); and of Israel’s mouth being filled with laughter and the nations saying, “The LORD has done great things for them” (Ps. 126:2). In other words, whereas a plain-sense reading of the Song of the Sea understands it as a celebration of Israel’s redemption from Egypt, vindication over their oppressors, and miraculous passage through the sea, in Rabbi Judah ha-Nasi’s reading, it celebrates an even greater redemption, an even greater vindication, and an even greater and more miraculous passage: the redemption of the dead, the vindication of the righteous, and the passage from death to life. The exodus has become a prototype of ultimate redemption, and historical liberation has become a partial but proleptic experience of eschatological liberation, a token, perhaps the token of things to come. The full activation of God’s potential in the classical foundational past has been transformed into a sign of the still greater activation of his potential in the future consummation—a consummation that moves the Jews not merely from slavery to freedom, but quite literally from death to life as well. Beneath this last transformation lies a conviction that so long as human beings are subject to death, they are not altogether free: Resurrection is the ultimate and final liberation. Another midrash (that is, rabbinic interpretation of biblical verses) states the same point with epigrammatic concision: “There is no free person except him over whom the Angel of Death has no power.”7 This will not, I admit, warm the hearts of those who believe, as many American Jews do (including some who should know better), that Judaism is a strictly this-worldly religion and that it is primarily human beings who build the redeemed order for which it waits. But it is a point with deep resonance in classical rabbinic Judaism and, more importantly for our purposes, one that the rabbis thought essential not only to the Oral Torah but even to the Written Torah, the Pentateuch, as well.
And that is where the rub lies. To moderns given to historical thinking, Rabbi Judah ha-Nasi’s reading of Exod. 15:1a represents a thoroughgoing reinterpretation and recontextualization of the biblical text and testifies to the sea change that the introduction of the doctrine of resurrection brought about. It is, in other words, a marvelous example of the “rewritten Bible” of ancient Judaism.8 To the rabbi himself, however, his reading involves no reinterpretation or recontextualization, and no recognition of historical development. The very grammar of the verse, he claims, supports his view that the Torah itself affirms the resurrection of the dead. This example, connecting as it does with several deep themes in rabbinic thought, involves more theological profundity than most, but it is only one of several attempts in rabbinic literature to show that the Torah endorses resurrection, or, to put it differently, that resurrection is not a sectarian tenet of the rabbinic party (and their Pharisaic predecessors), but an intrinsic element of the Mosaic legacy of the whole House of Israel.
Another Tannaitic attempt to validate the now ancient doctrine exegetically should sound familiar to any reader of the New Testament:
Rabbi Simai says: How do we know that the resurrection of the dead can be derived from the Torah? From the verse, “I also established My covenant with them [i.e., Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob], to give them the land of Canaan” (Exod. 6: 4), “To you” is not written but “to them.” Hence, resurrection of the dead can be derived from the Torah (b. Sanh. 90b).
The parallel with Jesus’ dispute with the Sadducees in Mk. 12:26-27 // Matt. 22:31-33 is patent. How can God fulfill his covenantal promise to give the land to the patriarchs if they have already died? Only, maintains Rabbi Simai (like Jesus), by raising them from the dead. Again we find the exegesis far-fetched, but it is worth reflecting for a moment about why. The essence of the problem with Rabbi Simai’s interpretation, we instinctively sense, is quite simple: it fails to recognize that in the biblical text the covenantal promise to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob can be altogether successfully fulfilled through their descendants—that is, those who bear their name and continue their identity—even after the ancestors have themselves passed away. The point is clear in the very first attestation of the land promise: “I will assign this land to your offspring . . .” (Gen. 12:7). The distinction between Abraham and his descendants as the recipient of the promise is quite foreign to biblical thought. The patriarchs stand for their descendants, and the descendants are already present in the patriarchs—as the “seed,” to use the biblical terminology, that comes out of them. If, as has long been noticed,9 the patriarchs of Genesis enact in advance large parts of the national story, their descendants, in turn, experience not only the tribulations foreshadowed in the lives of their ancestors but also the fulfillments that the latter, taken merely as individuals, never lived to see. The point is that the Tanakh (the Jewish Bible) does not see the patriarchs merely as individuals.
