future resurrection of the dead in early judaism: social dynamics, contested evidence

http://cbi.sagepub.com/Currents in Biblical Research

http://cbi.sagepub.com/content/9/3/394The online version of this article can be found at:

DOI: 10.1177/1476993X11400180

2011 9: 394Currents in Biblical ResearchC.D. Elledge

Contested EvidenceFuture Resurrection of the Dead in Early Judaism: Social Dynamics,

Published by:

http://www.sagepublications.com

can be found at:Currents in Biblical ResearchAdditional services and information for

http://cbi.sagepub.com/cgi/alertsEmail Alerts:

http://cbi.sagepub.com/subscriptionsSubscriptions:

http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.navReprints:

http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.navPermissions:

http://cbi.sagepub.com/content/9/3/394.refs.htmlCitations:

What is This?

- Jun 1, 2011Version of Record >>

at National Dong Hwa University on April 2, 2014cbi.sagepub.comDownloaded from at National Dong Hwa University on April 2, 2014cbi.sagepub.comDownloaded from

http://cbi.sagepub.com/


http://cbi.sagepub.com/content/9/3/394

http://cbi.sagepub.com/content/9/3/394



http://cbi.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts

http://cbi.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts

http://cbi.sagepub.com/subscriptions

http://cbi.sagepub.com/subscriptions

http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav

http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav

http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav

http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav

http://cbi.sagepub.com/content/9/3/394.refs.html

http://cbi.sagepub.com/content/9/3/394.refs.html

http://cbi.sagepub.com/content/9/3/394.full.pdf

http://cbi.sagepub.com/content/9/3/394.full.pdf

http://online.sagepub.com/site/sphelp/vorhelp.xhtml

http://online.sagepub.com/site/sphelp/vorhelp.xhtml





Currents in Biblical Research9(3) 394–421

© The Author(s) 2011Reprints and permission: sagepub.

co.uk/journalsPermission.navDOI: 10.1177/1476993X11400180

cbi.sagepub.com

Corresponding author:C.D. Elledge, Gustavus Adolphus College, 800 West College Avenue, Saint Peter, MN 56082 USA. Email: [email protected]

Article

Future Resurrection of the Dead in Early Judaism: Social Dynamics, Contested Evidence

C.D. ElledgeGustavus Adolphus College

AbstractIn its significance to both Jewish and Christian studies, resurrection of the dead remains a vital subject of biblical research; and it is now widely recognized that the religious culture of early Judaism (ca. 200 bce—ce 200) played a crucial role in both its origination and early reception. In the present landscape of study, perhaps the most recent methodological advances arise from sociological studies, which attempt to contextualize resurrection within the social dynamics of the religious movements that advanced this hope. Moreover, at the exegetical level, many vexing pieces of evidence have produced conflicting readings of precisely what individual traditions may say about resurrection. The present article treats these topics, including (1) the application of social-scientific methods to the study of resurrection, and (2) readings of contested literary and epigraphic evidence that remains crucial to the scholarly study of the resurrection hope in early Jewish culture.

Keywords1 Enoch, afterlife, Dead Sea Scrolls, Essenes, Hazon Gabriel, immortality, Josephus, Pharisees, resurrection

As a classic feature of western religions, the hope of a future resurrection of the dead rightly remains a vital topic of biblical research, one that integrally relates to other interdisciplinary fields in Jewish, early Christian, Classical, Near Eastern, and archaeological studies. Virtually every generation in the modern criticism of the Bible has intermittently attended to this topic; and yet the challenges posed by the complex, interrelated data that pertain to resurrection have bequeathed many unresolved problems to present scholarship. Such problems have ranged from how one understands the origins of the resurrection hope to how one

at National Dong Hwa University on April 2, 2014cbi.sagepub.comDownloaded from



Elledge: Future Resurrection of the Dead in Early Judaism 395

addresses unresolved exegetical problems among crucial pieces of the literary evidence. In the present critical landscape, newer methodological approaches, more recently available literary evidence from Qumran, and specialized studies of particular pieces of the literary evidence have significantly advanced scholar-ship in this area. In particular, the newest methodological developments include the application of sociological theory to the study of resurrection; specialized studies of Apocrypha, Pseudepigrapha, Dead Sea Scrolls, Gospels, Pauline litera-ture, Josephus, rabbinic, and inscriptional evidence have further illustrated both the expanding popularity and increasing diversity of conceptual expression in which the resurrection hope flourished during the Hellenistic and Roman eras.

While many studies have advanced this agenda through specialized treat-ments of particular pieces of the evidence (e.g., Puech 2003, 2004, 2005, 2008; Elledge 2006; Hengel 2001; Nickelsburg 2001a; Dimant 2000, 2001; Meier 2000; Kraemer 2000; Park 2000), more general treatments have explored a broader array of evidence through the use of particular methods of research. Among the latter, one may call special attention to more recently published stud-ies in the last decade by Levenson (2006) (with Madigan [2008]), Setzer (2004), Segal (2004), Wright (2003), and Nickelsburg’s revised and expanded edition (2006) of his classic study of Resurrection, Immortality, and Eternal Life (1972). Published articles of symposia and specialized volumes dedicated to the topic have also flourished (Charlesworth et al. 2011; Peters, Russell and Welker 2002; Avemarie and Lichtenberger 2001; Avery-Peck, Neusner and Chilton 2001; Davis, Kendall and O’Collins 1997).

The Social Dynamics of Resurrection Hope

In keeping with the larger contributions of sociological methods to biblical research, a number of studies have attempted to locate relationships between resurrection hope and the political behaviors, social dynamics, and identity- formation of those movements within early Judaism and Christianity that cher-ished resurrection. Among these, Wright’s approach highlights the anti-imperialist political context for resurrection hope, Segal examines the social context of reli-giously altered states of consciousness among other social factors that shaped ancient beliefs about the resurrection, and Setzer has concentrated on the sociol-ogy of identity-formation as applied to ancient beliefs about resurrection. These studies continue to build upon earlier sociological approaches to Judaism and Christianity (Elliott 1994; Cameron 1991; Horsley 1976, 1978).

N.T. Wright

Certainly, when a work is written that is as fast-paced, voluminous, and magiste-rial as Wright’s Resurrection of the Son of God (2003), it inevitably advances both




396 Currents in Biblical Research 9(3)

virtues and shortcomings that will require that subsequent scholarship carry out a more prolonged course of critical review to appreciate fully. Pursuant to that goal, it is important here to call attention to several interrelated features that character-ize the socio-political dynamics of early Jewish and Christian discourse about the resurrection in Wright’s book. Central to his treatment of the Jewish social setting of resurrection hope in the two centuries prior to the Common Era is its political orientation. While this is not always explicitly declared from the start, a political and counter-imperialist orientation to the resurrection hope runs with surprising continuity from Wright’s description of the Second Temple setting to the early church’s proclamation that Jesus was ‘raised’ by God. When addressing, for example, why Sadducees denied resurrection, Wright insists that in some measure it must have threatened their aristocratic social position and temple authority:

The real problem was that resurrection was from the beginning a revolutionary doctrine. For Daniel 12, resurrection belief went with dogged resistance and martyrdom. For Isaiah and Ezekiel, it was about YHWH restoring the fortunes of his people… It was the sort of belief that encouraged young hotheads to attack Roman symbols placed on the Temple, and that, indeed, led the first-century Jews into the most disastrous war they had experienced. It was not simply, even, that they thought such beliefs might lead the nation into a clash with Rome, though that will certainly have been the case. It was that they realized that such beliefs threatened their own position. People who believe that their god is about to make a new world, and that those who die in loyalty to him in the meantime will rise again to share gloriously in it, are far more likely to lose respect for a wealthy aristocracy than people who think that this life, this world and this age are the only ones there will ever be (Wright 2003: 138; cf. 139).

One even observes here the insinuation that resurrection was among the religious beliefs that contributed to the Great Jewish Revolt. In this portrait, Wright is clearly front-loading into his treatment of the more general early Jewish context a political dimension to the resurrection hope that will emerge with prominence in his treatment of New Testament literature.

Wright, for example, reads the church’s stories of Jesus’ resurrection as narra-tives that overturn the prevailing imperial ideology of Roman rule:

But if Jesus had been raised from the dead, if the new creation had begun, if they were themselves the citizens of the creator god’s new kingdom, then the claims of Jesus to Lordship on earth as well as heaven would ultimately come into conflict with those of Caesar… Jesus’ resurrection vindicated or validated his Messiahship; and if he was Messiah, he was the world’s true lord. Resurrection was every bit as radical a belief for the early Christians as it had been for the Pharisees, in fact more so (Wright 2003: 538).

Implicit within his treatment of earlier Judaism, then, is also a particular, politi-cally-oriented reading of resurrection that sets the stage for Wright’s





‘counter-imperial’ treatment of Jesus’ resurrection in the early church. Ultimately, this ‘political dynamite’ (2003: 730) has important ideological repercussions for the church’s social teaching in the present:

Death is the ultimate weapon of the tyrant; resurrection does not make a covenant with death, it overthrows it. The resurrection, in the full Jewish and early Christian sense, is the ultimate affirmation that creation matters, that embodied human beings matter. That is why resurrection has always had an inescapable political meaning; that is why the Sadducees in the first century, and the Enlightenment in our own day, have opposed it so strongly. No tyrant is threatened by Jesus going to heaven, leaving his body in a tomb. No governments face the authentic Christian challenge when the church’s social preaching tries to base itself on Jesus’ teaching, detached from the central and energizing fact of his resurrection (2003: 737).

