The history of Judaism spans a period of well over 2,000 years of recorded history (traditionally extending as far as 2,000 years and beyond that). Over these many years, Jewish belief has evolved and adapted, with disagreement a hallmark of Jewish theology. In modern times, perhaps as a result of attempts to divest Judaism of any semblance of superstition, the Jewish faith has often been characterized as a pragmatic, “here and now” religion. Moreover, the horrors of the Holocaust had a massive effect on Jewish identity, with views of death and the afterlife among the most strongly affected.

The Patriarch Abraham represents a potential starting point for a historical understanding of Jewish origins, with an estimated lifetime in around 1800 BCE. It is at this point that we begin to have some written historical records with which to corroborate biblical accounts from multiple cultures with which to compare and contrast beliefs and practice. The Bible itself was not written until several hundred years after this, though the stories contained therein purport to date back thousands of years before Abraham (into a history that includes such stories as Noah and the Flood; Sodom and Gomorrah; the Tower of Babel; and of Adam and Eve).

With Abraham, we have a figure whose story begins in Mesopotamia, a land of which much is known from historical records. For instance, the Epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest extent written text in Western civilization, tells the story of Utnapishtim, a man warned by a God to build a large boat in order to save his family from an impending flood. The similarities between this and the story of Noah are striking. That Abraham came from the land of Gilgamesh to occupy lands in modern Israel, it should be of no surprise that he would have brought some of that culture with him!

In terms of an afterlife, the ancient Mesopotamians held the view that life was a gift from the Gods, and that a person’s lot in life was but to honor and worship the Gods (their failure to do so was the reason for the Flood). Death was an unpleasant end, with the dead residing in a dark and dreary underworld with the only respite coming in the form of sacrificial offerings shared with them from the living. This ancestral cult formed the basis of religious life in that the living were expected to make offerings in honor of the Gods, and also to the dead, and to teach their children to do likewise into the future.

Similarly, the earliest Jewish ideas of life after death describe the place of the dead as a dark underworld called Sheol, literally a hole in the earth. There is no good said of this place as Sheol is described as, “A land of thick darkness, as darkness itself; a land of the shadow of death, without any order, and where the light is as darkness” (Job 10: 22), and elsewhere, “the nether-most pit, in dark places, in the deeps” (Ps. 88: 7). The author of one of the Psalms (88:5) laments: “I am counted with them that go down into the pit; I am become as a man that hath no help.” And again, in Job the life of a person is summed up: “He cometh forth like a flower, and withereth; he fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth not” (Job 14: 2). The scripture makes no mention of any reprieve for the dead, focusing squarely on life itself as the gift of God.

The story of Abraham marks a turning point away from the Mesopotamian tradition of ancestor worship, most explicitly revealed in the story of the sacrifice of Isaac (Gen. 22: 1-19). In this episode, God provides Abraham and his wife Sarah a miraculous child, their only son. Given their cultural background, the fact that they had had no children into old age would have represented a serious problem for their afterlife state, being one in which there were no living ancestors to offer sacrifices for them. God seemingly corrected this by allowing the elderly Sarah to become pregnant.

It is important to know that Abraham’s importance is cemented in his forming the covenant with God that defines Jewish identity ever after: Abraham agreed to a pact by which God would guarantee that he and his descendants would live peacefully and forever in a promised land (roughly modern Israel); in exchange, Abraham and his descendants would have to agree to do everything that God asked them to.

Isaac being born, God then asked Abraham to sacrifice his one and only son to Him, creating a paradoxical scenario in which Abraham knew that he had committed to doing everything God would ask of him, while the reward for doing so would be a guarantee of peace and life for him and his descendants. On the other hand, the Mesopotamian tradition from which Abraham emerged taught that Abraham should have children who would outlive him, thereby guaranteeing respite through sacrifices after death. With Abraham’s willingness to kill his son, a task that God released Abraham from at the moment he was about to complete it, Abraham not only showed his loyalty to God, but also his willingness to forgo the promises of an ancestral cult and to instead embrace the covenantal promise of eternal life and peace in the promised land of God.

Over the centuries since the time of Abraham, the Hebrew people have striven to live peacefully according to God’s commandments, but have found themselves time and again the victims of persecution and oppression. The land promised by God has been plagued by disruption, as waves of conquerors captured and abused her people. Israel was dominated by the likes of the Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Christians, and Muslims. The Jewish people were forcibly removed from the land in 70 CE, existing in an anti-Semitic Diaspora that culminated in the horrors of the Holocaust. Over and over, Jewish thinkers have had to grapple with the problem of God’s promise of peace and everlasting life in the promised land against the reality of suffering heaped upon suffering.