The rabbis, however, did see them as historical individuals, but very special ones in that they were graced to live out a providential drama centered on their seed, the people Israel. They were individuals, to be sure, but they were also types (typoi). In the older Israelite culture, these two categories, individual and type, are united in the figure of the ancestor, a figure who, in some sense difficult for us modern westerners to grasp, encompassed his or her descendants in an inextricable linkage. My central claim here is that if one takes the understanding of the self of the older Israelite literature into account, the affinities of biblical narrative with the later doctrine of the resurrection of the dead are much greater than first appears to be the case. Lest I be misunderstood, I must immediately register some disclaimers. The first is that I am arguing only for a certain degree of functional equivalence between the later idea of resurrection and the Pentateuchal phenomena that I shall discuss. I am not arguing for the historically indefensible notion that the older literature expected a resurrection of the dead along the lines of what would much later come to be the Jewish and the Christian orthodoxy, mutatis mutandis. Nor, needless to say, am I about to give an account of all the complex factors that occurred over the centuries of the Second Temple period that eventually yielded that enduring doctrine. I recognize, of course, the importance of that subject, and I am well aware that a predominately Christian readership will naturally gravitate to the later stages, given the widespread Christian tendency to associate the word “resurrection” with Jesus. But I would like to think that Christians, too, would be bothered by the idea that resurrection of the dead stands in radical opposition to the Torah, especially since their own scripture reports that Jesus thought otherwise. Finally, a word to Christians, Jews, and others who think that Judaism holds no such belief but rather maintains that death is final and irreversible. To judge from the prayerbooks of liberal Judaism, which tend to obscure and evade notion of the resurrection of the dead (tehiyyat hammetim in rabbinic parlance), this is indeed the case. But it is not the case in Orthodoxy, and my argument here may suggest that the elimination of this once central doctrine in other forms of modern Judaism is more problematic than first seems the case.
II.
Let us return to the issue of how God can fulfill his promise to the patriarchs long after they have died. Here, we butt against the nettlesome issue of the construction of personal identity that allows an individual to encompass his descendants. The first stage on the path to comprehension is to divest ourselves of certain characteristically modern (but not uniquely modern) habits of thought. Basing himself on Charles Taylor’s highly suggestive study of the Sources of the Self,10 Robert Di Vito points out in a recent article that “salient features of modern identity, such as its pronounced individualism, are grounded in modernity’s location of the self in the ‘inner depths’ of one’s interiority rather than in one’s social role or public relations.”11 Di Vito, cautioning against the naïve assumption that ancient Israel adhered to the same conception of the self, develops four points of contrast between modern and ancient Israelite thinking on this point. In the Hebrew Bible, he writes,
the subject (1) is deeply embedded, or engaged, in its social identity, (2) is comparatively decentered and undefined with respect to personal boundaries, (3) is relatively transparent, socialized, and embodied (in other words, is altogether lacking in a sense of ‘inner depths’), and (4) is ‘authentic’ precisely in its heteronomy, in its obedience to another and dependence upon another.12
Although Di Vito’s formulation may be overstated and too simple—is every biblical figure, even David, presented as “altogether lacking in a sense of ‘inner depths’”?—his first and last points, in particular, are highly instructive and alert us to the dangers that await anyone who assumes that “life” and “death” mean the same thing in ancient Israel as in the modern West. The contrast between the biblical and the modern Western constructions of personal identity is especially sharp when one considers the structure of what Di Vito calls “the patriarchal family.” This “system,” he tells us, “with strict subordination of individual goals to those of the extended lineal group, is designed to ensure the continuity and survival of the family.”13 In the modern Western type of society, individuals may draw consolation from the thought that their group (however defined) will survive their own deaths. There is no reason to doubt that ancient Israelites did so, too. But in a society like ancient Israel, in which “the subject is deeply embedded, or engaged, in its social identity,” “with strict subordination of individual goals to those of the extended lineal group,” the loss of the subject’s own life and the survival of the familial group cannot but have had a different resonance from the one most familiar to us. For even though the subject’s death is irreversible—his nepes having died just like the rest of him—the fulfillment of his life may yet occur, for identity survives death. Thus can God keep his promise to Abraham even after Abraham as an individual subject has died. Indeed, in light of Di Vito’s point that “the subject is comparatively decentered and undefined with respect to personal boundaries,” the very distinction between Abraham and the nation whose covenant came through him (Genesis 15; 17), or, for that matter, between David and the Judean dynasty whom his divine patron has pledged never to abandon (2 Sam. 7:8-16; Ps. 89:20-38), is too facile.
Given this embeddedness in family, there is, however, a threat that does very much evoke the terror and the depression that death provokes in more individualistic cultures. This is the threat of the absence or loss of descendants. Note that in Priestly literature, the ultimate penalty is karet, which Donald J.Wold, following rabbinic precedents, defines as the “divine curse of extinction,” “not annihilation in general but a premature and childless death.”14 The specter of childlessness drives several key biblical narratives, especially in Genesis. The story of Abraham is the parade example:
Some time later, the word of the LORD came to Abram in a vision. He said,
“ Fear not, Abram,
I am a shield to you;
Your reward shall be very great.”