While Wright’s reading does not declare itself a new, politically-oriented approach to resurrection, it is clear that his methods of interpretation stand in line with other recent pieces of biblical criticism that insist upon the anti-imperialist nature of early Jewish and Christian discourse (Horsley 2003; Elliott 1994). Moreover, Wright seems to have distilled the anti-imperialist political essence of Jewish apocalypticism into the resurrection hope itself, transferring its ideologi-cal spirit to the interpretation of early Christianity: Resurrection, thus, presents a vital link between the political impetus of earlier Jewish apocalypticism and the messianic claims of the early church.

Alan F. Segal

In the work of Segal, one finds a more clearly conceptualized and comprehen-sive method of interpretation that explores the relationships between the resur-rection hope and the social worlds in which it originally took shape. Calling his method a ‘comparative, social-historical technique’, Segal documents the pos-sible connections between a culture’s myths about the afterlife and the social institutions that shaped their surroundings (Segal 2004: 285). Such an approach seems especially well suited to the vast diversity among the materials treated in this ambitious study, which spans Egyptian, Zoroastrian, Classical, Near Eastern, Israelite-Jewish, Christian, and Muslim conceptions. For ancients as well as moderns, afterlife beliefs like resurrection have functioned both existentially and socially to affirm an orderly reality to human life:

Because notions of life after death help us conquer our ultimate fears of mortality in important ways, they also help society or culture organize and maintain itself… We all know that notions of life after death differ widely from culture to culture and from major religion to major religion… But the fact that these views differ radically does not mean that they are invalid or ridiculous. Behind these notions lie a limited number





of functions and structures. Beneath the visions of paradise expressed in countless different cultural idioms, there are a certain number of universal functions: Primary among them are the reification and legitimation of a society’s moral and social system; but one could just as easily argue that there is something fundamental to human life in them and that without them we would be totally lost in the world (Segal 2004: 19).

The individual units of Segal’s chronological treatment apply this method to a vast survey of the evidence. The ubiquitous beliefs in the afterlife in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Canaan arose in continuous relationship to the agricultural-climatic features of life in these regions, the myths that rationalized such natural surroundings, and the socio-political structures that ordered communal life in changing historical envi-ronments (2004: 54-55, 63-64, 104-109, 697-99): As Segal methodically executes his analysis, the reader observes the many ways in which, ‘Watching the afterlife change is watching a society’s hopes and fears change, with the attendant change in social institutions and values’ (2004: 698-99).

Israel’s own standing on the afterlife in pre-exilic times is characterized by an ambivalent relationship to the mythological and political structures of this regional environment. Segal observes that the world of the dead and the afterlife, in particular, play a markedly diminutive role in ancient Israelite religion in com-parison with its ancient neighbors—at least as the literary evidence in the Hebrew Bible presents the matter. The explanation for this disjunction is ultimately to be found, it seems, in the ways in which the exilic authors/editors of Israel’s religious traditions described their earlier history as separated from the cultic practices of their regional neighbors; the actual historical situation of Israel’s pre-exilic religion may, of course, have shared much more freely in the volumi-nous interest in the afterlife and cult of the dead that characterized its surround-ings (2004: 122-24). Later Judaism, in fact, would gradually relax this purist concern, borrowing more freely from the Hellenized forms of Egyptian, Persian, Mesopotamian, and Canaanite wisdom on the afterlife (2004: 65-68).

In fact, it is within the Hellenistic era that Segal traces the origins of Jewish thought on the afterlife especially to interactions with Persians and Greeks:

Persian and Greek influence become the most important two factors in the development of Jewish conceptions, from which they entered Christianity, and hence became the most important factors in the description of the afterlife in the religions of the West… As the Jews heard about more attractive hereafters, they gradually revised their own conceptions of the afterlife in ways that give credit to their patient, long-suffering LORD. The result, which moved them toward a new Jewish synthesis of views of the afterlife, began as a group of tendentious and conflicted, but related, arguments about what the afterlife might be. The Jewish nation entertained, both accepting and rejecting, aspects of Persian and Greek thought…the Jews readily accept notions of the resurrection of the body and the immortality of the soul, which came from Persian and Greek cultures respectively (2004: 173-75; cf. 394-96).





Segal’s social-historical approach, thus, traces the rise of resurrection hope in Judaism to two sociological reflexes in post-exilic Jewish history: (1) a gradually more open posture to non-Israelite cultures in the exilic eras after the conflict with the abhorrent Canaanite religions had long ceased; and (2) the particular contribution of Persian ideals on the afterlife to Judaism. The prevalence of immortality in much of Jewish reflection on the afterlife can, in turn, be traced to a social environment of interaction with Greek thought (2004: 279-81). This view, of course, significantly challenges proposals regarding a more exclusively ‘internal’ development of the resurrection hope within the confines of Israelite-Jewish tradition.

Like many earlier treatments, Segal attributes the rise of a confident belief in the afterlife to the religious and political conflicts of the Hellenistic Reform and Maccabean Revolt (2004: 270). It was this crisis, in particular, that resulted in an intense and literal affirmation of the afterlife that freely borrowed from earlier Persian and Greek conceptions that had long remained latent in earlier Jewish history. The Wisdom literature of the Hebrew Bible, further, suggests that this confident hope in the afterlife did not emerge from the aristocratic circles that produced this literature. Qoheleth (e.g., in 3.16-22), in fact, goes ‘out of its way to question’ any positive view of a personal afterlife (2004: 253): ‘Here, in Ecclesiastes, is the beginning of the position that Josephus and the New Testament associate with the Sadducees’ (2004: 254). In the crisis of the Maccabean revolt, however, the unprecedented social crisis over Jewish law pressurized the entire context of Jewish religion to adapt new religious resources for dealing with the realities of religious violence and martyrdom that characterized this conflict. Within this context, resurrection arose out of the earlier mythological resources bequeathed by Zoroastrian traditions to resolve the moral, political, and social crisis of martyrdom (2004: 270-72). Through its emerging hope in resurrection, sectors within Judaism proclaimed that these martyrdoms would be vindicated by God: Resurrection became ‘the remedy given by God to the Jews because of the cruelty and oppression of foreign domination, a notion which carried on directly into the Roman period’ (2004: 269).

Segal expands the sociological treatment of these origins more fully, referenc-ing the social milieu of the Maskilim of Daniel, as well as that of the Qumran Community, where resurrection was also held with passionate acceptance along with beliefs of angelification of the righteous. By comparing the social back-grounds of these movements with other forms of millenarian or apocalyptic groups, Segal gradually attributes the rise of the resurrection hope to various forms of deprivation suffered by Jews in the second century bce. Utilizing more distant social analogies found in Native American, Melanesian, and jihadist movements, Segal explores a number of social factors that contributed to the flourishing of the resurrection hope in early Judaism. These include ‘need, depri-vation, anxiety, leadership, and the propensity to interpret events in a religious





framework’ (2004: 319). Ultimately, it is the colonial situation of Judaism under Greece and Rome that orchestrates these dynamics in harmony:

Deprivation is what fuels these movements. But the source of the deprivation is inherent in the colonial situation itself. The colonial or imperial power evinces a great many superiorities to the native culture, despite the imperium’s distinct moral deficiencies from the native point of view. And yet, at the same time, the most religiously pious in the society, those who ought to be most favored by God, are materially and culturally disadvantaged in the imperial system. This creates cognitive dissonance, another kind of deprivation. In a way, though it is usually seen as a threatened disconfirmation of the native religion [sic]. When the goal cannot be achieved in this life, the rewards can be transferred to the next (2004: 320).

The treatment of ‘deprivation’ in Segal’s analysis strikes on numerous chords, including the material, status, and cognitive forms of deprivation which the situ-ation of Greek and Roman empire imposed upon traditional cultures in the Near East. Within this context, resurrection emerged as a hope that set the world right again: The material deprivation of death was overcome in newness of life; the threatened status of the righteous would be elevated to heavenly heights; and the moral anxiety of imperially sanctioned violence would be alleviated with the covenantal blessing of life restored to the suffering righteous (2004: 293-321).

This sociological analysis is also applied to other sectors of Judaism and images of the afterlife: Among the philosophical elite, Philo and Josephus, who depended upon upper-class rulers, adopted Greek notions of immortality that could be viewed as credible within the larger society (2004: 368). The differ-ences between resurrection of the dead and immortality of the soul in early Judaism also divide along lines of social setting in Segal’s treatment. Resurrection flourished within the more revolutionary activists of apocalyptic movements that became the most frequent targets of martyrdom; whereas immortality advanced among the intellectuals of the client classes that supported Hellenistic aristocra-cies and prized the integration of Jewish tradition with widely held philosophical virtues (2004: 394-95).

