A Guide to Understanding the Bible by Harry Emerson Fosdick
Chapter 6: The Idea of Immortality
A modern behaviorist, holding that a human being is simply a physical organism with its various functions, draws the inevitable inference that no continued life after death is possible. The early
Hebrews, starting with a similar idea, came to no such conclusion. While they believed that man was a body with breath for his soul, blood for his life, and organs whose functions were both physical and psychical, the earliest Hebrews of whom we have record were convinced that dead men were not
altogether dead. What remained existent after death was not soul conceived as an immaterial reality, for no such idea dawned on the Hebrews until ages later, when Greek influence was felt in Judaism. Human beings after death were, to the early Hebrews, still bodies, attenuated leftovers and shadowy replicas of the flesh, and these existences beyond the grave the Old Testament called rephaim --that is, shadows or ghosts.
That the dead were thus not sufficiently dead to cease being matters of concern to the living is made clear both by direct statement and indirect intimation in the Old Testament.
1. As among all early peoples, necromancy, dealing with the dead, was an active superstition among the Hebrews. In the background of such wizardry were doubtless the same influences, especially dreams, that have commonly persuaded primitive peoples of the continued existence and influence of the dead.
Man’s mind at first did not value waking experience above sleeping as a clue to truth, and far down in history, dreams, instead of being discredited as unreliable witnesses to fact, were given supernormal importance as revelations. When, therefore, a living man dreamed, let us say, of his dead father, and in his dream conversed with his sire and saw him act, the door was opened to the conviction that the dead were not dead, and to the still further belief that the dead, being mysterious and possibly dangerous presences, needed to be rightly dealt with.
Such ideas always have given rise to a special class of people, witches and wizards, who practice necromancy, and in the Old Testament they are repeatedly mentioned in terms of denunciation. The Deuteronomic law commanded the extirpation of any one who could be called "an enchanter, or a
sorcerer, or a charmer, or a consulter with a familiar spirit, or a wizard, or a necromancer."
(Deuteronomy 18:10-11; cf. Exodus 22:18) Isaiah poured scorn on "them that have familiar spirits" and on "the wizards, that chirp and that mutter," (Isaiah 8:19-20) and the later law of Leviticus twice returned to the same attack. (Leviticus 19:31; 20:6)
The most picturesque passage in the Old Testament in illustration of such prevalent beliefs concerns the Witch of Endor, whom Saul consulted in order to seek counsel from the dead Samuel. One notes the weird night scene, the underground setting, the fact that only the witch is reported to have seen Samuel, the complete credulity of Saul, Samuel’s rising out of Sheol in bodily form, clothed in a robe and
physically recognizable, and, implied in the whole story, the popular prevalence of such necromancy in making use of the still-existent dead. (I Samuel 28:3-25)
2. By all analogy we should expect to find ancestor worship associated with this range of ideas about the afterworld. In the Old Testament, however, the actual practice of worshiping ancestors had been so far overpassed that while one first rate scholar says, "There is a growing consensus of opinion that the
Hebrews, like all other peoples at a certain stage of thought, worshipped these spirits," (Henry Preserved Smith: The Religion of Israel, p. 25) another first-rate scholar says, "The alleged indications of Ancestor Worship are all exposed to more or less serious objections." (E. Kautzsch: "Religion of Israel," in
Hastings’ Dictionary of the Bible, Extra Vol., p. 614.)
What we do have in the Old Testament is a mass of evidence that the dead were of profound importance to the living, that elaborate ceremonies and popular customs were involved in dealing with them, and that such observances were concerned both with the veneration due from the living to the departed and with the possible good or evil that might come from the departed to the living. Many mortuary customs which persist today -- putting food on graves, as in China, for example, or flowers, as with us -- are traceable to primitive endeavors to please and placate the spirits of the deceased, and similar offerings to the dead in Old Testament times should be so understood. (E.g. II Chronicles 16:14.) General analogies with
Egyptian and Babylonian folk-ways confirm this, and in detail the kinship of Hebrew and Semitic
mortuary customs is clear in such observances as offering one’s cut hair to the dead or making incisions in the flesh to establish blood-covenant with the dead. (Isaiah 22:12; Jeremiah 7:29; Amos 8:10; Micah 1:16; Ezekiel 7:18; 27:31. See W. Robertson Smith: Lectures on the Religion of the Semites, pp. 323- 326) The persistence of such rites among the Hebrews is indicated by their condemnation in both early and late codes of law. So Deuteronomy said, "Ye shall not cut yourselves, nor make any baldness
between your eyes for the dead," (Deuteronomy 14:1; cf. 26:14) and Leviticus still found it necessary to insist, "Ye shall not make any cuttings in your flesh for the dead." (Leviticus 19:28.)