God had promised an everlasting life of peace provided His chosen people did as He commanded, and yet a great many who strove to follow God died without ever tasting a moment of peace let alone everlasting life. Recognizing human limitations in understanding, Jewish thinkers were open to new interpretations provided they could be backed by scripture. One important innovation was the concept of resurrection, predicting an eventual restoration to life of all those who had died without ever experiencing God’s promised reward for loyal dedication to Him. Since God had promised an eternal life of peace, the only way that the dead could enjoy such a promise was by being restored to life at some future point.

Under Hellenistic influence (circa late-third to mid-first century BCE), Jewish thinkers had to contend with competition from Greek conceptions of the afterlife, which included a dualism whereby the spirit might survive bodily death to exist in some paradisiacal realm. Among a range of cultural tensions, resurrection asserted a distinctly Jewish view of afterlife that emphasized the need for both body and spirit combined just as God had created life.

By the time of Jesus of Nazareth, Jewish religious leaders had established a scriptural basis for resurrection. The prophet Isaiah, for example, includes the prediction: “Thy dead shall live, my dead bodies shall arise – awake and sing, ye that dwell in the dust – for Thy dew is as the dew of light, and the earth shall bring to life the shades” (Is. 26: 19). The most often cited passage, though, is Ezekiel 37: 5–10. Here, the prophet has vouchsafed a vision of the remnants of the people of Israel:

‘Thus saith the L-rd GOD unto these bones: Behold, I will cause breath to enter into you, and ye shall live. And I will lay sinews upon you, and will bring up flesh upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and ye shall live; and ye shall know that I am the Lord.’ So I prophesied as I was commanded; and as I prophesied, there was a noise, and behold a commotion, and the bones came together, bone to its bone. And I beheld, and, lo, there were sinews upon them, and flesh came up, and skin covered them above; but there was no breath in them. Then said He unto me: ‘Prophesy unto the breath, prophesy, son of man, and say to the breath: Thus saith the L-rd GOD: Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.’ So I prophesied as He commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood up upon their feet, an exceeding great host.

While Jesus himself agreed with the doctrine of resurrection, it is clear that not all Jewish leaders accepted it. Even among those who accepted resurrection, there was no small debate on when it would occur, what the nature of the resurrected body would be, the state of the dead while awaiting resurrection, or on who would be resurrected.

The cadaver itself was thought to remain sensitive to its surroundings. There were many who believed that at the time of resurrection, the individual would be raised in the same clothes he had been buried in, encouraging many to bury their loved ones in the best clothes available. The luz, a small bone at the base of the spine which was the only part of the body thought to survive decomposition, was considered the kernel around which the resurrected body would be built. For this reason, cremation was impossible lest the resurrection of the person be prevented. Even the paradise of the eventual world to come had been conceived of as a sensual place, with the three main pleasures being Shabbat (worship of God), sunshine, and sexual intercourse (with one’s spouse, of course) (Sonsino and Syme 1994: 29).

The Jewish view of life after death remained relatively unchanged over the next several hundred years until religious philosophers began to move away from a strictly physical view of the resurrection and to place an increasing emphasis on the spiritual side of things. The great Jewish philosopher and scriptural scholar, Maimonides (1135–1201), citing Daniel,¹ argued that resurrection was a certainty and that it entailed both a physical restoration to life and also a spiritual hereafter beyond even that. From the Middle Ages through the eighteenth century, alongside Christian interpretations of resurrection, the doctrine of spiritual immortality overtook that of bodily resurrection and eventually became the more accepted position in Jewish belief.

Further emphasis on the divergence of spirit and body in Jewish thought appears in the mystical school of Kabbalah. One of the main mystical texts of this esoteric movement, the Zohar, has been described as containing “some of Judaism’s most sophisticated teachings on the afterlife” (Raphael 1994: 273). Here, the soul is believed to come from God and to eventually be destined to reunite with Him. In the meantime, souls will transmigrate from one body to the next, even through multiple levels of reality, always learning until they can finally leave the cycle of life and simply return to God. While there is no evidence of reincarnation appearing in any Jewish philosophy before the twelfth century, Kabbalists found references in the writings of certain Talmudic rabbis, as well as in the Tanakh itself. One rather vague passage used to illustrate this notes: “One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; and the earth abideth for ever” (Eccl. 1:4). Similarly: “For I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate Me” (Ex. 20: 5). In any event, the Kabbalists took reincarnation for granted from their earliest writings. King David was said to be the reincarnation of Adam, who was then meant to later reincarnate as the Messiah.

