Dying to meet you? Death in ancient Israel’s texts

Philip Johnston explores what God’s people believed about life after death during the time of the Old Testament

‘. . . death, the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns . . .’

This was Hamlet’s description of death in his famous ‘To be, or not to be’ soliloquy, in Act 3 of Shakespeare’s play. It is still the way many people feel about death today. It was certainly the way many ancient Israelites thought about death. But what else did they think? Were they dying to meet anyone? And how did their ideas about death develop later on?

Who was dying?

The Old Testament story from the patriarchs to the post-exile nation covers well over a thousand years, during which time many thousands of people lived and died. We know the stories of a very few from the narratives of the patriarchs, the exodus generation, the judges, the four centuries of monarchy, and the further periods of exile and restoration. But we know nothing of the hundreds of thousands of others, except that they all died on earth. Or very nearly all.

Two exceptions are mentioned: Genesis 5:24 has the cryptic comment, ‘Enoch walked with God, and he was not, for God took him’, while 2 Kings 2:11 relates that ‘Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven’. Nevertheless, a striking feature of these exceptions is that they had no impact whatsoever on mainstream Israelite faith. They remained unexplained, marginal phenomena: no psalmist, prophet, king, or wisdom writer ever asked to be spared death like these two men.

Three other individuals were revived by physical contact with Elijah (1 Kings 17:22) or Elisha (2 Kings 4:34), or with Elisha’s bones (2 Kings 13:21). But these people were restored to their previous state of life, and the biblical writers show no interest in their death experiences. Apart from these extremely rare and undeveloped exceptions, then, everyone died.

What did they think would happen when they died?

We have very little information about this. Like most ancient peoples, the Israelites thought that, on death, one went to the underworld—a dreary, shadowy place of virtual non-existence, deep below the earth.

Only two Old Testament texts give any description of it. The first, Isaiah 14:9-11, predicts the entry there of the once-mighty king of Babylon, to be greeted by the shades with the news that he has become as weak as them. The second, Ezekiel 32:20-30, envisages a vast underground cavern of corpses, with various armies, each in their own area.

The main feature of the underworld in the biblical texts is that it was cut off from Israel’s God, as summarised in Psalm 6:5: ‘In death there is no remembrance of you; in Sheol who can give you praise?’ All this stands in marked contrast with the two centres of ancient civilisation—Egypt, which was fascinated with death, and Mesopotamia, where many tales of the gods involved the underworld.

The main Hebrew term for this underworld is Sheol, which occurs 66 times. Other references use earthly terms like ‘pit’ or abstract ones like ‘destruction’, often in parallel with Sheol. These bring the total up to around a hundred. But this remains strikingly few compared to other references to death. For instance, the main Hebrew stem for death (mavet/mot) occurs a thousand times.

There is also a striking imbalance in the way the biblical writers use Sheol. Apart from a few uses of the term cosmologically (i.e. in opposition to the highest heavens) or figuratively (i.e. death as a threatening enemy), it is used mainly of human fate. And with only a few possible exceptions, it indicates the fate of the ungodly—one from which the righteous want to be rescued.

At the same time, it is never depicted as a place of punishment, and there is no alternative fate spelled out for the righteous. The picture remains tantalisingly incomplete.

Were they dying to meet their ancestors?

This is the view of many scholars, since we know that ancient family bonds were very strong, and that ancestors featured in the lives and cults of many surrounding peoples. The Old Testament does contain two phrases that might seem to suggest this, but both have very distinctive uses:

The first, ‘gathered to his people’, is used of the nations’ founders: Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses and Aaron, and then (slightly differently) of Joshua’s generation. But it does not occur after that, so it was probably simply an ancient phrase used idiomatically to mark significant deaths, without taking the words literally. The second phrase, ‘slept with his fathers’, occurs frequently regarding kings of Israel and Judah. But with rare exceptions it is only used for those who died peacefully, regardless of whether they did good or evil in God’s sight; it is not used for those who died violently. So this also seems to have become an idiom dissociated from the words of the phrase itself.

Given the predominance throughout the Old Testament of a dreary underworld as the only human fate, the idea of reunification in some meaningful afterlife is highly unlikely, and there are good alternative explanations for these texts. We can therefore conclude that the Old Testament gives no indication of reunion with ancestors in death.

