Having established communities of Christ followers throughout the cities of the Mediterranean Roman world, the apostle Paul returned to Jerusalem to present to the 'mother church' there the collection that his new-found communities had raised for its support. When he went to the Temple (at the suggestion of the Jerusalem church leaders) he was attacked by Jewish zealots who accused him of undermining the Mosaic Torah. He was arrested by the Roman authorities and put on trial before the High Priest and Temple authorities. At one point during the trial Luke tells us that Paul noticed that there were both Pharisees and Sadducees present among those judging him. Paul declared 'I am on trial concerning the hope of the resurrection of the dead' (Acts 23.6-8). This set the two main parties among his accusers, the Sadducees and the Pharisees, against each other. As Luke explains 'The Sadducees say that there is no resurrection, or angel, or spirit; but the Pharisees acknowledge all three'. They started arguing among themselves with Paul's fellow Pharisees taking his side. Of course that in itself didn't save Paul - he wasn't released (in Luke's account he was destined to travel to Rome to stand trial before the emperor) but the point is that when Paul said he was on trial because of the hope of the resurrection of the dead it was clearly an idea with which a significant group of fellow Jews identified. Clearly then, belief in the resurrection of the dead was an important part of the faith of at least some Jews in the first century A.D., to some extent defining the identity of the parties active within Judaism, and yet, as I have suggested in previous posts, the Hebrew Bible actually says very little about life after death (of any kind). For the most part, the hope of a godly Jew was a long life lived in harmony with God, with the land and with his or her community. 'Afterlife' consisted in having a good name and many descendants. Death was a terrible thing because it destroyed all of those relationships (for some, even with God - Psalm 6.5). The dead were silent, mere shades, forgetful and insignificant. At least that's how most of the texts in the Hebrew Bible regard it. It's virtually impossible to reconstruct now what the majority of 'ordinary' Hebrews really believed and it could well be that many were much more affirming of life after death than the biblical texts suggest. But my aim here is to try to describe 'what the bible really says about the afterlife' (see the header above!), and what the bible 'really says' is that the silent, shady Sheol was the common destination of all, and that wasn't something people looked forward to. So the obvious question is, how did Judaism get from the position of believing that death inevitably led to permanent sleep in Sheol, to the situation where some Jews could respond positively to Paul's claim that he was on trial because of his belief 'in the resurrection'? How did it get from being a religion with little or no hope of 'after-life', to one rich in resurrection hope and imagery? That is actually a complicated question to answer because the process was a subtle and complex one. There is probably no one moment and no one easily identifiable 'reason' why an expectation of resurrection emerged in Judaism. But if we want to understand that development we have to start with one very significant text from the book of Daniel. According to some commentators (but not me!) it is in fact the only biblical text that explicitly talks about a resurrection. It is a text which marks a distinct change in emphasis from the hope for a good and long life well lived to a hope for life beyond (and outside) the grave. It is a text which announces the possibility that the dead will rise. And yet it is a text which challenges most of our assumptions about what such a 'rising' might entail. To plagarise the famous (apocryphal) words of Spock from the original Star Trek "it's resurrection Jim, but not as we know it". One day as Daniel stood beside the river Tigris the angel Gabriel appeared to him and announced a forthcoming existential crisis in Israels' life. At the end of that crisis says Gabriel, the Lord will send Michael the great Archangel to bring an end to Israel's woes.
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Today we are encouraged to have a more positive view of death than our forefathers often did. People talk about the appropriateness of death, emphasising that it part of the natural cycle and doctors and therapists dealing with people at the end of life seek to help the dying find what they call a 'good death'. All of this is true and very healthy and where we are able to think in this way and have the resources to plan and arrange our dying it may well help face what is nevertheless a terrifying reality. But it is also true that for millions in our world still death comes as a negation of life, often coming in brutal, painful and úntimely ways. However much we try to accommodate death within our modern culture we are still aware that death represents the antithesis of life, that in death possibilities, ambitions plans and relationships come to an end. In the Hebrew bible there is a similar tension. For some, the 'good death' came at the end of a long and fulfilled life, surrounded by family, followed by burial in the ancestral home. But other traditions, recognising the violence and injustice prevalent within Israelite national life, speak of death as the enemy of life, indeed as God's enemy. Death is pictured as a prison with gates, as a monster with a voracious appetite and terrifying jaws, and as a subterranean menace pulling the unwitting down into its belly with cords and chains. The promise of God's victory over death through the resurrection of the dead therefore depends on God's victory over death. In this post I examine this imagery of death as a life-denying power and reflect on the importance of this imagery for the New Testament understanding of Death as a power opposed to God. "So, when when we read in Isaiah, 'And he will destroy on this mountain the shroud that is cast over all peoples, the sheet that is spread over all nations; he will swallow up death for ever' we realise that Isaiah is playing with the concept of death as the monster with the voracious appetite. On that great Day, when everything is "shaken up" and where everything is twisted out of shape so that nothing is as it was, the tables are turned even on death itself. Instead of it swallowing us, God will do the swallowing, eating up devouring the monster which has bought such distress and misery on the earth. And so with the monster of death/Sheol swallowed up, those trapped in the cords and snares of death, those imprisoned by its gates, can walk free, no longer entangled, no longer held in death's vice-like grip. Now, with the defeat of death, resurrection, i.e. whole, complete restoration of embodied life in all its fullness becomes a possibility, in fact it becomes the hope of the people of God."
