In ancient Israel, how did people think about death and dying? Oddly to us, the Hebrews believed that you are some stuff, some "dust" into whom God has blown "the breath of life" (Genesis 2), and when God stops breathing in and out of you, you are quite simply dead. You return once again to the dust, you disintegrate over time into the stuff that is your body. When you die, you go to Sheol, which isn't some netherworld, and isn't hell or heaven. Sheol really means nowhere, the place of the dead, the earth - back where you came from. There is no future for the dead (Job 14). What lingers after your death is not you or your soul, but your "name," your reputation, your legacy in the form of children and property.
The Israelites do not wish to die because "in Sheol, who can praise you, O Lord?" (Psalm 6). One Psalmist wishes not to die - because he loves God, and doesn't want that love to end. Isn't this the seed of what eternal life is about? Not some mega-reward for being a grand person or sitting in the right pew - but you love God now, so much that even death can't sever it, and God (in God's surprising mercy) cannot bear for the love to end either, and miraculously empowers the love to continue.
The Old Testament generally has no notion of a soul that is the real you dwelling inside your body. Some English translations use the words "soul" or "spirit," but the Hebrew originals mean something like "self" or "living being." We might ask, "If there is no such thing as life after death, then why bother behaving ethically?" The average Israelite would answer that this is all the more reason to behave ethically. This life is it, it's your only chance to be good, to achieve a good name. And if you are good, you are good because - well, because it is good to be good. You avoid evil, not to escape the torments of hell, but simply because evil is abhorrent.
You can dig up a handful of exceptions. Many passages, like "dem bones" in Ezekiel 37, speak not of eternal life for the individual, but the restoration of the nation of Israel. In some of the very latest-written passages in the Old Testament, there are pregnant thoughts of life beyond death, of eternal life. Daniel 12, Isaiah 25, and perhaps one or two more hint at a fledgling grasp on life beyond death. Between the Old and New Testaments (which we will cover in eBibleQuestions24) a growing sense of life beyond death emerges quite clearly, and the climax of this nascent understanding is the startling resurrection of Jesus... To learn more about death and the afterlife in both Old and New Testaments, click here to read a solid article by Jim Tabor of UNCC.
James
james@mpumc.org
Coming up:
eBibleQuestions24 - What was going on between the Testaments?
eBibleQuestions25 - The New Testament!
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