Ultimately, the most profound challenge to the Jewish covenant with God has been the Holocaust. That God should allow His chosen people to suffer to such an extreme shattered many peoples’ faith (see Rubenstein 1966), leading to a secular Judaism that focuses strongly on life in the here-and-now. For others, in the depths of immense suffering a renewed sense of meaning was discovered. The psychologist and Holocaust survivor, Victor Frankl (Frankl 1984: 98), explains:

We had to learn ourselves and furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men, that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life – daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.

Today, the many branches of Judaism embrace various forms and combinations of the beliefs described above. As the Tanakh, being the ultimate authority in all schools of Judaism, makes so little mention of the afterlife, it is largely considered an open question. Only the most orthodox Jews hold onto the notion of a literally physical resurrection, others preferring to view things metaphorically. The resurrection which is to take place is more often considered to be one of a purely spiritual nature. The concept of reincarnation is not widespread in Judaism in the least, but it remains a valid alternative all the same, the Kabbalah having been largely absorbed into the larger Jewish tradition. In any event, a life after death is expected at some point within Judaism despite the “this-life” orientation of many modern Jews.

For Christians, the story begins with Jesus of Nazareth and the story of Jesus begins with the Gospels. Written several decades after his death, the Gospels describe the teachings of Jesus in the context of intertestamental religious debates. Jesus teaches his particular interpretation of scripture, sometimes in agreement with other Jewish spiritual leaders, and sometimes at odds with them. On the topic of the afterlife, there are few clear details, though Jesus is certainly on the side that argues for the truth of an impending resurrection.

In one episode, a group of Sadducees, conservative Jews opposed to the notion of resurrection, posed what was meant to be a tricky question, confronting Jesus on the issue of resurrection (Mark 12: 18–27 & Luke 20: 27–38). Their proposed hypothetical involves a woman obliged by tradition to marry her husband’s brother after his death. To the question of to whom the woman should be married after the resurrection, Jesus answered simply: “Do ye not therefore err, because ye know not the scriptures, neither the power of God? For when they shall rise from the dead, they neither marry, nor are given in marriage; but are as the angels which are in heaven” (Mark 12: 24–25). Jesus’s reply not only stumps the Sadducees, but also, while supporting the notion of an eventual resurrection of the dead, also suggests that one’s state after resurrection will be somehow different from that before. The exact nature of this postresurrected state has been hotly debated ever since.

The Jewish thinking on resurrection had emphasized physical bodily return in contrast to the Greco-Roman dualism of body and spirit. As Christianity spread, though, and moved away from Judaism, it leaned into dualism. Other books of the New Testament, particularly those attributed to St. Paul who was writing largely to non-Jewish Christians, confirm the truth of resurrection, but muddy the waters on to whether it will be a physical or a spiritual one. In his first letter to the Corinthians, for instance, Paul summarizes the individual’s fate thus: “It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body. There is a natural body, and there is a spiritual body” (I Cor. 15: 44). Clearly, Paul indicates that the postresurrection man is fundamentally changed from his present state. The corruptible, physical body is dead and gone and in its place is a fresh, incorruptible spiritual body, however paradoxical the notion of a spiritual body is.

The Church Fathers, who laid down the basis for Christian doctrine from the second century AD, encouraged a physicalist interpretation. Growing slowly out of Judaism and still unable to conceive of a life without a body, they leaned more heavily upon the Hebrew tradition over the Hellenized intertestamental ideas that seem to have influenced Jesus and the biblical accounts of his resurrection.

Augustine (354–430 AD), accepting what might seem to be a dualistic compromise, proclaimed that at death the soul left the body for an intermediary state where it awaited the coming resurrection. Upon an individual’s death, Augustine taught, the soul left the body and if not immediately taken up to Heaven – a privilege reserved for the most pure of men, including Elijah in the Old Testament – it went to a Sheol-like transitional state – the first inklings of purgatory, an interim where souls would be purged of their sins before finally being judged on the Last Day and either resurrected to live eternal life with God, or sent back to Hell to suffer the eternal damnation described by Jesus. The philosopher of religion, John Hick, sees this as the beginning of a trend in Christian thought moving away from a focus on the resurrection and looking more purposefully to the immediate fate of one’s soul upon death (Hick 1976).

As the clouds of the Dark Ages parted, medieval Christians had all but relegated the final resurrection to some distant and unimaginable future. The official doctrine still held to that delineated by Augustine, but for the average believer, the resurrection was a far-off anticlimax. With purgatory, each individual was judged at death to determine the level of purgation required; some would go directly to Heaven, some to Hell, but most required some degree of purification. With this initial judgment rendered, the idea of a Final Judgement seems no more than a reiteration of one’s immediate death.