In Matthew 16.18 Jesus tells Peter that "the gates of hell will not prevail" against the rock that is the church. Many of us imagine that what Jesus meant was that the forces of hell (i.e. the devil and his demonic hordes) will never be able to overcome the church. The devil and his demons will try but the rock-like church will withstand their onslaught. The problem with this interpretation is that the word translated as 'hell' in the King James Version is the greek word Hades, which meant simply the land of the dead. In this light his statement seems rather odd. Is Jesus saying that the dead will not be able to destroy the church? The statement makes more sense when we realise that usually gates don't move. They are normally to be found in a fixed spot keeping people out, or in. So, Jesus is saying that the gates of death's kingdom will not be able to withstand the onslaught of the church! Jesus is not painting a picture of his church under siege, but rather of the church triumphant, breaking down the doors of death and proclaiming the hope of resurrection to those within. However much the church might enjoy living under a siege mentality, the reality is that the church is invested with great power, the power of the gospel to utterly transform the landscape of human existence. If we can rid ourselves of the unbiblical and medieval notions of 'hell' and understand what Jesus really meant the church might reclaim it's confidence in the power of Christ's resurrection to overthrow the reign of death with all its terror, despair and hopelessness. "So, when people read or heard Jesus telling Peter that to him and the church has been given dominion over the gates of Hades, they would have had a clear understanding of what Jesus meant. Now, the eschatological fulfillment had arrived. These were the last days, the days of the defeat of death, the end of the darkness which had become the paramount enemy of God and of his purpose of life. It is not a text about Satan, the powers of evil or "spiritual conflict". It is not a text about a place called hell. It is a text about resurrection, triumph and the gates of death/Hades being burst open. It is a text about the hope for a world in which there is no more mourning and no more tears." Lost in Translation #1: How the King James version of the bible got it so wrong about Hell.6/10/2015 So often, when we try to express ourselves in a foreign language, the true intended meaning gets 'lost in translation'. As an English man living in Sweden trying to express myself in a foreign language I know how hard this can be to make myself understood. Sometimes although we are using a form of words that should accurately express what we want to say we are missing the idiomatic way of saying it and our words come over as clumsy and strange. Sometimes it is simply because there is simply no word or concept in the other language for what we mean. Similar problems confront translators of the bible. Their intention is to translate into a modern, living language, texts written in languages no longer spoken (modern Hebrew is different in many significant ways from biblical Hebrew) and written by people living in a very different world. When the translators of the new English version of the bible commissioned by King James in 1604 started work, they adopted a very important principle that was to profoundly influence the character of the work they produced, namely that consistency was less important than clarity. So the same Hebrew or Greek word could be translated by different English words depending on the context. One of the most significant results of this approach was that the Hebrew word Sheol was sometimes translated grave or pit but in the great majority of cases as hell. Sheol really means something like the land of the dead (like the Greek Hades . . . but different) and 'grave' or 'pit' is therefore quite an accurate translation, but their principle of inconsistency meant that many generations of readers found in the King James version Old Testament references to 'hell' where none was intended in the original Hebrew. This has had an enormous (and deleterious) influence on present day assumptions about the biblical teaching on hell. The concept of Sheol as the land of the dead, or as the grave, was simply 'lost in translation'. Thus inconsistency in translation was then, a deliberate policy and implied a rejection of the advice of one of the greatest English Hebrew scholars of the age, Hugh Broughton, who although not invited to join the panel of translators, nevertheless gave them his advice in a letter, where, among other points, he urged them to translate words consistently. In his opinion the same word or phrase in the original Greek and Hebrew should always be translated by the same English word. This was advice they ignored. So, the translators felt at liberty to translate Sheol sometimes by grave or pit, but more often by hell. They seem to have used grave when there was an overwhelmingly clear reference to death, especially as expressed by a biblical hero (such as Abraham). They used hell in the great majority of cases.