But Abram said, “O LORD GOD, what can You give me, seeing that I shall die childless!” (Gen. 15:1-2a)
The future patriarch’s assumption here is that all the reward in the world, even having God as one’s personal protector, cannot compensate for childlessness. And, later in the redacted narrative, the proof that Abraham (his name is changed from “Abram” in chap. 17) truly “fears God,” that he places obedience to the divine command above his personal welfare, is that he is willing to sacrifice the promised son when at long last his previously barren and now elderly primary wife has borne him (22:11-12).15 Job’s miseries, too, like Abraham’s, begin with his loss of his children (Job 1:13-19), and this readily provokes suicidal thoughts (chap. 3)—and an existential and theological crisis that has continued to reverberate through the millennia. Here, bereavement of progeny is the functional equivalent of death, and here, too, the patriarchal figure’s restoration inevitably entails his recovery of his seven sons and his three daughters (Job 42:13; cf. 1:2). At this point, we moderns, of course, immediately protest. The loss has not really been made good at all, we indignantly insist, since these are not the same children as those who died at the start of Job’s woes. But that very objection only demonstrates the distance between our individualistic and non-familial construction of personal identity and the highly collective and familial concept that underlies these ancient Israelite narratives. However we may feel about Job’s restoration, the epilogue to the Book of Job gives no indication whatsoever that the authors or redactors thought that grief about his dead children in any way impaired Job’s contentment at the time of his own death. The sufferer has endured death and successfully recovered from it.
A comparison between the Mesopotamian and the Israelite flood narratives provides a striking illumination of the familial conception of survival on which I have been focusing. In the Mesopotamian story as it is preserved in the epic of Gilgamesh, the survivor of the flood, and he alone, is granted eternal life:
Hitherto Utnapishtim has been but human [the god Enlil pronounces].
Henceforth Utnapishtim and his wife shall be like unto us gods.
Utnapishtim shall reside far away, at the mouth of the rivers!16
The Israelite Utnapishtim, Noah, is also granted eternal life after the flood. But his comes in the form not of personal immortality, but of familial survival. The God of Israel makes an “everlasting covenant” “between [Himself] and all flesh that is on earth” that he will “never again [cause] a flood to destroy all flesh” (Gen. 9:8-17). This “everlasting covenant” is of essentially the same type as the “everlasting covenant” with Abraham of which we read in Genesis 17, marked “throughout the generations” by the circumcision of males at the age of eight days. It also recalls, to give but one more example, the eternal covenant between God and David (2 Samuel 23:5; cf. Psalm 89:29). In all cases, what is described is a kind of dynastic grant, in which God promises to uphold the family of his covenant partner “throughout the generations.”17 This is the Israelite counterpart to the immortality and deification that the Babylonian Noah, Utnapishtim, received and that Gilgamesh, terrified of death, so frantically sought.
Similarly, in the Book of Ruth, a tale that begins with famine, expatriation, and death (Ruth 1:1-5) is transformed into one of abundance, homecoming, integration of the alien, and, most importantly of all, birth (2:14-19; 4:7-15). Through Ruth—now married to Boaz and on her way to becoming a matriarch of the House of Judah and thus of its royal line (4:11-12)—her thrice bereaved mother-in-law Naomi, herself apparently past her childbearing years (1:12-13), becomes the equivalent of a mother (4:16-17). The deaths of her husband and two sons, which occasioned her renaming herself Mara (“bitter”) in place of Naomi (derived from a word for “pleasantness” or “sweetness,” 1:19b-21), has now been reversed, and she is once again “Naomi,” her bitter, death-beset life now sweetened (4:17). “Shaddai has made my lot very bitter,” she had once told the women of Bethlehem. “I went away full and the LORD has brought me back empty” (1: 20-21a). But by the end of the story, when Ruth has given birth, Naomi, too, has been brought back full. As in Job, the tragedies of the first chapter are reversed, and then some, in the last. Here, too, though death is real, the last word of the God of Israel is not death, but life.