As time went on, the emphasis on the immediate afterlife took an increasingly ominous turn. The fate of the soul became a matter of everyday concern for the general population. One could die at any moment and immediately face judgment. According to Aquinas, man was placed upon this earth with the sole intention of aspiring toward Heaven. As for descriptions of Heaven, the scripture is sparse. John’s Apocalypse reports witnessing God’s Holy City, the New Jerusalem, descending from the heavens:

It shone with the glory of God, and its brilliance was like that of a very precious jewel, like a jasper, clear as crystal. It had a great, high wall with twelve gates, and with twelve angels at the gates. […] The wall was made of jasper, and the city of pure gold, as pure as glass. The foundations of the city walls were decorated with every kind of precious stone. The first foundation was jasper, the second sapphire, the third agate, the fourth emerald, the fifth onyx, the sixth ruby, the seventh chrysolite, the eighth beryl, the ninth topaz, the tenth turquoise, the eleventh jacinth, and the twelfth amethyst. The twelve gates were twelve pearls, each gate made of a single pearl. The great street of the city was of gold, as pure as transparent glass. (Rev. 21: 11–12 & 18–21)

Though the Pearly Gates come from this biblical description, the association of St. Peter as the gatekeeper is traditional, perhaps drawn from Jesus’s declaration that Peter would be the “rock” of the Church, and “I will give you the keys to the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 16: 19). In fact, both Sts. Paul and Peter are depicted as psychopomps, advocating for the dead in purgatory and introducing the faithful to Heaven, in catacomb paintings from as early as the second or third centuries AD.

Though the image of riches might encourage many to strive after it, Revelation indicates that only the “victorious will inherit all of this,” while “the cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile, the murderers, the sexually immoral, those who practice magic arts, the idolaters and all liars – they will be consigned to the fiery lake of burning sulfur” (Rev. 21: 8). Perhaps because of the prevalence of cowards and liars among the general population (for who among us is not one sometimes?), this striving quickly evolved to an overwhelming fear of facing Hell, which had people scrambling to atone for sins before it was too late. As Hick suggests (p: 198), Dante’s Divine Comedy and Milton’s Paradise Lost depict the medieval idea of the afterlife as conceived in the popular imagination, doing more to define most people’s conceptions of Heaven and Hell than official Church doctrine. Both of these works deal almost exclusively with the immediate fate of the individual upon death, ignoring any idea of a future resurrection. Dante contrasts the light and love of the heavenly spheres with a series of detailed tortures for various sins in concentric circles of Hell; Milton brings to life the ambition of Satan’s war over Earth, bookended by the desolation of Hell and the lushness of Eden’s garden.

With a growing fear of Hell, and of the tortures meted out in purgatory, many worried for the fates of their departed loved ones. Prayers on behalf of the dead were thought helpful and the Church began to accept alms in exchange for such prayers as services on behalf of the dead. Alternately, the living could also see their sins absolved by similarly paying the local clergy in order to ensure safe passage to Heaven after death. Purgatory thus became a profitable venture for the Church as souls gathered there in wait of the Final Judgement, leading to one of the most prominent criticisms of the Protestant Reformation.

The Reformation called for a return to direct scriptural interpretation, much like what the Jews had been doing for centuries, away from Church authority and the edifice of doctrine that the Fathers had built over time. Problematically, though, once undermining one authority, Protestantism opened the door for a myriad claims to authority, resulting in widespread disagreement on all manner of scriptural detail. Anyone could pick up a Bible and read the Word of God for themselves. Luther believed purgatory to be no more than a tool used by the Church to fleece believers as they paid tribute in order to “save” deceased souls (Luther 1915). Instead, Luther readopted the Judaic concept, whereby a person would simply sleep dreamlessly until being awakened at the Last Day. Among Reformers there was not agreement, however, as Calvin argued against Luther’s torporific state, positing that the souls of the dead were transported immediately to either Heaven or Hell, there sampling their eventual fates, the reunion of body and soul at the resurrection intensifying the joys or pains of the afterlife (Calvin 1958). While Protestants rejected the Catholic notion of purgatory as an intermediary spiritual existence, they maintained themes of Heaven, Hell, and even the Final Resurrection, though the details of timing, nature, and of who might endure what fate remains an ongoing debate.

As to the Final Judgement, the Gospels warn that the means to salvation are difficult and that many will fail to achieve it:

Enter ye in at the straight gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat.

Only gold members can continue reading. Log In or Register to continue

Share this:

• Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)

Related

Related posts:

Spiritual Care: An Essential Aspect of Cancer Care Quality of Life at the End of Life A Historical Perspective of Death in the Western World Economic Aspects of Death and Dying in Oncology Art of Dying Symptom Management of the Dying Oncology Patient

Stay updated, free articles. Join our Telegram channel

Join