Indeed, it has been supposed by some that the teraphim, household gods, (Genesis 35:4; 31:19; 30-35; I Samuel 15:23; 19:13, 16; II Kings 23:24) were originally images of ancestors; that they were honored as such and were part of the apparatus of popular religion; (Hosea 3:4) that mortuary customs which the prophetic school later condemned grew up around them; (Cf. Deuteronomy 26:13-14) that the right of performing the necessary ceremonies for one’s ancestors devolved upon a son and that this fact underlay both the sense of tragedy in being sonless and the practices of levirate marriage and of adoption to avoid such disaster; (Cf. Genesis 15:2-3; 30:3-8; Deuteronomy 25:5-10) and that this set of ideas and customs
was an integral part of the whole clan organization of early Israel. "From such a mass of evidence," says Lods, "it would seem that we are warranted in the conclusion that before their entry into Canaan the Hebrew tribes must have possessed a fully organized cultus of the ancestors of families and clans."
(Adolphe Lods: Israel from its Beginnings to the Middle of the Eighth Century, translated by S.H.
Hooke, p. 229; cf. R.H. Charles: Eschatology; Hebrew, Jewish and Chrisitian, pp. 21-33) At any rate, there can be no doubt, in view of the evidence presented by mortuary customs, that early Hebrews felt a deep concern for dealing effectively with the influence of the still-existent dead.
II
As for the dwelling-place of the rephaim, the Old Testament leaves us in no uncertainty. The Hebrew cosmos was three-storied: the sky, or heaven, above; the flat earth beneath; and, under that, Sheol, the abode of the departed. In this regard, primitive Greek and Hebrew conceptions were practically
unanimous, and Sheol in the Old Testament was of one piece with Hades in Homer’s poems. The dead in Hades, as the Iliad and Odyssey pictured them, were not souls, in the later Platonic sense, but vaporous bodies. Just as Samuel came up from Sheol in visible presence, clothed as he was on earth, so the shade of Patroklos is described in the Iliad as "in all things like his living self, in stature, and fair eyes, and voice, and the raiment of his body was the same." Yet, despite this earthly verisimilitude, the difference made by death was profound, for when Achilles "reached forth with his hands" he "clasped him not; for like a vapor the spirit was gone beneath the earth with a faint shriek." (The Illiad of Homer Done Into English Verse: by Andrew Lang, Walter Leave, and Ernest Myers, Bk. 23, pp. 452, 453) So Odysseus found the shade of his mother wholly insubstantial, (Homer; The Odyssey, With an English Translation, by A. T. Murray, Vol. I, Bk. 11, pp. 401-403) and even valiant heroes were reduced in Hades to ghosts so feeble that a draught of the fresh blood of sacrificial victims was necessary to rouse them to action.
(Ibid., Bk. 11, pp. 393, 397)
In general conception and in many particular details the similarity between Hades and Sheol is plain. In the Hebrew underworld, the prophet still wore his ghostly mantle and kings sat on shadowy thrones. (I Samuel 28:14; Isaiah 14:9) The dreariest words in the vocabulary were used about the dwelling of the dead and its inhabitants. It was the land of the "dark" and of "forgetfulness," (Psalm 88:12) of "silence"
(Psalm 94:17) and of "destruction." (Job 26:6 [marginal translation]) Far from being consulted as "the knowing ones," its inhabitants were conceived by those who had renounced necromancy as neither knowing nor caring about anything on earth:
His sons come to honor, and he knoweth it not; And they are brought low, but he perceiveth it not of them. Only for himself his flesh hath pain, and for himself his soul mourneth. (Job 14:1-22 [marginal translation])
As though to leave us in no doubt about this shadowy half reality of Sheol, Isaiah drew a picture of it with even its royal tenants rising to greet newcomers and saying, "Art thou also become weak as we?"
(Isaiah 14:9-10)
Clearly, therefore, no hope was associated with Sheol. It was the sad, inevitable end of man, "the house appointed for all living." (Job 30:23) To go there was to lose real existence and the pious sick could pray,
Oh spare me, that I may recover strength,
Before I go hence, and be no more. (Psalm 39:13)
The best to be said for Sheol was that life on earth might become so wretched that Sheol’s very negativeness would be a relief. Job, finding his existence intolerable, craved the unreality of the underworld, too empty of positive content to involve the sufferings of earth:
There the wicked cease from troubling;
And there the weary are at rest.