In the case of Abraham and Sarah, it can be argued that the motivation for the triumph of survival over destruction is the patriarchal promise that drives the entire Book of Genesis from chap. 12 on. Abraham is to father a great nation, as the three pentateuchal sources evident in this narrative unanimously insist.18 In the case of Ruth, too, the story has, or has been given, an etiological function. Ruth and Naomi as well (Ruth 4:16-17) become the ancestors of David and thus of the Judahite royal dynasty. No such rationale, however, can be detected in the case of Job, who may not, in fact, be portrayed as an Israelite at all and whose descendants after the first generation are unknown. This suggests that the theme of miraculous survival in the face of overwhelming odds is not owing to the particular promise to Israel. Rather, the direction is the reverse: the promise to Israel formulated in Genesis is a promise of life as that term was understood in the culture—the continuation of the lineage. The earlier Ugaritic tales of Kirta and Aqhat add support for this claim, by the way. Both stories speak of a bereaved father, and certainly in the case of Kirta and possibly in that of Aqhat, the bereavement ends, and the lost sons reappear.19
The tales of Abraham, Job, and Ruth and Naomi, though much more developed in narrative artistry than most, are hardly unique within the Hebrew Bible. In more rudimentary form (though perhaps epitomizing longer oral formulations), the pattern in which birth reverses death can be found in many other stories. Its earliest attestation (in terms of literary order, whatever the chronology of composition) lies in the folk etymology of Adam and Eve’s third son, whom the latter “named Seth, meaning ‘God has provided me with another offspring in place of Abel, for Cain killed him’” (Gen. 4:25).20 Twenty-three generations later, Judah, ancestor of the royal line from which David would hail, loses two sons, the second because of a refusal to fulfill the Levirate requirement “to provide offspring for his brother” (Gen. 38:9; see Deut. 25:5-10)—the very requirement that reversed Ruth and Naomi’s bereavement. Having refused to release his third son for fear the same fate would befall him, too, and mistaking his widowed daughter-in-law for a prostitute, Judah inadvertently fulfills the requirement himself.21 In the end of this strange and disquieting tale, full of odd twists and unexpected reversals, the man who lost two sons gains twins, as the widow whose in-laws neglected her gives birth to the boys who will carry on her father-in-law’s tribe. One chapter earlier, Jacob loses (so far as he knows) his beloved son Joseph, and the sight of the latter’s bloody tunic plunges him into mourning and depression (Gen. 37:31-35). As in the story of Naomi and Ruth, so here death is conjoined with famine and exile, as the surviving sons of Jacob leave the promised land and descend into Egypt in search of grain (minus the new beloved son Benjamin, Joseph’s younger and only full brother). When they return without Simeon,22 who Joseph has demanded be kept as a hostage in lieu of Benjamin, Jacob understandably sees himself bereft of two sons, and, to add insult to injury, he now faces the demand to release a third as well (Gen. 42:36). Yet it is precisely the release of the third son that eventually restores the other two, saves the family from lethal famine, and reunites it after a long estrangement.23 Jacob’s response to his sons’ report that “Joseph is still alive; yes, he is ruler over the whole land of Egypt” nicely highlights the pattern of death and revival that underlies the Joseph story. “His heart went numb, for he did not believe them,” the narrator reports. “But when they recounted all that Joseph had said to them, and when he saw the wagons that Joseph had sent to transport him, the spirit of their father Jacob revived” (Gen. 45:26-27).
Jacob’s own apparent death and revival here encapsulate the underlying movement of the entire tale, a tale of the apparent death of children reversed through the providential restoration of them to their grieving father. Since the comic resolution focuses on the same children lost in the tragic opening, the pattern is more reminiscent of the aqedah, or binding of Isaac (Gen. 22:1-19), than of the Books of Ruth and Job. For the latter books close with the birth of new children rather than the restoration of those lost in the first chapter of each book. As we noted in connection with Job’s restoration, however, too much should not be made of the difference. For in each case a death—apparent, real, or threatened—is reversed, and a parent gains or retains progeny after death has made its terrifying presence known. In fact, in the case at hand, Jacob, who at the beginning of the tale had thought he had lost two sons, acquires two new sons at its end when, on his deathbed, he adopts Joseph’s children as his own (Gen. 48:5-7; 1 Chr. 5:1). Birth again qualifies and diminishes the finality of death.
It is crucial to understand that the qualification is not automatic. Death has not lost its fearfulness so long as it is only a possibility that birth might reverse it. And when, in some cases (such as Abraham’s), it is a divine promise that underlies the birth and survival of an heir, trust in the promise does not come easily—hence Sarah’s laugh in J (Gen. 18:12-15) and Abraham’s in P (Gen. 17:17). In other instances, no assurance is given that parents will not die bereft. Birth in this understanding can qualify the finality of death, but nothing in nature guarantees that birth will take place, and given the rates of infant mortality and maternal death in childbirth in such a society, much in nature makes it likely that it will not. The texts we have been discussing display, in short, anything but a calm assurance of continuation. Rather, they speak of a lethal assault on the survival of the family—one that is, nonetheless, miraculously repelled or reversed, as life replaces death. Another way of putting this is to say that the functional equivalent of what these texts affirm is indeed resurrection and not immortality of the soul. For they speak of the miraculous reversal of the very real and very potent forces of death. They do not speak of the survival of the self after the body, the real person’s eminently dispensable physical casing in this view, dies away forever. The new life incarnate in the children born to the bereft parents is not “spiritual” in the sense of existing in a disembodied state. Rather, it is eminently and unashamedly physical and biological or—to use a term that has often been deployed to disparage Jewish peoplehood—carnal, but also more than that. Interestingly, the replacement of the classical language of resurrection with affirmations of immortality is one of the hallmarks of those liberal Jewish prayerbooks I mentioned earlier.24 Whatever is to be said on behalf of this change, it is anything but a reversion to the biblical situation. (I must caution that the difference between resurrection and immortality should not be overdrawn, as it often has been. There is no reason that a culture cannot adhere to both of these in one way or another, as rabbinic Judaism, inter alia, does.)