An anomaly within this portrait is the Pharisees: a non-revolutionary religious movement, populated by relatively well-positioned artisans and scribes that nevertheless is associated with the revolutionary ideal of the resurrection. Segal addresses this ‘paradox’ by re-reading some of the evidence for ‘bodily resurrec-tion’ among the Pharisees, especially the evidence of Josephus and the New Testament. His conclusion is that the Pharisees and their rabbinic descendants more fluidly combined resurrection and immortality, together with transforma-tive understandings of the resurrection that highlighted an ultimately celestial or spiritual destiny for the risen. In this way, the social position of the Pharisees actually does fit with the more eclectic and flexible nature of their afterlife beliefs, which could at once accentuate their commonalities with resurrection





traditions, while also accommodating the respectable belief in immortality (2004: 379-82). Segal even insists: ‘The Pharisees’ belief in life after death was entirely congruent with their Roman client status’ (2004: 381):

Why should the Pharisees, who sometimes share the reins of government, propound a doctrine that was characteristic of only the most extreme sectarians? The answer is that they do not; they do not tie themselves down to the specificity of the millenarian position. They pick a term and a pastoral vision of the end that is deliberately ambiguous. Like Paul, resurrection of the body for the Rabbis might not mean the fleshly body, at least in its corpselike form, but the ‘metamorphosis’ or more properly a ‘summorphosis’ of the corporeal body into a heavenly and spiritual body (2004: 608).

This ability to move flexibly between classic apocalyptic views of the resurrec-tion and Hellenistic conceptions of immortality would also characterize the later church fathers, under different historical circumstances in the second century and beyond (2004: 486-90).

Another important contribution of Segal’s work from within the anthropologi-cal and social sciences accentuates the value of ‘religiously interpreted states of consciousness’ (RISC) and ‘religiously altered states of consciousness’ (RASC) when addressing both Jewish mysticism and the earliest New Testament litera-ture (2004: 322-50). In this treatment, the notions of ‘ascent’ into the heavens familiar to Jewish apocalyptic literature may not simply comprise traditional literary conventions of the genre, but may, in fact, express underlying religious states of consciousness, which the authors of apocalypses pseudepigraphically attributed to visionary figures such as Daniel and Enoch (2004: 330-44). Such ‘ascents’ into the heavenly world often shaped afterlife conceptions in Jewish mysticism, as they ‘verified the notion of the immortal soul’ (2004: 340), the survival of existence beyond the body, and the realities of those cosmic spheres which would ultimately house the dead beyond this life (2004: 344-50). In such ways, RISC/RASC were integrally related to the afterlife beliefs of pagans, Jews, and eventually the early church as well.

The significance of this background reaches full expression in Segal’s treatment of Paul, whose vision of the future resurrection life ‘is framed around his visionary experience’ (2004: 417). Thus, Paul’s own mystical-apocalyptic state of consciousness already inwardly anticipated and partici-pated in the ultimate transformation of the body into the spiritual image of the risen Christ. Here, one finds an association that proves essential to Segal’s larger theoretical contribution to studies of the afterlife: that our understand-ings of the afterlife, both in the biblical eras and beyond, ultimately reflect internal states of consciousness, which humans have mythologized into cul-turally intelligible forms through the metaphors of soul’s journey, the fate of the body, and life after death:





It follows that in investigating ‘the Undiscover’d Country’ of the afterlife, we are actually investigating our own self-consciousness through the mirror of our culture. The words we use will be the words our culture gives to us for understanding these ‘peak experiences’ in our consciousness. The journey to heaven is also a journey into the self. This conclusion becomes inescapable. Saying that, however, is saying a great deal more than that we build our afterlife out of our imaginations. It is saying that we then invest those imaginative constructions with the authority of reality through a very complicated social procedure (2004: 344).

Paul’s own portrait of resurrection emerges deeply from his own consciousness of the risen Lord (1 Cor. 15.1-7) and his ongoing mystical experiences of ascent to heaven (2 Cor. 12.1-5):

Because Paul had seen the Christ in his resurrected body, Paul knew that the resurrection had begun and that all who came to believe in him were the firstfruits of this resurrection… What Paul said about the spiritual bodies is a direct result of that vision, a further description of that vision (2004: 407).

Thus, through an analysis of Paul’s language about his own states of conscious-ness and his descriptions of resurrection, Segal fully employs the major socio-logical methods that characterize his approach to resurrection: The resurrection hope that had been a perennial concern of Paul’s earlier Pharisaism became the predominant cultural language through which he expressed his vision of the future, a vision that was also integrally related to those states of consciousness that energized his vision of Christ and his own apostolic vocation. Segal’s syn-thesis of history, society, and consciousness, thus, illumines both Paul’s religious experience and his religious teaching on resurrection. The association proves crucial to his concluding sociological rationalization for the prevalence of the afterlife in the western heritage: Through hope in the afterlife, internal states of consciousness have been externalized in culturally appropriate forms that ulti-mately affirm, console, and justify one’s own position within a given society.

Claudia Setzer

Setzer’s recent work on resurrection equally utilizes sociological approaches to its functions within ancient religions—yet this time with a closer examination of how resurrection enhanced the identity-formation of particular factions of Jews and Christians in the first two centuries of the Common Era. For Setzer, resurrec-tion is not an isolated dogmatic claim as it practically relates to functioning Jewish and Christian communities:

Belief in resurrection carried with it a set of other tenets, some explicit, some implicit. The most common corollary is the one Tertullian points to here, the power of God.





Other ideas that frequently accompany resurrection are ultimate justice, reward for the righteous and punishment for the wicked, confidence in the election of those who hold this belief, and the legitimacy of those who preach and teach resurrection. Drawing multiple ideas in tow, resurrection possessed a peculiar utility for groups struggling to define themselves (2004: 1).

Since resurrection ‘condenses a worldview’ (2004: 44), it often became the chief symbol that expressed one religious group’s boundary-conflicts with its rivals (2004: 44-52). In the evidence analyzed by Setzer, resurrection came to be ‘the crucial test’ by which communities declared other religious parties as ‘in or out’ of alignment with their own group identity (2004: 6). This view of how resurrec-tion functioned in the self-consciousness of various religious movements is further developed in conversation with the socio-rhetorical methods of Cohen (1985), Swidler (1986), Horsley (1989; cf. 1976, 1978), Elliott (1994), Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca (1969), Cameron (1991), and Scott (1990). Within the incremental units of analysis, therefore, Setzer consistently treats the following aspects of resurrection across a survey of writings that span the first and second centuries ce: Resurrection is a symbol and strategy (2004: 44, 66, 83, 94), resur-rection condenses a worldview (2004: 44-45, 66-67, 83-84, 94-95), resurrection is imprecise and abstract (2004: 46, 67, 95), resurrection draws boundaries (2004: 46-47, 67-68, 84, 95-96), resurrection constructs community (2004: 47, 68, 84-85, 96), resurrection legitimates the authorities who teach it (2004: 47-49, 68-69, 85), and resurrection solves a set of problems, allowing communities to live in the world as it is (2004: 49-51, 69-70, 85-86, 97-98).

After a brief survey of the resurrection hope in early Jewish sources, Setzer turns her attention to the Pharisees’ resurrection hope. She contends that resur-rection served as an appropriate belief for helping the Pharisees in their social role of reconciling between the hopes of the Jewish populace and the realities of Roman rule:

I suggest that the concept of resurrection was part of a strategy that allowed the Pharisees to negotiate their position as mediators between the Romans and the people. Resurrection carried with it a set of affirmations about God’s power, ultimate justice, vindication of the righteous and punishment of the wicked. Yet it could seem innocent to an outsider, and as Josephus shows, it could be packaged to sound like the Greco-Roman idea of the immortality of the soul. For the people who looked to the Pharisees as their patrons or representatives, it would be a shorthand that reassured them of the continuing power of the God of Israel and Scripture’s story, as well as their own eventual vindication. For the local Roman bureaucrat or his deputies, it would be an innocuous belief, perhaps not recognizably different from Greco-Roman ideas of immortality (Setzer 2004: 35-36).

Here, one senses a very different reading of the social dynamics of the resurrec-tion hope than that proposed by Wright: Resurrection was more a mediating,





than a revolutionary, concept at least as it was held by Pharisees and the Tannaim, as it reconciled ‘dearly held ideas of God’s power and favor to Israel…with the reality of her suffering and subjection to an alien power’ (Setzer 2004: 52). Like Segal, Setzer seems to affirm that the Pharisees utilized resurrection with a certain amount of social latitude, both defining Judaism culturally while also accommodating it to its present environment.

Since resurrection was still likely a minority view in the first and second centuries, the Tannaim who branded resurrection of the dead into portions of the Mishnah and Jewish liturgies also legitimated their own authority within the larger Jewish community by stamping their particular beliefs into these tradi-tions (Setzer 2004: 38-39, 43-44):

The belief in resurrection acts as an implicit protest against competing groups and the larger Greco-Roman society without, and as an instrument of self-definition and social control within the community… Elegant in its amorphous, abstract nature—malleability and removal to another time (or place)—resurrection affirms the individual, physical body and the collective body of Israel in this world (Setzer 2004: 52).

In its adaptability to the particular social environment of the first and second centuries ce, then, the resurrection hope served the Pharisees and later Tannaim well as a public symbol of their opposition to external rivals and their authority to speak within the Jewish community.