There the prisoners are at ease together;
They hear not the voice of the taskmaster.
The small and the great are there:
And the servant is free from his master. (Job 3:17-19)
While the early Hebrews, therefore, believed in existence after death, it was so pallid and unreal, in an underworld so undesirable, that no hopes were associated with it. Until far down in their history, all the vivid and enheartening hopes of the Hebrews were concerned with the future of their nation on earth --
. . . thy seed shall be great,
And thine offspring as the grass of the earth. (Job 5:25) As for those who went "down into the pit," they were
. . . as a man that hath no help,
Cast off among the dead. (Psalm 88:3-5)
In suggesting the literal location of Sheol -- an underworld beneath the surface of the ground and as geographically real as any place on earth -- the Old Testament is clear and explicit. When, for example, Moses executed Yahweh’s wrath against the rebellious sons of Korah, they were dropped alive into Sheol through the yawning ground -- "The ground clave asunder that was under them; and the earth opened its mouth, and swallowed them up, and their households, and all the men that appertained unto Korah, and all their goods. So they, and all that appertained to them, went down alive into Sheol: and the earth closed upon them.’’ (Numbers 16:31-33: cf. Psalm 63:9; 86:13; Ezekiel 26:20; ; 31:14;32:18, 24) Such was the beginning of the Bible’s conception of the afterworld, and the development of thought from this crude primitiveness of Sheol to the New Testament’s doctrine of eternal life constitutes one of the most significant contributions of the Scriptures to religious history.
III
Among the factors that played a part in this development, the enlarging idea of God was prominent.
Sheol was an inheritance in Hebrew belief from a past long antedating the introduction of the people to Yahweh. At first, therefore, Yahweh as the storm god of Sinai, or as the war god of the migrant tribes, or even as the agricultural god of Canaan, had nothing to do with Sheol; the underworld of the dead was outside his realm.
Commonly in ancient mythologies, the gods of the nether world were not the gods of the earth’s surface.
So it was in Greece, where Hades had its own deity; and so it was in Babylonia. The Babylonian Sheol, called Aralû, was a great cavern in the bowels of a mountain under the earth; (Cf. Jonah 2:6) it was without light, covered with dust and filth, its inhabitants eating dust save as offerings of food were received from the sacrifices of the living; and the shades who dwelt there were no longer under the domain of the gods of earth but had deities of their own, supremely Nergal. To be sure, in the Old
Testament no gods of Sheol are specifically named, but Dr. Paton is probably correct in thinking that we have the faded reminiscence of them in such personifications as "Death shall be their shepherd" (Psalm 49:14) or "He shall be brought to the king of terrors." (Job 18:14) Moreover, it is not unlikely that the death angels of later Judaism were the old gods of the underworld, reduced, according to the habit of early religions, to the subordinate position of spirits. (See Lewis Bayles Paton: "The Hebrew Idea of the Future Life," in The Biblical Word, "New Series," Vol. 35 (1910), pp. 159-171, for influence of
Babylonian thought on Hebrew thought of life after death.)
In any case, the Old Testament repeatedly reveals that, at first, Yahweh had no control over Sheol; he was god of the earth, then god of the sky, but at the gates of the underworld relationships with him ceased. The Eighty-eighth Psalm is explicit on this point:
. . . My life draweth nigh unto Sheol.
I am reckoned with them that go down into the pit;
. . . .
Like the slain that lie in the grave, Whom thou rememberest no more,
And they are cut off from thy hand.(Psalm 88:3-5; see also vs. 11)
Similarly, the sick Hezekiah shrinks from death believing that it separates from Yahweh:
For Sheol cannot praise thee, death cannot celebrate thee:
They that go down into the pit cannot hope for thy truth. (Isaiah 38:18) Whether within the Old Testament, where the psalmist is convinced that
The dead praise not Yahweh,
Neither any that go down into silence, (Psalm 115:17: cf. 6:5; 30:9; 118:17)
or in Jewish literature outside, as in Ecclesiasticus -- "Who shall give praise to the Most High in the grave?" (Ecclesiasticus 17:27) -- or in the Book of Baruch -- "The dead that are in the grave, whose breath is taken from their bodies, will give unto the Lord neither glory nor righteousness" (2:17) -- we have the persistent tradition that death breaks off all relationships between man and Yahweh.