Earlier, we saw that the construction of personal identity in biblical Israel renders problematic the conventional claim that the Pentateuch in particular, and the Hebrew Bible in general (with the exception of a few late passages), offers no expectation of survival after death. A more accurate generalization is that the hope for survival centers on the family, including (eventually) the extended family that is the nation, the whole House of Israel. If this seems to offer modern Westerners scant consolation in the face of their own inevitable death, as indeed it does, this is primarily because modern constructions of personal identity perceive higher and more rigid boundaries between the subject and the social group, especially the involuntary grouping that is the family. When the emphasis lies on the individual and his or her power of self-determination, as it generally does in modern Western thought, then the loss of the individual to death will inevitably seem catastrophic and irreversible (unless, of course, it can be reversed through resurrection). In that case, the survival of the family through new births offers nothing more than purely psychological consolation, of whatever worth. It relieves the burden of grief, but does not affect the objective situation. To the modern Western mind of the sort I am describing, it seems right to say that Naomi, Ruth, and Job carry on and rebuild in the last chapters of the respective books after the deaths reported in the first chapters. But to imply in addition, as those biblical tales do, that the births of Ruth’s son Obed and Job’s seven new sons and three new daughters overcome the deaths of Naomi’s husband and two sons-in-law, and Job’s first set of seven sons and three daughters seems to miss the point badly. To us, the shadow of death always overcasts, at least to a small degree, the felicity that the Books of Ruth and Job predicate of Naomi, Ruth, and Job at the end of their travail. We look in vain for some acknowledgement that the newfound or recovered felicity is not absolute, since death is. The evidence presented here strongly suggests that the authors of these books thought otherwise.
If this is correct, then we must qualify rather severely the ubiquitous claim that until the emergence of the idea of resurrection, ancient Israelite culture (at least as reflected in the Hebrew Bible) thought death to be in accord with God’s will. I am thinking, to give but one example, of the sort of generalization made by Lloyd R. Bailey, when he writes in his survey of Biblical Perspectives on Death that “mortality as the Creator’s design for humans . . . seems to be the basic perspective of the O[ld] T[estament] literature.”25 This is, to be sure, true to a large degree at the level of the individual (the level on which we instinctively focus), but it misses the import of the countervailing promise of familial survival and continuation. Or, to put it differently, this generalization misses that deep embeddedness, that deep engagement, of the subject in its social identity of which Di Vito writes.26 We shall badly misunderstand the complexity of the Israelite view of life and death if we limit ourselves to the familiar dichotomy of “mortality as the Creator’s design,” on the one hand, and personal immortality, on the other.
It is of capital importance to our subject that the notions of familial restoration and survival so evident in stories of Israel’s origin are also prominent in predictions of her future consummation. This is especially the case in the oracles of Second and Third Isaiah, e.g.:
5Fear not, for I am with you:
I will bring your folk from the East,
Will gather you out of the West;
6I will say to the North, “Give back!”
And to the South, “Do not withhold!
Bring My sons from afar,
And My daughters from the end of the earth—
7All who are linked to My name,
Whom I have created,
Formed, and made for My glory—
8Setting free that people,
Blind though it has eyes
And deaf though it has ears.” (Isa. 43:5-8)
At the center of this new redemption lies an element unprecedented in the exodus but well known, as we have observed, from the patriarchal narratives of Genesis and from the Ugaritic literature before it: the return of the lost sons and daughters (v. 6). Note that although the recovered sons and daughters in this oracle are those of its addressee, Jacob/Israel (v 1), the LORD still refers to them as “My sons” and “My daughters.” Here, perhaps an analogy should be drawn with those royal psalms in which the God of Israel becomes the father of David, son of Jesse, or of his descendents.27 In any event, in the oracle from Isaiah 43, the God of Israel assumes a role like that of Jacob himself, of course, but also like that of Job, Naomi, or, for that matter, King Kirta and perhaps Dan’el of the Ugaritic poems. He becomes the parent who against all odds recovers his lost children and with them the promise for continuation that they represent, thus, not incidentally restoring his own fatherhood in the process.
A variant of the same image occurs in those striking oracles of Second Isaiah that speak of Israel as a barren woman who, like Sarah in Genesis (especially in P; see Gen. 17:16), shall give birth to a multitude:
Shout, O barren one,
You who bore no child!
Shout aloud for joy,
You who did not travail!