Setzer further charts a parallel, if independent, series of social functions for the resurrection hope within the early church during the same centuries. While she does not treat the Historical Jesus comprehensively, she joins Meier (2000: 3-24), who argues that the Synoptic controversy story on resurrection (Mk 12.18-27//Mt. 22.23-33; Lk. 20.27-40) represents a genuine relic of an historical conflict that emerged in the course of Jesus’ disputations in Jerusalem (Setzer 2004: 53-54). Although resurrection may not have constituted a central element of Jesus’ activ-ity, it nevertheless features as a kind of secondary element in his original preach-ing. For Setzer, a reading of the controversy story also ‘reinforces the argument…that a first century Jew would link the belief in resurrection of the dead to God’s power and a correct understanding of Scripture’ (2004: 54), both prominent fea-tures of the controversy narrative (Mk 12.24//Mt. 22.29). This historical root in the ministry of Jesus received further growth in the later church’s catechesis.

When applying her self-definition paradigm to Paul, Setzer relies heavily upon anti-imperial readings of the Pauline literature by Elliott and Horsley, not unlike Wright’s own treatment of resurrection (Setzer 2004: 54-58). Her work is further established upon the social divisions among the ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ at Corinth, as explored by Martin (1995). Reading 1 Corinthians (esp. chs. 8–11) as ‘an open challenge to the power politics of Paul’s day and a prescription for an alternative society’, the resurrection emerges in the letter as ‘the final proof that





the pyramid of power has been overturned and an alternative society has emerged’ (2004: 58). Among the social divisions that formed between the ‘strong’ Corinthian social elite who denied resurrection and the ‘weak’ lower classes at Corinth who cleaved to it as a hope for a new order to reality, Paul’s teaching on the future resurrection of the body takes the side of the weak; it ‘disrupts the pyramid of value’, status, wealth, and authority that characterizes the intellectual culture of Corinth; through the future resurrection of the body, ‘the hierarchy will eventually be overturned’ (2004: 65). In so doing, the ‘resurrection of bodies from the dead becomes a powerful idea wielded by Paul against prevailing politi-cal and cultural assumptions’ (2004: 66). In this reading, Paul also shares the basic social features of future resurrection as identified in Setzer’s larger treat-ment: It crystallizes a number of important claims within Paul’s gospel (2004: 66-67); it undermines the predominant assumptions of the Graeco-Roman cul-ture which surrounds his churches (2004: 67-68); it becomes the rallying-point for defining an alternative vision of reality in the church (2004: 68); it becomes a kind of litmus-test for proper teaching and the correct exercise of religious authority (2004: 68-69); and it helps the early church to cope with the world in its present state of imperfection and imperial subjugation (2004: 69-70).

These features continue to apply to the second-century social setting of resur-rection hope among the early Christian apologists in Second Clement (Setzer 2004: 71-73), Justin (Setzer 2004: 74-86), and Athenagoras (Setzer 2004: 87-98). In these writings, resurrection constitutes a symbol that defines the church’s faith over and against its pagan and heretical antagonists, forming community around an ideal that both legitimates authoritative teachers and undermines rivals. Setzer further extends this reading of Christian apologists to Irenaeus and Tertullian, whose works represent a more fully developed expression of earlier traditions, some of which extend even further back into the first-century evidence. These include concerns with scriptural argumentation to affirm resurrection and the authority of those who teach it, the paradigm of creation as the precedent for the raising of the dead, and the unity of body and soul as an anthropological ideal making a bodily resurrection necessary in the future life (2004: 125-43). The social uses of resurrection, thus, developed significantly over the first two centu-ries of the Common Era. From the Pharisees to Paul, one may note a heightened state of polemic and subversion of imperial authority in 1 Corinthians; and from the first century to the second, one may note an increasing number of arguments, analogies, and symbols that ‘burgeons into an articulate resurrection apologetic among early Christians that presents an intellectually respectable front to the Greco-Roman world, but helps maintain a separate, distinctive identity’ (2004: 144). The symbol of resurrection, thus, prevented Christians from fully assimi-lating into the Graeco-Roman world; it maintained their distinctive identity as separate and internally cohesive, until they ultimately came to overcome the empire itself (2004: 155).





Further Reflections

When read together, the studies of Wright, Setzer, and Segal raise important ques-tions about the social dynamics of the resurrection hope. In the end, was resurrection the politically revolutionary, socially destabilizing force that Wright assumes? Or, on the other hand, did it allow for a more flexible mediation between imperial rule and Jewish identity, as Setzer and Segal assert? Was it a boundary-marker that exclu-sively defined authoritative teaching within particular religious movements or a sym-bol that could be apologetically translated in appeal to pagan audiences? Was it limited to conditions of deprivation or upwardly mobile among status-holders? Moreover, these studies seem to suggest that the social dynamics of resurrection dif-fered among various movements within Judaism, with Segal drawing a distinction between apocalyptists and Pharisees, and Setzer providing a somewhat more subver-sive treatment of Paul’s utilization of the resurrection hope when compared with the Pharisees and later church fathers. In recognition of these arguments, it seems wise to recognize the extent to which resurrection could serve a range of diverse socio-rhetorical functions, from quiescence to activism and from exclusive self-definition to flexible apologetic. As M. Bockmuehl has noted, for example, actual pagan responses to the resurrection seem to have regarded it more ‘as religiously silly and gullible rather than as politically serious or menacing’ (2004: 494). If so, then it also reasons that any easy, one-to-one correspondence between resurrection hope and a particular set of social dynamics should be avoided. Such caution is especially war-ranted in light of the evidence for resurrection in the Book of Watchers in 1 Enoch (see below), which now attests resurrection a generation earlier than the great politi-cal turmoil of the Maccabean revolt. Perhaps Paul himself is a quintessential example of the socio-rhetorical flexibility of discourse about the resurrection, where resurrec-tion language can equally encourage a quiescent, hardworking life amid the uncertain-ties of death and the world (1 Thess. 4.10-12; 5.11) or inspire self-sacrificial activism in light of God’s coming triumph over all cosmic powers (1 Cor. 15.24-28, 31-32, 58).

Contested Evidence

In spite of frequent and detailed inquiry, many bodies of evidence regarding res-urrection in early Judaism and Christianity remain at a crossroads of different interpretive conclusions regarding precisely what certain traditions actually say about resurrection. Specialized studies dedicated to particular pieces of literary and material evidence have advanced our understanding of these contested and frequently troubling problems in the study of resurrection.

1 Enoch

The precise nature of resurrection in the Enochic literature has remained a chal-lenging problem in earlier scholarship due to the complex editorial features of 1





Enoch (Puech 1993: I, 109-112; Cavallin 1974: 41-43; Hengel 1974: II, 200-202; Bousset 1966: 270; Charles 1912: 53-54). The more recent commentary by Nickelsburg (2001a) on 1 Enoch 1–36 has shed considerable light upon earlier scholarship and now makes it possible to identify with confidence some form of future resurrection within the Enochic Book of Watchers. Based upon the complex editorial activity exerted upon these chapters, Nickelsburg dates 1 Enoch 20–36 to the late third century bce (2001a: 292–300). This historical setting allows one to appreciate all the more the early historical dating for the resurrection prophe-cies of 1 Enoch 22.13 (cf. 24.5–25.1). If his dating of these units is correct, then portions of the cosmic journeys of Enoch in Watchers demonstrate, ‘That this author believed in some kind of a resurrection…it appears that the righteous will be raised to a new and long life in Jerusalem’ (2001a: 306; cf. 312-16); ‘it is pos-sible that the author is thinking of a resurrection of the body…the use of the term [bones] here suggests bodily life in the new Jerusalem’ (2001a: 315).

This confident identification of a resurrection prophecy in Watchers and its dating to the late third century bce fills a crucial void in the emerging chronology of the resurrection hope in early Judaism. While numerous commentators have noted that Dan. 12.1-3 only summarizes a hope in resurrection that had an earlier pre-history in Judaism (Chester 2001: 67-69; Stemberger 1972: 278), the Book of Watchers now charts a clear point of reference for appreciating how the hope was utilized in earlier apocalyptic circles prior to Daniel (Collins 1993: 395-97; Puech 1993: I, 109-13). Moreover, Nickelsburg has even suggested that Dan. 12.2 itself ‘probably reflects the interpretation of Isaiah 65–66 in 1 Enoch 24.2–27.5’ (Nickelsburg 2006: 5; cf. 2001a: 315-16). This dating of the evidence from Watchers makes it much more difficult to suggest that resurrection arose in any exclusive sense out of the later experiences of Jewish martyrdom during the Hellenistic Reform and Maccabean Revolt (Nickelsburg 2006: 5-6). The histori-cal climate in which Watchers was composed is particularly dim, leaving no clear indication that its authorial community was dealing in any tangible way with the crisis of Jewish martyrdom at all. The prominence of resurrection in Daniel and 2 Maccabees, writings explicitly associated with the Hellenistic Reform and Maccabean Revolt, have made it conventional to associate the rise of the resur-rection hope with the historical experience of Jewish martyrdom in the middle of the second century bce. The evidence of Watchers, however, challenges this conclusion. Watchers reveals that resurrection had an extended pre-history prior to that crisis, a pre-history that may not have involved martyrdom at all. Collins, for example, locates these afterlife traditions in the social context of the more general ‘cultural trauma’ exerted upon Near Eastern societies as the result of Hellenistic empire (Collins 2001: 127). One may, therefore, seriously question the extent to which the resurrection hope originated from the particular crisis of martyrdom or whether it was simply the way in which the traditions found in Watchers understood the eschatological destiny of the righteous and wicked.





