Truth Unites - Did Early Israelites Believe in the Afterlife?

Episode Date: August 5, 2024

Some biblical scholarship maintains that the Israelites didn't believe in the afterlife until after the Babylonian exile. Here Gavin Ortlund responds by pointing to various indications that the progression of Israelite beliefs about the afterlife was coherent. Truth Unites exists to promote gospel assurance through theological depth. Gavin Ortlund (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) is President of Truth Unites and Theologian-in-Residence at Immanuel Nashville. SUPPORT: Tax Deductible Support: https://truthunites.org/donate/ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/truthunites FOLLOW: Twitter: https://twitter.com/gavinortlund Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TruthUnitesPage/ Website: https://truthunites.org/

Did the Old Testament saints in the earlier portions of what we call the Old Testament believe in the afterlife? It's very common to hear the claim in biblical scholarship that there's no doctrine of the afterlife in the earlier portions of the Old Testament. People in the time of Moses, for example, have no conception of life beyond the grave. There's an interesting interview with a Jewish scholar, a scientist, philosopher, historian, kind of a fascinating person. He was asked about his own views of the afterlife. He said, in the entire Torah, there is not the slightest,

suggestion that anything happens after death, after you die, you simply do not exist. The Torah, of course, is the law of Moses, those first five books of the Bible, the Pentateuch. And so commonly, what you'll basically get here is this idea of an evolution, and there can be different views about this, but one basic way of understanding it is that the Babylonian exile in the 6th century BC, 587-586, brings the Israelites into contact with Zoroastrian thought. Zoroastrianism is an Iranian religion, if you know the name Zarathustra, he was a Zoroastrian prophet. And this initiates what we think of as kind of a full-blown, late Old Testament eschatology, where you have things like a bodily resurrection, you have recompense, differing fates

for the righteous versus the unrighteous and so forth. But before that time, before Zoroastrian influence, so it is said, not by everyone, but by many, you don't really have a conception of the afterlife or you have something very different. So a lot of times what you'll, I'll put these three options up on the, on the screen here. A lot of times you'll have first, the idea is there's no after, no conception of the afterlife before that point. So references to Sheaul are just speaking of the grave more generally. Or you'll have Shewold as a kind of afterlife, but it's a kind of shadowy afterlife. It's seen more negatively. There's no life and pleasure there. And it's seen as the common destination of both the righteous and the unrighteous, and the claim is that only after

the exile do you get the ideas like bodily resurrection or a different fate for the righteous versus the unrighteous? And so that's why you'll see this belief only reflected in the late Old Testament texts like Daniel 12 as an example, and there's some others as well, Isaiah 26, I think, through others like this. So you can summarize like this. And again, there's more other options. This is complicated, but one basic way to try to get some traction here is to say, think of three views. Number one, no afterlife. Number two, Sha'all as a shadowy afterlife for everybody. And number three, the ideas of resurrection and recompense. And a lot of times what we will hear is that as you go throughout Israelite history, you're going from one to three or from two to three or from one to two to three.

but the idea of three, the idea of what like today we might think of as like heaven and hell or something like that, that's not present at all prior to the Babylonian exile. So the question is for this video is how do we evaluate that claim? Now, one of the common points that will come up in response is the idea of progressive revelation, which is the idea that God is revealing himself gradually with greater clarity throughout redemptive history. So C.S. Lewis even compared his own, spiritual status between his conversion to theism in 1929 and his conversion to Christianity in 1931, that year and a half period or so, those dates are actually disputed a little bit interestingly.

But in Surprised by Joy, he talks about that period, and he said, period in his life, and he says, my training was like that of the Jews, to whom he revealed himself centuries before. There was a whisper of anything better or worse beyond the grave than shadowy and featureless Shetwell. Now, I think the idea of progressive revelation is a helpful category, and it's certainly a valid category, and it's helpful on this topic in particular. It's undeniable that there's progress in the clarity of God's revelation over time on an issue like this. But when Christians speak of progressive revelation, we're typically not thinking about a movement from one idea to its opposite

or to something contradictory to it, or even from ignorance to brand-new information. Rather, we're thinking of a movement from less clarity to greater clarity, or think of it like a seed to a flower. Progressive Revelation has this idea of coherence and sort of organic unfolding in it, okay? And the reason for that is that if we believe the Bible is revelation from God, we want to try to recognize coherence to it, just as if you're listening to a human being that you think is intelligent and trustworthy, you want to try to take their statements and see if you can make sense out of them, and see if they're coherent and not too quickly attribute a contradiction from one paragraph to the next and so forth. Say, okay, what do they mean?