For the children of the wife forlorn
Shall outnumber those of the espoused
—said the LORD. (Isa. 54:1)
The image is of a piece with that of Israel as a widow whose lost husband returns to her, or as a divorcee whose ex-husband’s love and compassion have at last overwhelmed his righteous anger (Isa. 54:4-8). My point is not simply the truism that Second Isaiah, like Hosea and Jeremiah before him (e.g., Hos. 1-2; Jer. 3:6-13), viewed Israel’s covenant with their God as a marriage. Rather, I want to stress that the restoration of the relationship through remarriage entails a reversal of the calamities of the exile, and central to that restoration is the engendering of new children, an unexpected generation whose very existence signals that Israel and her land have been revitalized and that the God who once left a widow behind yet lives.28 In this respect, the distance is not great between these oracles of Second and Third Isaiah and Ezekiel’s visionary parable of Israel about to be restored as dry bones in the process of revivification (Ezek. 37:1-14). For, although the individuals who make up the people Israel in that vision will die, just as their sinning fathers died before them, the people itself—the family, that is, in its fullest scope—is resurrected, coming “out of the graves” and “[in]to the land of Israel,” as Ezekiel puts it (v. 12).29 In this famous vision, we can already begin to see the lineaments of that midrash of Rabbi Judah ha-Nasi we examined earlier, in which Moses sings the Song of the Sea in the eschatological era after he has been raised from the dead. And we can begin to see the dim outline of the idea of the people Israel’s national recovery not simply through birth but through regeneration after death.
The literature that I have been discussing regards the threat of death, then, as real and terrifying, yet also reversible. As I have said, these texts display none of the assurance and tranquility associated with the notion of the immortality of the soul.30 Their protagonists, rather, hope against hope for continuation and the fertility and safety that make it possible. They seek divine protection against the death-dealing forces that threaten the family by closing wombs and taking children away. This literature exhibits, in other words, a highly agonistic worldview. The dichotomy that knows only the acceptance of mortality as God’s design, on the one hand, or the belief in an immortal soul, on the other, cannot accommodate the dynamism inherent in these narratives. Parallels do, however, exist. Just as created nature in the biblical vision is not a steady state of serenity but rather a precarious order maintained or renewed in the face of potent and malevolent chaos (e.g., Isa. 51:4-11; Ps. 74:10-23);31 and just as righteousness is often, perhaps usually, seen as vindication against powerful and successful evildoers and their false accusations (e.g., Jer. 15:15-21; Ps. 25:18-22; 35); so is the continued life of the family a triumph over the forces of death and a vindication against evil. It is, in short, a consequence of struggle, a turning back of the very real and deadly forces of adversity that, in the natural course of things, so easily and inevitably hold sway.
III.
If these reflections are correct, they require, as noted earlier, a substantial qualification of the commonly accepted generalization that, in Bailey’s words, “mortality as the Creator’s design for humans . . . seems to be the basic perspective of the O[ld] T[estament] literature.”32 For many biblical narratives and prophetic visions of redemption alike portray the death of the descendants as reversible. The living replace the dead, and the loss of the bereaved is made good. That the individuals who are the gladdened parents and their restored children will themselves die does not seem to impair the redemptive vision of this literature in the minds of its authors.
I should like to suggest another, related sense in which even for individuals, mortality is not part of the “Creator’s design.” This is not to deny, of course, that the death of the individual is indeed universal and irreversible in the Hebrew Bible. There are only a very few exceptions, and no generalization should be built on them.33 As the wise woman of Tekoa eloquently puts it to David, “We must all die; we are like water that is poured out on the ground and cannot be gathered up” (2 Sam. 14:14, but note even here that her argument is that David should work for familial and intergenerational reconciliation by bringing back Absalom). There are, nonetheless, more than a few texts that indicate that mortality is not the Deity’s highest hope for humankind and that the death of even the wicked falls below the divine ideal (even when he must decree it). The best known of these is, of course, Genesis 3, in which (at least in its present form) the LORD God deprives the man access to the Tree of Life because of his transgression (Gen. 3:22-24). Presumably, had the man not eaten of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, he might have attained immortality with no objection on the part of the Deity.34 Similarly, Deuteronomy 30 portrays Moses as he puts before Israel the great covenantal decision between blessing and curse, obedience and disobedience, life and death. “Choose life,” the preacher exhorts, “if you and your offspring would live” (Deut. 30:19). In this powerful offer of life, Deuteronomy joins both the Priestly traditions (Lev. 18:5, H) and Wisdom literature (e.g., Prov. 15:24), which extend the same offer, each in its own vocabulary. Note, too, that in Priestly law, the dead are a source of contamination (Num. 19:11-22) from which the priesthood (the kohanim) must normally stay away (Lev. 21:1-4), and that in hymnic and lament literature we read five times that the dead do not praise God (Isa. 38:18; Pss. 6:6; 30:10; 88:11; 115:17; cf. Pss. 118:17; 119:175).35 These texts all underscore that worship of YHWH is for the living; the relationship he wants is not with the dead.36
But it is Ezekiel’s words about the possibility of repentance that render most difficult the generalization that in the literature of the Hebrew Bible mortality is part of God’s design:
Is it my desire that a wicked person shall die?—says the LORD GOD.
It is rather that he shall turn back from his ways and live. (Ezek. 18:23)
But what does Ezekiel mean when he says that God wills not death but repentance? Did the prophet seriously believe that only the unrepentant die and everyone else lives forever? The obvious answer, rather, is that the authors of all these texts (with the exception of Genesis 3) expected the righteous to experience neither deathlessness nor resurrection, but only a long, happy life, one that knows the presence of God37 and ends in dignity, presumably with many descendants left to carry on.38 The life promised in these last examples, unlike the eternal life mentioned in Gen. 3:22-24, entails no escape from death or post mortem victory over it.