One of the major factors, therefore, both in redeeming Sheol itself from its original negativeness and in arousing hope of resurrection from it to full life again, was the extension of Yahweh’s sovereignty to the nether world. As Yahweh overpassed early limitations in the thinking of his people until he was
recognized as God of heaven and earth, the question of his power over the realm below the earth was inevitably raised, and the forces which had expanded his sway elsewhere tended to include also under his domain the abode of the rephaim. The Old Testament still retains the early evidences of this new
theology, explicitly contradicting the older restriction on Yahweh’s power.
The first motive, of which we have expression, for thus extending Yahweh’s rule to Sheol, was the desire that unpunished men might not escape justice there. So Amos represented Yahweh as saying, "Though they dig into Sheol, thence shall my hand take them,’’ (Amos 9:2) and Deuteronomy pictured him in a threatening mood:
For a fire is kindled in mine anger,
And burneth unto the lowest Sheol. (Deuteronomy 32:22)
In a word, the nether world, at first for the sake of justice, was gradually taken possession of by
Yahweh’s expanding power, until Isaiah could challenge Ahaz to ask a sign of God "either in the depth, or in the height above" (Isaiah 7:11) -- that is, in Sheol or in heaven.
Without understanding this gradual expansion of the divine sovereignty until, at least in the imagination of a few, the entire Hebrew cosmos with its three levels -- sky, earth, and underworld -- were under Yahweh’s sway, we cannot feel the full force of one of the supreme passages in the Old Testament. It was new theology when it was written, an immortal expression of man’s faith in the universal presence and availability of God, and it was phrased in terms of the threefold Hebrew cosmos with the triumphant conviction that Yahweh was inescapably present throughout the whole of it:
Whither shall I go from thy Spirit?
Or whither shall I flee from thy presence?
If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there:
If I make my bed in Sheol, behold, thou art there.
If I take the wings of the morning,
And dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea;
Even there shall thy hand lead me,
And thy right hand shall hold me. (Psalm 139:7-10)
Along this line of development hope traveled that Sheol might not be the last word in the story of man.
"God," cried the psalmist, "will redeem my soul from the power of Sheol." (Psalm 49:15) Moreover, with the divine sovereignty thus extended to the dead, and with the divine character conceived increasingly in terms of righteousness, Sheol itself was bound to be transformed. It gradually ceased being inane and meaningless, a non-moral land of darkness and forgetfulness. It became ethically significant, with rewards and punishments administered to its inhabitants. And, at last, along with the transformation of Sheol itself into a morally meaningful place, came the hope of restoration from it to full life again.
IV
In achieving this result, the developing idea of man was also influential. So long as man was more or less completely submerged in the social mass, his personal fortunes beyond death would be imagined and cared for dimly, if at all. The continuing social group was the reality on which attention was centered and in which all hope inhered. This is the meaning of Hezekiah’s words:
They that go down into the pit cannot hope for thy truth The living, the living, he shall praise thee, as I do this day
The father to the children shall make known thy truth. (Isaiah 38:18-19)
When, however, the individual as a personality with rights of his own began to stand free from social submergence, the question of his fate after death was inevitably raised
Apparently it was the demand of the individual for justice that pushed this issue to the fore. At first, justice had especially concerned the social group as a whole and Yahweh was held to be inflexibly fair in dealing with the clan or nation, thought of en masse. With the increasing discrimination of the individual, however, as a center of keen interest, it became clear that the problem of life’s justice to him is a much more complicated and difficult affair. So the Book of Job wrestled with the apparently insoluble dilemma -- Yahweh just, and yet not always just to persons one by one, within their lifetime on the earth.
It is in the Book of Job, therefore, that we find what has been called "the first tentative demand for a life beyond death." (H. Wheeler Robinson: The Religious Ideas of the Old Testament, p. 94) That this
demand sprang from considerations of equity to the individual is made clear in the drama. Job, a virtuous man, suffering incredible afflictions and so facing in acute form the problem of life’s injustice, blazed tentative trails toward a solution. One of these was the hope of at least a temporary restoration from Sheol and a vindication of his character at the judgment seat of God. Sheol itself was to Job what it was to his contemporaries, "the land of darkness and of the shadow of death" (Job 10:21) but, all the more because of that, his demand for individual justice led him to hope that the inanity of Sheol was not God’s last word to a mistreated man. Out of this situation rose Job’s conviction that, in a special case like his, Sheol might turn out to be only an intermediate state with a final vindication of righteousness afterwards.
At times he denied such expectation and was hopeless:
As the cloud is consumed and vanisheth away,
So he that goeth down to Sheol shall come up no more. (Job 7:9; cf. 14:7-12)