You know, is there a way to trace all this out together? And so the question for us here is on the afterlife, on this question of the afterlife, do we find coherence? Certainly we find progression, but is it a coherent progression? And I want to argue, yes, for a couple of reasons. First, Shaol is not necessarily contradictory to later revelation about, for a example, differing fates for the righteous and the unrighteous. Many of the references to Shaul as the destination of all human beings can be understood as just general references to the grave or the realm of the dead, just like we can speak today of, you know, all people

will return to the grave and so forth, or something like this. But in other passages, it seems that Shaul is not a place for all people indiscriminately, but it's specifically for the unrighteous, while the righteous have hoped to be ransomed from the power of Sheul. Psalm 49 is a good example of this. It speaks of the wicked as like sheep appointed for Sha'ul. Death shall be their shepherd and the upright shall rule over them in the morning. Their forms shall be consumed in Sha'ul with no place to dwell, but God will ransom my soul from the power of She'ul for he will receive me. So this seems to depict two distinct fates for the righteous and the unrighteous, Derek Kidner in his wonderful commentary on Psalms,

notes that the word receive here is a positive one, more positive than the English verb receive. And he notes that the same word is used for the taking of Enoch, which we'll discuss in just a minute. So this is why passages like this are why some scholars, like the older Assyriologist Alexander Heidel, argued that insofar, now he's an older scholar now, but he's influenced the discussion. and he basically says insofar as Shaul means a place, as opposed to just a general reference to death or the realm of the dead, then it's only a destination for the wicked, not for the righteous. Quote, as regards Sha'ul, we have evidence that it, in the signification of the subterranean realm of spirits, applies to the habitation of the souls of the wicked only.

And to get to that conclusion, he's looking at a lot of factors, not just passages about Sha'ul, but also language like being gathered to one's people and being gathered to one's fathers. And he says this language seems more optimistic. And he makes an argument that you can see on the screen here. I'll put it up, pause, and read through if you want, that this can't be referring just to burial or an ancestral grave or something like that. Now, there are counter arguments to this view. The whole issue of Sha'ul is really complicated. I'm never trying to oversimplify.

These are complicated issues. You've got to deal with passages like Hezekiah's fear of going to, She'Ole in Isaiah 38, for example. So there's a lot more to say about all that. If you want a fuller treatment of Sheul, see this article by Desmond Alexander. He walks through a taxonomy of different options, and he also addresses some of these challenging texts like Isaiah 38, and a few of the others. He basically argues that Hezekiah may well have been afraid of Sheal in the worst sense in that passage. But the usage of Shehawl in Psalm 49, okay, this is a place from which the righteous hope to be ransomed by God and taken to God. This accords with a hope that you'll find

throughout the Psalms, lots of references to being taken to God and to God's glory and so forth, being received by God. You also see this in other passages in the Old Testament, like this one in the book of Job, where there's a hope for the afterlife, and this is significant in that it's often dated relatively early. We also have this hope reflected in the prophet Hosea, which is, again, very significant. Sometimes these passages are not given sufficient weight in treatment of this, this Hosea passage is very significant because in critical scholarship, Hosea is often interpreted as one of the earliest books to be written down in the Old Testament. So this is why you can find scholars who argue that belief even in the bodily resurrection goes way back

before the exile, and I'll put up one example of that. But what about the Torah? Do we find any hope there? Recall what Leibovitz said, not the slightest suggestion that anything happens after death in the Torah. Now, I want to draw attention to one passage. It's certainly, we can grant, this is not the emphasis of the Torah. Again, we don't have a lot of clarity, but I want to draw attention to one passage that I think is often overlooked and very relevant, comes right towards the beginning of Genesis in the first genealogy, even before the flood story, where we're told that Enoch walked with God and he was not, for God took him. Now, the words he was not here are not well taken as just a reference to God killing Enoch or something like that.