It is still significant, however, that these texts do not in any way qualify the offer of life or refer to its limited duration. They do not, for example, promise the observant generation or the penitent person that they will “die the death of the upright” for which Balaam longs (Num. 23:10), nor do they call the reward for proper behavior “length of days,” as does Proverbs (Prov. 3:16). Rather, the offer of life is so powerful here that the inevitable death of those who accept it has vanished from the preacher’s mind and, if the sermon succeeded, from his hearers’ minds as well. To point out, as we historical scholars are all too inclined to do, that the hearers would still die even if they accepted the preacher’s message is, on the one hand, to state a truth. But it is also, on the other hand, to traduce that message by undermining its rhetoric with an extraneous and countervailing observation.
In conclusion, we are now in a position to proffer a more sophisticated generalization than the one that claims that in the literature of the Hebrew Bible, death is altogether in accord with God’s intentions for humanity. Rather, across its genres and periods, the Hebrew Bible exhibits a tension between the fact of death, on the one hand, and the promise of life, on the other. This is a tension that is handled in a variety of ways. In those texts that think in more familial and less individualistic terms, it is the death not of the subject but of his heirs that is the greater problem, but also a problem that can, with God’s grace, be readily remedied. In those texts in which “life” means length of days and happiness, even though ultimately of limited duration, life can again be affirmed without qualification, even though death will eventually loom. In both these cases, life trumps death. The same is true of the doctrine of the resurrection of the dead when it finally comes into being. To affirm the fact of death without mentioning the promise of life is not only to give a partial picture. It is also to invert the priorities of many biblical texts, from a number of genres and periods, and to miss the tension out of which the doctrine of resurrection of the dead will eventually arise. For that doctrine upholds both realities—the fact of death and the promise of life—and again gives the last word not to death, but to life. And it does so in a way that is, for all the changes, still in striking continuity with the vision of the Torah. As N. T. Wright puts it, “‘Resurrection,’ while focusing the attention on the embodiment of the individuals involved, retained its original sense of the restoration of Israel by her covenant God.”39 To which I would add that in the Torah Israel is a supernaturally graced natural family, or, to adapt the apostle Paul’s words (though not his thought), children of the flesh who are also, whether they wish it or not, children of God.40 If so, we should not be surprised to read Rabbi Judah ha-Nasi’s midrash that the people Israel will sing the Song of the Sea in the future, when all their generations shall have been resurrected in the great redemption of which the exodus was but a foreshadowing.
Notes
1. An earlier version of this essay as “The Resurrection of the Dead and the Construction of Personal Identity in Ancient Israel.” in Congress Volume: Basel 2001, Leiden, Netherlands, ed. André Lemaire, 2002, pp. 305-22
2. Unless otherwise noted, all biblical translations are taken from Tanakh, Philadelphia, 5746/1985.
3. Note, however, that the interdiction occurs without the words “in the Torah” in t. Sanh. 13:5.
4. E.g. Num. 24:7-8, 17-24.
5. On the general issue, Leonard J. Greenspoon, “The Origin of the Idea of Resurrection,” in Traditions in Transformation, ed. Baruch Halpern and Jon D. Levenson, Winona Lake, Indiana, 1981, pp. 247-321.
6. See Bruce K. Waltke and M. O’Connor, An Introduction to Biblical Hebrew Syntax, Winona Lake, Indiana, 1990, pp. 497-98.
7. Cf. Seder Eliyyahu Zuta 4. This text is only one of many that could be cited against Lloyd R. Bailey’s generalization that “mortality as the Creator’s design for humans” is “the basic perspective” even in rabbinic literature. Lloyd R. Bailey, Sr., Biblical Perspectives on Death, Philadelphia, 1979, p. 38.
8. On the exegetical techniques through which interpreters in the Second Temple and rabbinic periods produced a rewritten Bible, see James L. Kugel, The Bible as It Was, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1997.
9. E.g., by Nachmanides (Ramban) in his comment on Gen. 12:10.
10. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1989.
11 Robert A. Di Vito, “Old Testament Anthropology and the Construction of Personal Identity,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 61, 1999, p. 220. On the question of collective vs. individual identity in ancient Israelite culture, see also Klaus Baltzer, Die Biographie der Propheten, Neukirchen-Vluyn, 1975.
12. Ibid., p. 221.
13. Ibid., p. 223.
14. Donald J. Wold, “The Kareth Penalty in P: Rationale and Cases,” Society of Biblical Literature Seminar Papers 1979: I, pp. 1-45 (here, pp. 5 and 15).
15. See Jon D. Levenson, The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son. New Haven and London, 1993, pp. 125-42.