Were they dying to meet God?

Did ancient Israelites ever envisage a positive life with God, similar to the later concept of paradise (sometimes called a ‘beatific afterlife’)? After all, God could bypass death, as noted for Enoch and Elijah. God could raise the dead, as celebrated in Moses’s song recorded before his death (Deuteronomy 32:39) and in Hannah’s song after the promise of a child (1 Samuel 2:6). God could also revive the nation: various prophets used the imagery of individual resurrection for this, immediately applying it to the whole nation (Hosea 6:1-2, cf. 4; Ezekiel 37:1-10, cf. 11-14).

But what did individual Israelites believe? As so often, the Psalms give us the best perspective on this (regardless of issues of their composition, adaptation, and compilation). The vast majority of the Psalms seem to affirm the general Old Testament perspective that death leads to the underworld, even if their term for it—Sheol—implied a place for the wicked rather than for the righteous.

But there are a few possible hints that the communion with God enjoyed in this life must somehow continue in the next (e.g. Psalms 16:11; 73:24). The clearest glimpse comes in Psalm 49. On the one hand, no human can pay a ransom for themselves or another to escape ‘the pit’ (i.e. Sheol; Psalm 49:7-9). On the other hand, while the self-reliant rich will end up in Sheol (Psalm 49:10-14), the writer confidently asserts, ‘God will ransom me from the power of Sheol, for he will receive me’ (Psalm 49:15).

Neither here nor elsewhere do psalmists name how this will occur, or locate a specific place, or describe what it will be like. They simply proclaim confidence in some form of continued relationship with God.

Finally, two books say a little more about the resurrection of individuals. In an intense section of Isaiah portraying divine deliverance amid global disaster, the oppressors’ dead who do not rise are contrasted with those of God’s people who will indeed rise (Isaiah 26:14,19).

Then at the end of the book of Daniel, after predicting horrendous persecution, the seer asserts that ‘many who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt’ (Daniel 12:2). This may envisage just the Jewish people (martyrs and compromisers), as the immediate context suggests, but it is still the clearest Old Testament statement on resurrection, and the precursor to later theological developments.

However, before turning to those, we must accept that these glimpses of resurrection had no obvious impact on the main Israelite views. If these texts were written by Isaiah and Daniel in the eighth and sixth centuries respectively, as many evangelical scholars maintain, this revolutionary insight doesn’t seem to affect the afterlife perspectives of contemporary or subsequent authors. These further biblical writers, whether prophets, sages, psalmists or historiographers, maintain the more traditional Israelite perspective outlined above.

How does this fit with the New Testament?

By contrast, Jewish literature of the second and first centuries before Christ explored these themes with great enthusiasm, so much so that some of it has been termed ‘a Cook’s tour of the afterlife’. But the key to interpretation had to await the time of Jesus. Even here, the New Testament shows significant development within it. During Jesus’s lifetime, his disciples were still uncertain about the afterlife.

For instance, after the transfiguration, his three closest disciples were unclear ‘what this rising from the dead might mean’ (Mark 9:10). Until Christ himself rose from the dead, and the Holy Spirit descended at Pentecost, the disciples simply did not understand it.

The key to interpreting Old Testament views on death actually comes in one of latest New Testament books, which tells us, ‘Christ Jesus . . . abolished death and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel’ (2 Timothy 1:10). It needed ‘the gospel’ (i.e. the good news of Christ’s death and resurrection and his gift of forgiveness and new life) to bring life and immortality to light. So before then these issues must have been in the dark, or at least in the shadows. No wonder Jesus’s immediate Jewish predecessors didn’t understand. And no wonder their ancient forebears who wrote and compiled the Israelite scriptures had a very partial understanding of all this.

Christians can rejoice in God’s progressive revelation, and hence their own much greater understanding of the afterlife. To adapt Hamlet, ‘a traveller has indeed returned from that now discovered country’. But humility is still needed. As the Apostle Paul says (albeit in a different context), ‘now we see in a mirror dimly’ (1 Corinthians 13:12), and the New Testament itself remains unclear on many details regarding the future. Christians know far more than the faithful people of the Old Testament, but by no means everything. Like their forebears in the faith, they are called to be faithful to what they know, while living out their greater hope in Christ.