The Dead Sea Scrolls

A recent shift in thinking about the Dead Sea Scrolls has led an increasing num-ber of studies to conclude that resurrection registered in some form or other among the diverse eschatological traditions that animated the Qumran Community’s religious worldview. An earlier impasse in discussions of this question arose over a disconnect between the eschatology found among the so-called ‘sectarian’ Dead Sea Scrolls that were composed and/or edited by the Qumran Community (e.g., Rule of the Community, Damascus Document, Pesharim, War Scroll, etc.) and other writings attested at Qumran but probably not composed by the same authors of the sectarian literature. Since resurrection was not explicitly mentioned in the former group of writings, scholars such as Nickelsburg (1972: 144-69) and Collins (1997a: 110-29) reasonably concluded that future resurrection had no role in Qumran sectarian eschatology, which emphasized, instead, the opening of the heavenly world itself into the earthly domain in the Community’s pure worship, where angelic existence and everlast-ing life were already qualities experienced in the present. Following an earlier study by Grelot (1958), Fletcher-Lewis cites numerous passages that seem to indicate a belief in spiritual ascent among the Qumran-Essenes, rather than a belief in resurrection (Fletcher-Lewis 2002: 128-33). Such distinctions between sectarian and non-sectarian literature seem to decrease the possibility that the Qumran Community itself was among those sectors of Judaism in which the resurrection hope took a firm root.

This assessment, however, has been challenged by the expanding number of writings that allude to resurrection over the last two decades. The Scrolls manu-scripts which became increasingly released to the public in critical editions dur-ing the 1990s featured a number of writings that seemed to assert a confident hope in some type of resurrection from the dead. Paramount among these was Puech’s edition of 4Q521, the so-called Messianic Apocalypse, which repeatedly celebrates the hope that God will ‘revive the dead’ (fragments 2+4 II 1-12; frag-ments 7+5). Alongside this clear attestation of resurrection hope, other writings soon emerged as additional support for a positive reception of the resurrection hope. Pseudo-Ezekiel (4Q385 fragment 2 lines 1-10), for example, creatively rewrites the prophet’s vision of the ‘valley of dry bones’ (ch. 37) (Dimant 2001: 23-29; 1999–2000: 527-48). This rewriting of the earlier prophetic text envisions a literal hope of physical resurrection, an interpretive tradition well attested in later Jewish and Christian literature (Lives of the Prophets 3.11-12; Genesis Rabbah 14.5; Leviticus Rabbah 14.9; Tertullian, Resurrection 29-30; cf. 4 Macc. 18.17). Finally, Puech has additionally suggested that a wisdom writing from Qumran (4Q418 = 4QInstructiond) also alludes to a resurrection (fragment 69 II + 60 lines 1-15, esp. lines 7-8) in which the just will ‘awaken’/‘be awakened’ from the dead to judge the wicked at the end of the age (Puech 2004: 427-44;





2005: 427-44; 2008: 157-73). One may further add to these newly discovered writings the multiple copies of 1 Enoch and Daniel at Qumran, writings whose eschatologies certainly featured the resurrection hope.

While these writings have not numbered among the quintessential ‘sectarian’ writings of the Qumran Community, they have provided an increasingly formi-dable column of evidence that resurrection was positively received at Qumran; and more recent assessments have certainly taken account (Davies 2001: 189-211; Hengel 2001: 170; Segal 2004: 298-303; VanderKam and Flint 2002: 245-46; Vermes 1997: 88-89; Wright 2003: 27). Even Nickelsburg, who still upholds the crucial distinction between ‘sectarian’ and ‘non-sectarian’ writings, has acknowledged in the recently expanded edition (2006) of his classic study (1972), ‘Thus, to judge from the broader range of Scrolls that were either brought to or copied at Qumran, some people there believed in a resurrection from the dead’ (Nickelsburg 2006: 12).

Perhaps the absence of an undoubted reference to resurrection within classic Qumran sectarian ideology may suggest that resurrection was a popular hope from broader sectors of Judaism, which the Community positively received as somehow compatible with its eschatology, even if it did not feature at the very core of its formative religious ideology. The peripheral nature of resurrection at Qumran may also suggest that the Community was still in the process of gradu-ally accepting resurrection; yet it had not integrated resurrection into its ideology in any comprehensive way. In the impasse between so-called ‘sectarian’ and ‘non-sectarian’ Qumran literature, then, what we may be observing is a commu-nity in the dynamic process of positively receiving the resurrection hope as it began to flourish in Jewish literature of the later second to first centuries bce. However one may interpret that particular point, the palaeographical dates of the Messianic Apocalypse (early first century bce), Pseudo-Ezekiel (middle first century bce) and 4QInstruction (late first century bce) clearly attest to the growth of the resurrection hope in multiple sectors of Judaism—including Qumran—in the generations following our earliest literary evidence in 1 Enoch and Daniel.

Moreover, the Scrolls seem to exhibit precisely the same mixed and inconsis-tent conceptualization of resurrection that one encounters in contemporary Judaism as a whole. Although one should remain cautious, given the fragmen-tary remains of these writings, the Messianic Apocalypse seems to feature a celestial domain for those who have been raised to new life; and yet a literal reading of Pseudo-Ezekiel would indicate that its resurrection is a graphically physical one, given its confident use of the language and imagery of Ezekiel 37. The precise understanding of resurrection in 4QInstruction, however, seems more difficult to discern. Since Puech has compared its language to that of Dan. 12.1-3, perhaps comparisons with that text may offer some clue as to how the author of this sapiential work understood resurrection. At any rate, these three diverse writings exhibit different conceptualizations of resurrection. The





Qumran Community’s gradual acceptance of resurrection, thus, never seems to have taken the shape of an exclusive anthropological understanding; and that would only make it entirely consistent with the diverse forms of resurrection attested within the larger Jewish culture of its time.

Wisdom of Solomon

On another front, the Wisdom of Solomon (1.1–5.23) has traditionally been read as espousing a mild blending of Hellenistic beliefs about the immortality of the soul with Jewish tradition, without providing any genuine references to the res-urrection hope (Collins 1997b: 185-90; Nickelsburg 2001b: 152-56; Schürer 1979: III, 572; Cavallin 1974: 127). Puech has challenged such traditional read-ings, arguing that hope in resurrection of the body may also be assumed by the author (Puech 2003: 209-32; 1993: I, 92-98; cf. Wright 2003: 162-65, Gilbert 2001: 271-97). Aside from Wisdom 2.22–3.5, which seems clearly enough to proclaim a positive hope in immortality, Puech argues that a number of subse-quent passages in Wisdom advance a more complex, this-worldly eschatology in which the deceased righteous are assumed to reign on earth and judge the wicked (3.8; 4.16; 5.1-8)—a hope that may only be fulfilled through a physical resurrec-tion (Wright 2003: 172). Indeed, at the time of judgment, ‘the righteous shall stand with great boldness’ (5.1; emphasis added), an expression that may imply a ‘rising’ from the grave (Puech 2003: 224-25). Even so, Puech does acknowl-edge that Wisdom may have veiled this hope at a more implicit level, presenting the hope of resurrection without actually naming the word itself in the philo-sophical context of Egyptian Judaism, where it might otherwise have seemed shocking or strange (2003: 226).

Certainly, there is more at stake in this discussion than precisely what Wisdom of Solomon itself says on this point. If Wisdom preserves some allusion to resur-rection, then this only underscores the widespread nature of resurrection in mul-tiple currents of Judaism near the turn of the eras, even within those currents of Egyptian Judaism that esteemed a synthesis of Hellenistic philosophy with Jewish tradition. Reading resurrection into texts like Wisdom of Solomon, in fact, supports the judgments of those like Wright, who maintains that virtually every Jew in the Second Temple Period believed in some form of it and that it was already a standard belief prior to the rabbinic age (Wright 2003: 129, 147). If the traditional reading is more accurate, however, then Wisdom further accen-tuates the diversity of Jewish reflection on the afterlife, highlighting the distinc-tiveness of the resurrection hope among those currents of Judaism that did positively express this otherwise controversial hope. Such a reading of Wisdom would, therefore, further support the claim that resurrection was still an occasion-ally controversial, if well-known, minority viewpoint during the Second Temple Period; and that its popularity in some literary texts must be weighed over and





against the preponderance of the evidence that avoided, ignored, or preferred other language for the afterlife than an explicit portrait of resurrection.

