But the problems with that thinking were palpable: God’s own people Israel continually, painfully, and frustratingly suffered, from natural disaster, political crises, and, most notably, military defeat. Jews had long believed that God was lord of the entire world and all people, both the living and the dead. About two hundred years before Jesus, Jewish thinkers began to believe that there had to be something beyond death-a kind of justice to come. The most one could hope for was a good and particularly long life here and now.īut Jews began to change their view over time, although it too never involved imagining a heaven or hell. God would forget the person and the person could not even worship. That is what made death so mournful: nothing could make an afterlife existence sweet, since there was no life at all, and thus no family, friends, conversations, food, drink – no communion even with God. But in most instances Sheol is simply a synonym for “tomb” or “grave.” It’s not a place where someone actually goes.Īnd so, traditional Israelites did not believe in life after death, only death after death. It is true that some poetic authors, for example in the Psalms, use the mysterious term “Sheol” to describe a person’s new location. The Hebrew Bible itself assumes that the dead are simply dead-that their body lies in the grave, and there is no consciousness, ever again. So too the “soul” doesn’t continue on outside the body, subject to postmortem pleasure or pain. When we stop breathing, our breath doesn’t go anywhere. Then it was dust to dust, ashes to ashes.Īncient Jews thought that was true of us all. Adam remained alive until he stopped breathing. On the contrary, for them, the soul was more like the “breath.” The first human God created, Adam, began as a lump of clay then God “breathed” life into him (Genesis 2: 7). Unlike most Greeks, ancient Jews traditionally did not believe the soul could exist at all apart from the body.
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