Okay, again, the verb take is a positive verb, and it's in context here a commendation and blessing upon Enoch, consequent upon his walking with God. This is not a divine judgment or something like that. Hebrews 11.5 is being sensible when it interprets this as he was taken up so that he should not see death. So the obvious question that comes up right here toward the front of the Bible is, If there's no doctrine of the afterlife in the Torah, where is Enoch supposed to have gone? Though we have less detail here than we have with Elijah in Second Kings 2, where you've got the horse, the chariot of fire and so forth, nonetheless, it seems like the same kind of thing.

And it seems like the same kind of dynamic as Psalm 4915, this hope of being ransomed from the power of Shaul and taken to God. So the big question will be then, of course, when do you date the genealogical material in Genesis, and that is disputed. Sometimes it's classified with the priestly source. If you remember the old documentary hypothesis, JEDP, and that has been sort of challenged in more recent years. But I'm going to stay away. Look, I'm not an Old Testament scholar, so I always try to hold my views loosely on things that aren't my area of expertise.

I'm going to stay away from any attempt to do a reconstruction behind the texts, because that's very complicated. I know enough to know that's very complicated. But focusing on the texts as we have them, insofar as people make claims about this, you'll even find people making claims about the entire Old Testament, having no conception of the afterlife. But that's harder to prove. But when it's made about the Torah or the Pentateuch, that there's no conception of the afterlife in the text as we have it. By the way, I think you can make a very strong case that even if you take the most liberal view of the dating of Old Testament books possible, the material going into Genesis 5 certainly testifies to earlier pre-exillic beliefs among the Israelites. But let's just leave

all that off the table, just focusing on the text as we have it. Do we have belief in the afterlife in the Torah? Certainly. You don't have clarity, you don't have emphasis, but you've got something. You've got this recognition of this person who walks with God and God takes him to himself and he was not. It's cryptic, but it's there. It's like a seed. It becomes a flower. So I would put this forward as an example of where as Christians, when it comes to an example like the doctrine of the afterlife, we can see a coherence.

We can see the development of the seed to the flower as it's unfolding. It's not easy. It's not neat and tidy. But certainly the strong claims of no conception whatsoever don't seem to be the case. Now, for those who watch my channel who are skeptical about this whole idea of heaven, this video of course doesn't prove that this is a defensive video responding to this charge but if i was to try to prove that or gesture toward that i'd want to look more at the resurrection of christ where i think we can make the best case but just from this and i'll put up this painting it's one of my favorite

paintings of elijah going to heaven and i just want to draw attention to these last two words into heaven in those two words a world of comfort and possibility comes into the picture and i would i love to make the appeal just like this. What if it's true? You know, what if there's a world beyond the world? What if this spacetime universe is not the whole of reality, but it was brought into being by some other reality? And so death, or some other events, even in the case of Enoch, other than death, can be a translation into a different realm altogether. And the words into heaven reflecting that hope there in second kings too. If that is true, that is the most important thing that could be ever discovered, ever thought about, ever contemplated. And so it's worth, if nothing else, it's worth investigating

further because the emotional stakes, the existential stakes are infinite. And I believe that actually it's a plausible idea, that actually the very finitude and contingency of our world suggests that this is not all there is. And that just raises the question of, well, what is beyond? What is out there? And then, of course, we believe that in all the murky fears and uncertainty of that, the God who created this world has actually given us a clear revelation of that through raising Jesus from the dead, and that this is the sort of guarantee of, yeah, there's more. And that's one of the reasons the resurrection of Jesus is such good news. It just dispels the darkness of uncertainty and tells us, this is what's going to happen for those who have trusted in Christ. It's a very

happy thing to believe in. Anyway, all I'm saying right now is, what if? Isn't it a happy thing to at least consider as a possibility. Anyway, let me know what you think about this video. Thanks for watching. More to come. This video was just a short one. Longer videos, I'm very excited to share on the Trinity, the Apostles Creed, other things coming out soon. Thanks for watching, everybody.