Josephus

Similar problems are encountered in how one reads the crucial and problematic evidence supplied in the writings of Josephus (Against Apion 2.218-219; War 1.650; 2.153-158, 163, 165; 3.372-376; 6.46-49; 7.343-349, 351-357; Antiquities 1.229-231; 17.354; 18.14, 16, 18). As the only Jew to have composed an account of what his contemporaries believed about the afterlife, Josephus supplies a potentially significant source of information on this matter; yet conflicts remain over precisely how his reports should be read. Many interpreters have suggested that his descriptions of the Jewish sects, as well as other passages of his surviv-ing works, refer somehow to resurrection (Wright 2003: 175-77; Tabor 1989: 225-38; Schürer 1979: III, 543; Cavallin 1974: 141-42; Feldman 1965: 13, note c; Schlatter 1932: 263); yet others have called attention to the prevalence of Hellenistic afterlife conceptions like immortality and metempsychosis in his descriptions of Jewish beliefs (Elledge 2006: 48-51, 127-30; Puech 1993: II, 707; Carnley 1987: 53; Bruce 1971: 458-60; Thackeray 1919: 159; Bentwich 1914: 117). The present author has addressed this problem in a specialized study that builds upon earlier suggestions that Josephus is translating Jewish apocalyp-tic beliefs, like resurrection, into a philosophical idiom conversant with his Hellenistic readers’ own cultural expectations (Segal 2004: 302; Hengel 2001: 162; Collins 1993: 398; Puech 1993: II, 747-48, 781, 795). Such methods of translation would place Josephus’s reports well at home among Greek and Roman ethnographic literature, which occasionally enumerated the death cus-toms and afterlife beliefs of the ‘barbaric’ peoples whose ancestral customs fas-cinated their imperial overlords (Herodotus, Histories 2.123; Poseidonius, F 116 > Diodorus Siculus, Historical Library 5.28.5-6; Caesar, Gallic Wars 6.14; Strabo, Geography 4.4.4; Appian, Gallic Wars 1.3; Tacitus, Histories 5.5). The portrait of immortality among the Jews in the writings of Josephus probably incorporated earlier ethnographic sources like these, while further elaborating them with a variety of mythological, philosophical, and noble death traditions (Elledge 2006: 81-127). The frequency of immortality in Josephus’s descriptions of Judaism further supported his idealizing, philosophical characterization of Jews and his moralizing, providential presentation of theodicy (Elledge 2006: 131-45). An awareness of these ethnographic and apologetic features of Josephus’s works suggests caution when utilizing his writings as evidence for Jewish beliefs on resurrection: At the surface level, his writings ascribe to Jews a positive and rather mixed view of popular Hellenistic traditions on the immor-tality of the soul in which resurrection has been intentionally avoided; at a deeper level, of course, one may imagine that resurrection was one of the eschatological





beliefs of early Judaism that motivated Josephus’s elaborate translation effort. Josephus, thus, represents the viewpoints of those Jews—perhaps even ‘aristo-cratic’ Jews, as Segal and Setzer might suggest—for whom immortality repre-sented an appealing device for mediating between Hellenism and popular Jewish eschatological hopes like resurrection. Perhaps Philo, the Wisdom of Solomon, Pseudo-Phocylides, and 4 Maccabees might be similarly compared.

Inscriptions

Despite the obsession with literary evidence for resurrection, inscriptions and material culture do continue to play a potentially significant role. At the same time, recent studies present an ambivalent attitude toward how precisely one may utilize inscriptional evidence in the study of resurrection. Park’s specialized study of Paul in light of Jewish inscriptions advances a more positive view of the value of inscriptions:

As is commonly acknowledged, one advantage of the study of Jewish inscriptions is that it allows a more representative view of the beliefs and feelings of the Jewish people than that provided by the literary evidence, which is usually the product of a certain religious and social group. In addition, despite the importance of convention, there is a certain amount of spontaneity and immediacy in the funerary inscriptions. This is because they are a conscious effort to preserve the sentiments of those affected by death, which furthermore normally comes without warning or preparation. Finally, it may be noted that these sentiments are available to the modern researcher more or less directly, unlike literary evidence, which normally entails a process of transmission (Park 2000: 1).

Park applies his analysis of funerary inscriptions to identifying how Paul’s letters utilize popular and conventional language reminiscent of the phrases and slogans found in burials, including his allusions to the netherworld, the denial of afterlife in his letters, and, of course, resurrection itself (2000: 174-204). In light of this survey, Paul’s language for the afterlife ‘is not limited to certain texts, for exam-ple, the OT and Jewish apocalyptic literature, but an entire range of ideas current in both Jewish and non-Jewish sources, literary and artifactual, which more often than not overlap and intermingle with each other’ (Park 2000: 204). In an analo-gous study, Kraemer has called attention to the commonalities between burial styles and inscriptions at Beth She‘arim and rabbinic beliefs about death, with the only dissonant element between the two being the pronounced Roman burial styles of Jewish tombs (Kraemer 2000: 69-70).

The positive approach to inscriptions, as well articulated by Park, is countered in more cautious treatments. Park’s own detailed reading of the inscriptions themselves, in fact, demonstrates the numerous options that may be advanced even for interpreting the precise meaning of a single inscription (Park 2000:





151-73). For such reasons, Setzer casts a more suspicious eye upon this column of evidence:

Many of the phrases [on funerary inscriptions] are conventional, and may or may not reflect their original meaning. Even if they are heartfelt, they could reflect the views of the deceased, the family of the deceased, or the stoneworker, not all of whom necessarily belong to the same religious group. Nor is it always clear who is a Jew or a Christian, nor what religious symbols mean (Setzer 2004: 109-10).

In the words of Van der Horst, such complex ‘evidence often defies interpreta-tion’ (1991: 114). In spite of such obstacles, inscriptions may at least challenge a number of generalizations about resurrection in early Jewish society that are drawn from literary evidence. Among Jewish inscriptions ranging in date from 200 bce—ce 400, Rutgers estimates the actual number that deal explicitly with the afterlife as ranging between three per cent among Roman inscriptions and 15 per cent in Palestine (Rutgers 2001: 298-99). Within this diminutive number, the large number of inscriptions that portray the denial of the afterlife or a more vague belief in immortality help to indicate that actual references to resurrection in funerary inscriptions are dramatically miniscule in comparison to its popular-ity in literary evidence.

Perhaps one may appreciate, then, how inscriptional evidence may distinguish the specific religious concerns within literate circles from the popular conventions for burial in the more general Jewish populace (Park 2000: 173, 193; Setzer 2004: 123-24). It further seems impossible to prove on the basis of inscriptional evidence that the particular idea of resurrection (physical or otherwise) predominated in early Judaism (Horst 1991: 126), although Park concludes his own assessment with the claim that ‘in terms of both detail and quantity, the expectation of resurrection is much greater than any other specific form of afterlife expectation examined in the present study’ (Park 2000: 173). The more generalized, confused, and diverse expressions of attitudes toward death within this column of evidence might even suggest that the ardent hope for resurrection in literary circles represented a special-ized, minority concern that perhaps never fully established itself with the same intensity in other sectors of early Jewish culture. Or perhaps, following Rutgers, ‘Jews apparently did not consider funerary inscriptions the most appropriate vehi-cle directly to express their ideas on matters relating to the afterlife’ (Rutgers 2001: 300-301), whether they believed in resurrection or not.

While such ambivalence regarding how to interpret the remains of material culture continues to complicate this column of evidence, one can at least sum-marize here that some of the most valuable pieces of the Jewish evidence for resurrection now include the Regina inscription from Rome (Noy 1995: II, 86-88); the mixed yet valuable types of afterlife beliefs featured, sometimes in





the very same hand, in the Beth She‘arim funerary inscriptions (Avigad 1976; Schwabe and Lifshitz 1974; Mazar 1973); and perhaps a few suggestive inscrip-tions from Leontopolis (Tcherikover, Fuks and Stern 1957–64: III, 138-66). With regard to early Jewish and Christian writings, most of these inscriptions are later (Regina, third–fourth century ce; Beth She‘arim, second–fourth century ce) than some of the crucial literary evidence with which they may be compared.

Hazon Gabriel

Written in Hebrew on stone near the late first century bce, the Hazon Gabriel and its interpretation by I. Knohl has certainly posed a controversial new piece of evidence in the study of resurrection and messianism in pre-Christian Judaism. In line 80 of this apocalypse-like vision, Knohl reads an indecipherable three-letter word beginning with chet as the imperative ‘live’ (chy’), thus rendering the phrase, ‘By three days…live/be resurrected… I Gabriel command you’ (Knohl 2008: 151, 157). Who is being addressed in the putative imperative? In Knohl’s reading, the imperative refers to an antecedent ‘Ephraim’ in earlier lines of the Hazon, which he, in turn, interprets as an historical allusion to Simon of Peraea, a failed political messiah who led a brief revolt against Roman rule in 4 bce (Josephus, War 2.57-59; Antiquities 17.273-77). While this is not the moment to unwind every strand of this complex and speculative reconstruction, it is at least beneficial to enumerate the possible implications of Knohl’s reading for under-standing the more general topic of resurrection: (1) Knohl’s reading of line 80 may be entirely wrong; and if so, this is not evidence that is relevant to resurrec-tion. (2) Line 80 may conceivably reference resurrection, whether or not it directly refers to the resurrection of a messianic figure; and if so, Hazon Gabriel would further underscore the role of angelic mediators in the resurrection, a pop-ular Jewish tradition that is also found in Daniel (12.1-3). (3) Identifying the putative resurrection language with ‘Ephraim’ and Simon remains a third layer of interpretation that is, even in Knohl’s own words, ‘in the realm of conjecture’ (2008: 158). While the present author prefers options 1 or 2 (above), it is clear that Hazon Gabriel presents what is perhaps the most controversial new evidence for discussing the question of resurrection in Judaism prior to the turn of the eras.