16. The translation is by E. A. Speiser, in Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament, Princeton, 1969, p. 95.
17. See Moshe Weinfeld, “The Covenant of Grant in the Old Testament and in the Ancient Near East,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 90,1970, pp. 184-203.
18. J (Gen. 15:2), E (Gen. 21:18), and P (Gen. 17:5, 20).
19. See Ugaritic Narrative Poetry, ed. Simon B. Parker, n.p., 1997, pp. 9-48 and pp. 49-80. Whether the bereaved father Dan’el ever receives his dead son Aqhat anew is unclear because of the fragmentary character of the tablets. The parallel with Kirta and with several biblical narratives (especially 2 Kgs. 4:8-37) and the allusion to the tale in Ezek. 14:12-20 suggest that he does.
20. My translation departs slightly from the Tanakh translation because I think the last clause is still part of Eve’s speech.
21. See Levenson, Death and Resurrection, pp. 157-62.
22. At least in E. It is usually held that J knows nothing of Simeon’s detention.
23 See ibid., 143-69.
24. See Neil Gillman, The Death of Death: Resurrection and Immortality in Jewish Thought, Woodstock, VT, 1997, pp. 189-211.
25. Bailey, Biblical Perspectives, p. 38.
26. Di Vito, “Old Testament Anthropology,” 221.
27. E.g., 2 Sam. 7:14; Pss. 2:7; 89:27-28. On the Egyptian parallels, see Jan Assmann, “Die Zeugung des Sohnes,” Funktionen und Leistungen des Mythos, ed. Jan Assmann, Goettingen, 1982, pp. 13-61.
28. A similar idea occurs in Third Isaiah as well (Isa. 60:4-7).
29. See G. B. Caird, The Language and Imagery of the Bible, London, 1980, p. 246. “ . . . the language of resurrection was used metaphorically of national recovery from disaster long before Israel had any belief in life after death,” Caird writes, citing Hos. 6:1-2 and Ezek. 37:1-14. “Centuries later, almost certainly under the impact of persecution and martyrdom, the possibility began to be mooted that this language might have a more literal reference.” This move from metaphorical to literal reality is rather different from the move from the finality of death to the expectation of resurrection that scholars usually see in this process.
30. It has been argued, most notably by Mitchell Dahood, that a notion of immortality appears in the Hebrew Bible. E.g., see M. Dahood, Psalms, Garden City, NY, three vols., 1965, 1968, and 1970, on Pss. 16:11, 21:5, 27:13, 69:29, 116:9, 133:3, and 142:6. Against this, see Bruce Vawter, “Intimations of Immortality and the Old Testament,” Journal of Biblical Literature 91 (1972), pp. 158-71. In any event, even if Dahood’s unlikely arguments are credited, the difference between immortality (freedom from death) and resurrection (the reversal of death) should not be missed.
31. See Jon D. Levenson, Creation and the Pesistence of Evil, rev. ed., Princeton, 1994.
32. Bailey, Biblical Perspectives, p. 38.
33. These include perhaps Enoch (Gen. 5:24) and certainly Elijah (2 Kgs. 2:4-12) as individuals who mysteriously escape death. Those resurrected include the boys whom that prophet and his disciple Elisha restore to their bereaved mothers (1 Kgs. 17:17-24; 2 Kgs. 4:31-37) and the man who comes into contact with Elisha’s bones (2 Kgs. 13:20-21). There is no reason to believe, however, that any of these three individuals do not experience a second death.
34. See James Barr, The Garden of Eden and the Hope of Immortality, London, 1992, especially p. 4. Note that Prov. 3:18, by identifying the Tree of Life with wisdom (v. 13), sees access to it as still a possibility. The life in question, however, is not eternal, but only long and happy, as v. 16 demonstrates.
35. See also Sir. 17:27-28. On this theme, see Hartmut Gese, “Psalm 22 und das Neue Testament,” in Vom Sinai zum Zion, Munich, 1974, p. 191, and Bernd Janowski, “Die Toten loben nicht. Psalm 88 und das alttestamentliche Todesverständnis,” in Auferstehung-Resurrection, ed. F. Avemarie and H. Lichtenberger, Tübingen, 2001, p. 24.
36. Note also the difficult verse in the Psalms that seems to say, “The death of His faithful ones/is grievous in the LORD’s sight” (Ps. 116:15).
37. On this, see especially R. Martin-Achard, From Death to Life, Edinburgh and London, 1960, p. 151.
38. On this understanding of life, see C. Barth, Die Errettung vom Tode in den individuellen Klage und Dankliedern des Alten Testaments, Zürich, 1987, passim, but especially p. 28; and M. A. Knibb, “Life and death in the Old Testament,” in R.E. Clements, ed., The World of Ancient Israel, Cambridge, UK, 395-415, 1989, especially p. 400.
39. N. T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God, Minneapolis, 1992, p. 332.
40. Cf. Rom. 9:8.