Resurrection and Immortality

Finally, scholars today continue to wrestle with the old problem of precisely how individual writings negotiate the often protean relationship between the resurrec-tion of the body and the immortality of the soul. No longer is it possible to assert the stark contrast between Hellenism and Judaism that characterized the well-known article by Oscar Cullmann (1960). Nickelsburg’s correction to that older paradigm remains an influential guide to contemporary studies that accentuate how these two ideals merged and complemented one another in a confluent and





eclectic intellectual context (1972: 177-80; 2006: 219-23). Further complicating this problem is the tendency of some writings (e.g., 1 Enoch 5.7-9, 10.17, 91.10, 92.3-5, 103.3-4) to apply resurrection language—not to the body—but rather to the shade, soul, or spirit of the deceased in a kind of ‘resurrection of the spirit’. In such cases, is one truly reading about resurrection, immortality, or both? Or, following J. Collins, ‘This is not the Greek idea of immortality of the soul, but neither is it the resurrection of the body’ (Collins 2001: 124). It seems impossible to differentiate the two concepts clearly from one another in these instances.

In spite of these caveats, however, scholars continue to call attention to the very different anthropological assumptions of the two conceptions. Jon Levenson, for example, admonishes that immortality and resurrection ‘can be different in critical ways, and it can be profoundly misleading to subsume them under some simplistic master category, such as “afterlife”’ (2006: 20):

The expectation of an eschatological resurrection coexists easily with immortality so long as the latter is defined as the state of those who have died and await their restoration into embodiment, that is, into full human existence. It can also coexist easily with immortality understood as the invulnerability to a second death of those who will be raised and rewarded with eternal life. But if immortality is defined in connection with an indestructible core of the self that death cannot threaten (and may even liberate), then resurrection and immortality are at odds. Imported into Judaism, that version of immortality looks not forward to a new creation in a miraculous end-time but backward to the original creation, when God either made humankind deathless or granted it the capacity to reacquire a lost immortality. If immortality, so understood, involves anything miraculous, its miracle is (thankfully to many moderns) strictly in the past, and human beings already have all they need to survive death—a spirit or soul that is immortal or can be made so through the practice of ethics and morality. Whereas history in the classical Jewish vision of resurrection will culminate in God’s supernatural triumph over death, this second idea of immortality assumes a very different scenario: individuals at various times and without relationship to each other quietly shed their perishable casings to continue in an unbroken communion with their benevolent creator (2006: 21).

For Levenson, the Jewish concept of resurrection also stood as incorporating all Israel by kinship and covenant into a final vision of the afterlife (2006: 108-22), while immortality did not share the same collective awareness. Resurrection was, therefore, an explicitly ‘bodily and communal event… God would raise the dead in their full humanity…as a physico-psycho-social unity’ (Madigan and Levenson 2008: 3; see further Batnitzky 2009: 279-96). Recent feminist biblical criticism has explored similar lines of inquiry regarding resurrection’s distinc-tive focus on the body, community, and creation (Janssen 2000: 61-78).

Perhaps the best interpretive strategy for dealing with this continuing prob-lematic is to recognize the vast diversity of afterlife conceptions that flourished





in a variety of media in early Judaism within the Hellenistic and Roman eras. Within this expansive range of diverse conceptions, one may more fully appreci-ate how individual texts and traditions negotiate the complex boundaries and intersections between immortality and resurrection. Some writings do assert immortality of the soul in a more heavily radicalized form with no apparent ref-erence to a hope for the physical body. Philo of Alexandria, Wisdom of Solomon, the evidence of Josephus, and 4 Maccabees attest a moderate synthesis of Hellenistic reflection on the soul and Jewish tradition without referencing physi-cal resurrection in any explicit way (Grabbe 2001: 172-73, 181-84). One may even accuse Josephus and 4 Maccabees of having intentionally reinterpreted and suppressed the resurrection hope entirely (Elledge 2006: 127-52).

On the other hand, other writings clearly insist upon God’s future redemption of the body itself, apart from any apparent vocabulary for the soul’s properties or an interim state prior to resurrection, including Daniel, 2 Maccabees, the Messianic Apocalypse (4Q521), and Pseudo-Ezekiel (4Q385). Still other writ-ings attest a complex amalgamation of the language of both soul and body. The Jewish poet Pseudo-Phocylides, for example, combines immortality of the soul, resurrection of the dead, and even divinization/angelification within the narrow compass of approximately ten perplexing verses. The Apocalypse of 4 Ezra offers a tour de force in which the immortal souls of the righteous and wicked immedi-ately participate in the final judgment in an anticipatory way, even prior to the final resurrection in which the righteous will be restored to their bodies. Portions of 1 Enoch may further attest the belief in a resurrection of the departed spirit, without any explicit mention of the fate of the body (91.10; 92.3-5; 103.3-4).

While some interpreters, in particular Wright, have pursued the impulse to har-monize these diverse traditions into a two-stage model of intermediate state and final resurrection (Wright 2003: 129, 143-47, 168-75, 181-86, 195), the evidence supplied in early Jewish literature itself persistently resists such generalizations. Indeed, M. Bockmuehl has suggested that such claims by Wright ‘could be strengthened by engaging a little more seriously with mixed or discordant evi-dence’ (2004: 492). The admonition of P. Perkins rings true in this regard: ‘Exegetes must always take pains to avoid creating a false unity out of genuine diversity’ (1984: 22). The recognition of the diverse conceptions actually found in earlier literature may, in fact, only further enhance appreciation for how the rabbis and church fathers forged the intellectual syntheses that would characterize later Jewish and Christian thinking on the final destiny of the human; and yet superimposing these later syntheses upon earlier literature equally obscures perceptions into its conceptual innovation and diversity. The prolific nature of early Jewish religious thought on the afterlife is truly a profound moment in the history of western reli-gions: While never achieving standardization, its origination and diverse applica-tions of the resurrection concept bequeathed theological treasures that would forever enrich the later religious histories of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.





Bibliography

Avemarie, F., and H. Lichtenberger (eds.)2001 Auferstehung = Resurrection (The Fourth Durham–Tübingen Research

Symposium: Resurrection, Transfiguration and Exaltation in the Old Testament, Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity; WUNT, 135; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck).

Avery-Peck, A., J. Neusner and B. Chilton (eds.)2001 Judaism in Late Antiquity, Volume Three. Part Four: Death, Life after Death,

Resurrection, and the World to Come in the Judaisms of Antiquity (Leiden: Brill)Avigad, N.

1976 Beth She‘arim III: Catacombs 12-23 (Jerusalem: Massada).Batnitzky, L.

2009 ‘From Resurrection to Immortality: Theological and Political Implications in Modern Jewish Thought’, HTR 102: 279-96.

Bentwich, N.1914 Josephus (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society).

Bockmuehl, M.2004 ‘Compleat History of the Resurrection: A Dialogue with N.T. Wright’, JSNT

26: 489-504.Bousset, W., with H. Gressmann (ed.)

1966 Die Religion des Judentums im Späthellenistischen Zeitalter (HNT, 21; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 4th edn).

Bruce, F.1971 ‘Paul on Immortality’, SJT 24: 457-72.

Cameron, A. 1991 Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire: The Development of Christian

Discourse (Berkeley: University of California Press).Carnley, P.

1987 The Structure of Resurrection Belief (Oxford: Clarendon Press).Cavallin, H.C.C.

1974 Life after Death: Paul’s Argument for the Resurrection of the Dead in 1 Cor. 15; Part 1, An Inquiry into the Jewish Background (Lund: Gleerup).

Charles, R.H.1912 The Book of Enoch, Translated from the Editor’s Ethiopic Text (Oxford:

Clarendon Press).Charlesworth, J. et al. (eds.)

2011 Has Jesus’ Tomb Been Found?: An Exploration of Burial Practices and the Afterlife in Second Temple Judaism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans) [forthcoming].

Chester, A. 2001 ‘Resurrection and Transformation’, in Avemarie and Lichtenberger (eds.)

2001: 44-77. Cohen, A.

1985 The Symbolic Construction of Community (London: Tavistock).Collins, J.

1993 Daniel: A Commentary (Hermeneia; Minneapolis: Fortress Press).





1997a Apocalypticism in the Dead Sea Scrolls (Literature of the Dead Sea Scrolls; New York: Routledge).

1997b Jewish Wisdom in the Hellenistic Age (OTL; Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press).

2001 ‘The Afterlife in Apocalyptic Literature’, in Avery-Peck, Neusner and Chilton (eds.) 2001: 119-39.

Cullmann, O.1960 Immortality of the Soul or Resurrection of the Dead? The Witness of the New

Testament (London: Epworth).Davies, P.

2001 ‘Death, Resurrection, and Life after Death in the Qumran Scrolls’, in Avery-Peck, Neusner and Chilton (eds.) 2001: 189-214.

Davis, S., D. Kendall and G. O’Collins (eds.)1997 The Resurrection: An Interdisciplinary Symposium (Oxford: Oxford

University Press).Dimant, D. 1999–2000 ‘Resurrection, Restoration and Time-Curtailing in Qumran, Early Judaism

and Christianity’, RevQ 19: 527-48.2001 Qumran Cave 4.XXI: Parabiblical Texts, Part 4: Pseudo-Prophetic Texts

(DJD, XXX; Oxford: Clarendon Press).Elledge, C.

2006 Life after Death in Early Judaism: The Evidence of Josephus (WUNT, 2.208; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck).

Elliott, N.1994 Liberating Paul: The Justice of God and the Politics of the Apostle (Maryknoll,

NY: Orbis).Feldman, L. (trans.)

1965 Josephus, Jewish Antiquities, Volume VIII: Books 18-19 (LCL; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).

Frey, J.-B.1975 Corpus Inscriptionum Judaicarum: Jewish Inscriptions from the Third

Century B.C. to the Seventh Century A.D. (2 vols.; prolegomenon by B. Lifshitz; New York: Ktav).

Fletcher-Louis, C.2002 All the Glory of Adam: Liturgical Anthropology in the Dead Sea Scrolls

(STDJ, 42; Leiden: Brill).Gilbert, M.

2001 ‘Immortalité? Résurrrection? Faut-il choisir?’ in P. Abadie and J.-P. Lémonon (eds.), Le Judaïsme à l’aube de l’ère chrétienne: XVIIIe congrès de l’association catholique française pour l’étude de la bible (Paris: Cerf): 271-97.

Grabbe, L.2001 ‘Eschatology in Philo and Josephus’, in Avery-Peck, Neusner and Chilton

(eds.) 2001: 163-85.Grelot, P.

1958 ‘L’eschatologie des Esséniens et le Livre d’Hénoch’, RevQ 1: 113-31.





Hengel, M.1974 Judaism and Hellenism: Studies in their Encounter in Palestine during the

Early Hellenistic Period (trans. J. Bowden; 2 vols.; London: SCM).1989 The Zealots: Investigations into the Jewish Freedom Movement in the Period

from Herod I until 70 A.D. (trans. D. Smith; Edinburgh: T&T Clark).2001 ‘Das Begräbnis Jesu bei Paulus und die leibliche Auferstehung aus dem

Grabe’, in Avemarie and Lichtenberger (eds.) 2001: 119-84.Horsley, R.

1976 ‘Pneumatikos vs Psychikos: Distinctions of Status among the Corinthians’, HTR 69: 269-88.

1978 ‘How Can Some of You Say “There is No Resurrection of the Dead?” Spiritual Elitism at Corinth’, NovT 20: 203-31.

1989 Sociology and the Jesus Movement (New York: Crossroad).2003 Jesus and Empire: The Kingdom of God and the New World Disorder

(Minneapolis: Fortress Press).Horst, P. van der

1991 Ancient Jewish Epitaphs (Kampen: Pharos).Janssen, C.

2000 ‘Bodily Resurrection (1 Cor 15)? The Discussion of the Resurrection in Karl Barth, Rudolf Bultmann, and Dorothee Sölle and Contemporary Feminist Theology’, JSNT 79: 61-78.

Knohl, I.2008 ‘“By three Days, Live”: Messiahs, Resurrection, and Ascent to Heaven in

Hazon Gabriel’, JR 88: 147-58.Kraemer, D.

2000 The Meanings of Death in Rabbinic Literature (New York: Routledge).Levenson, J.

2006 Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel: The Ultimate Victory of the God of Life (New Haven: Yale University Press).

Madigan, K., and J. Levenson2008 Resurrection: The Power of God for Christians and Jews (New Haven: Yale

University Press).Martin, D.

1995 The Corinthian Body (New Haven: Yale University Press).Mazar, B.

1973 Beth She‘arim I: Catacombs 1–4 (Jerusalem: Massada).Meier, J.

2000 ‘The Debate on the Resurrection of the Dead: An Incident from the Ministry of the Historical Jesus?’ JSNT 77: 3-24.

Nickelsburg, G.1972 Resurrection, Immortality, and Eternal Life in Intertestamental Judaism

(HTS, 26; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).2000 ‘Resurrection’, in L. Schiffman and J. VanderKam (eds.), Encyclopedia

of the Dead Sea Scrolls (2 vols.; Oxford: Oxford University Press): II, 764-67.





2001a 1 Enoch 1: A Commentary on the Book of 1 Enoch, Chapters 1–36; 81–108 (Hermeneia; Minneapolis: Fortress Press).

2001b ‘Judgment, Life-after-Death, and Resurrection in the Apocrypha and the Non-Apocalyptic Pseudepigrapha’, in Avery-Peck, Neusner and Chilton (eds.) 2001: 141-62.

2006 Resurrection, Immortality, and Eternal Life in Intertestamental Judaism and Early Christianity (HTS, 56; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press [1972]).

Noy, D.1995 Jewish Inscriptions of Western Europe. II. The City of Rome (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press).Park, J.

2000 Conceptions of Afterlife in Jewish Inscriptions: With Special Reference to Pauline Literature (WUNT, 121; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck).

Perelman, Ch., and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca1969 The New Rhetoric (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press).

Perkins, P.1984 Resurrection: New Testament Witness and Contemporary Reflection (Garden

City, NY: Doubleday).Peters, T., R. Russell and M. Welker (eds.)

2002 Resurrection: Theological and Scientific Assessments (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans).

Puech, É.1993 La croyance des esséniens en la vie future: immortalité, resurrection, vie

éternelle?: histoire d’une croyance dans le judaïsme ancien (2 vols.; Etudes bibliques, 21-22; Paris: Gabalda).

2003 ‘La conception de la vie future dans le livre de la “Sagesse” et les manuscrits de la Mer Morte: un aperçu’, RevQ 21: 209-232.

2004 ‘La croyance à la resurrection des justes dans un texte de sagesse: 4Q418 69 ii’, in C. Cohen, A. Hurvitz and S. Paul (eds.), Sefer Moshe: The Moshe Weinfeld Jubilee Volume: Studies in the Bible and the Ancient Near East, Qumran, and Post-Biblical Judaism (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns): 427-44.

2005 ‘Les fragments eschatologiques de 4QInstruction (4Q416 I et 4Q418 69 ii, 81-81a, 127)’, RevQ 22: 89-120.

2008 ‘Les identités en présence dans les scènes du jugement dernier de 4QInstruction (4Q416 1 et 4Q418 69 ii)’, in F. García Martínez and M. Popović (eds.), Defining Identities: We, You, and the Other in the Dead Sea Scrolls: Proceedings of the Fifth Meeting of the IOQS in Groningen (STDJ, 70; Leiden: Brill).

Rutgers, L.2001 ‘Death and Afterlife: The Inscriptional Evidence’, in Avery-Peck, Neusner

and Chilton (eds.) 2001: 293-310.Schlatter, A.

1932 Die Theologie des Judentums nach dem Bericht des Josefus (Beiträge zur Förderung christlicher Theologie, 2.26; Gütersloh: Bertelsmann).





Schürer, É.1979 The History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ (175 B.C.—A.D.

135) (ed. M. Black, G. Vermes and F. Millar; trans. T. Burkill et al.; 3 vols.; London: T&T Clark).

Schwabe, M., and B. Lifshitz1974 Beth She‘arim II: The Greek Inscriptions (Jerusalem: Massada).

Schwankl, O.1987 Die Sadduzäerfrage (Mk 12, 18-27 parr): Eine exegetisch-theologische

Studie zur Auferstehungserwartung (BBB, 66; Frankfurt am Main: Peter Hanstein).

Scott, J.1990 Domination and the Arts of Resistance (New Haven, CT: Yale University

Press).Segal, A.

1997 ‘Life after Death: The Social Sources’, in Davis, Kendall and O’Collins (eds.) 1997: 90-125.

2004 Life after Death: A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion (New York: Doubleday).

Setzer, C.2004 Resurrection of the Body in Early Judaism and Early Christianity: Doctrine,

Community, and Self-Definition (Leiden: Brill).Stemberger, G.

1972 Der Leib der Auferstehung: Studien zur Anthropologie und Eschatologie des palästinischen Judentums im neutestamentlichen Zeitalter (ca. 170 v. Cr. – 100 n. Cr.) (Analecta biblica, 56; Rome: Biblical Institute Press).

Swidler, A.1986 ‘Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies’, American Sociological Review

51: 273-86.Tabor, J.

1989 ‘“Returning to the Divinity”: Josephus’ Portrayal of the Disappearance of Enoch, Moses, and Elijah’, JBL 108: 225-38.

Tcherikover, V., A. Fuks and M. Stern (eds.)1957–64 Corpus Papyrorum Judaicarum (with an appendix by D. Lewis; 3 vols.;

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).Thackeray, H.

1919 Selections from Josephus (New York: Macmillan).VanderKam, J., and P. Flint

2002 The Meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls: Their Significance for Understanding the Bible, Judaism, Jesus and Christianity (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco).

Vermes, G.1997 The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English (New York: Penguin).2008 The Resurrection: History and Myth (New York: Doubleday).

Wright, N.T.2003 The Resurrection of the Son of God (Christian Origins and the Question of

God, 3; Minneapolis: Fortress Press).




future resurrection of the dead in early judaism: social dynamics, contested evidence

Documents