When we think of the afterlife we usually think of some kind of distinction between the good and the bad, between heaven and hell. But in the Hebrew bible no such distinction was made. Everyone went to Sheol when they died. Sheol was a bit like the Greek concept of Hades, the land of the dead. The dead still existed in some sense but only in a very intangible, shadowy way. The dead became mere rephaim or shades (we might think ghosts) and had no meaningful life. Sheol was a land of forgetfulness and sleep. Some texts assume that God had little or nothing to do with Sheol, which at times could come in handy as a bargaining tool with God - if God wanted worshippers he jolly well had to keep them away from Sheol for as long as possible! Sheol was inevitable but no one wanted to go there. Sheol was the universal destination of the dead.
The mother of a friend of mine used to say "dreaming of heaven is all very well but it won't get the dishes done". She was right. We may well have an 'eternal home', but thinking about it all the time won't bring it any closer or make it happen any sooner. and it certainly won't get the dishes done, i.e. help us to live our lives. The ancient Hebrews knew that. They didn't wish their lives away dreaming of heaven, in fact they had no idea of going heaven when they died! They believed that it was enough to entrust themselves into the love and grace of God in the here and now, in the lives they lived with family and friends, on the good land the Lord had given them. This post explores what it was the Hebrews hoped to get out of life and how that related to their expectations of what happened to them when they died. "Ultimately everyone died and so everyone found themselves in Sheol. But Sheol was not hell, it was not a place of punishment and the 'final destination' didn't matter nearly as much as the means of getting there, the path taken. Life was what mattered. A good, rich, long and full life. What lay at the end was a kind of nothingness. It was what happened here and now that really mattered to the Hebrews. I think if we modern day 'members of the covenant' could capture something of that outlook rather than wishing our lives away dreaming of 'heaven', we would not only honour God more by enjoying the richness of the world and of life, but play a much greater part in freeing the world of despair and fear. Instead of planning to run away, we might be better able to show people how to live".
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Archives
April 2016
GalleryThis blog is as much about images as it is about text. Below is a slideshow of the pictures and images used in this blog. Click on any of the pictures to go to the post where that image is featured.
PostsLocating Paradise #1 In a Garden, Far, Far Away
The Testament of Abraham and the Threefold Judgement of God #5 'Stuck in the Middle With You'
The Resurrection According to Rahner
Today You Will Be With Me in Paradise
The Testament of Abraham and the Threefold Judgement of God #4 'And Who by Fire'
The Testament of Abraham and the Threefold Judgement of God #3: Held in the Balance
The Testament of Abraham and the Threefold Judgement of God #2: Once, Twice, Three Times a Sinner
The Testament of Abraham and the Threefold Judgement of God #1: The Broad and Narrow Gates
Daily Dante 7: Many Rivers to Cross
Daily Dante 6: 'You Gotta Serve Somebody'
In Hell Everyone Can Hear You Scream. The Vision of Tundale #3
Teeth, Spikes and Cleavers: At the Sharp end of Hell. The Vision of Tundale #2
'No Pain No Gain': The Vision of Tundale #1
'Hellzapoppin':
Illustrations from Le Livre de la Vigne nostre Seigneur, #2 'It's The End of the World as We Know It (and we feel fine)'. Illustrations from Le Livre de la Vigne nostre Seigneur, #1
Visions of Heaven. Botticini's Assumption of the Virgin #2 Blinded by the Light
Visions of Heaven. Botticini's Assumption of the Virgin #1: Glorious and Immortal
Daily Dante 5: What the gates said.
Daily Dante 4: When I find myself in times of trouble
Daily Dante 3: I'll take you there
Daily Dante 2: Fierce creatures
Daily Dante 1: If you go down to the woods today
In Seventh Heaven or 'What Enoch Did Next'
A World of Fire and Ice: Heaven according to Enoch
The Power and the Glory: Visions of God as king in the Hebrew bible
The Beautiful Bestiary of Catherine Cleves: Monsters and Demons in detail.
Heaven is for Real: Heaven as a physical space up above the sky
Resurrecting the Dead or Reviving the Flowers? The loss of resurrection faith in Judaism.
The Defeat of Death #1: The promise of resurrection in the Isaiah Apocalypse.
The Defeat of Death #2: Death as a hostile power and promise of God's victory in Isaiah
Scary Monsters and Super Creeps: The 'Last Judgement' according to Stefan Lochner
Hell in the Hospital: The 'Last Judgement' of Rogier van der Weyden in the Beaune altarpiece.
'Hell' in the New Testament #2: The gates of Hades shall not prevail
The Hours of Catherine Cleves: Imagining hell and purgatory in Catherine's prayer book
'On Earth as in Heaven': The kingdom of God as a revelation of heaven
'Hell' in the New Testament #1: Gehenna
Lost in Translation #1: How the King James version got it so wrong about hell
Heaven is not our home
Domes, Depths and Demons: The cosmology of the Hebrew world
A Bigger God
"See you in Sheol" - Sheol, the common destination of all
Heaven, Hell and Christian Hope
BooksBelow are some of the books which have helped me the most in the research and writing for this blog. Click on any image to find out more about that book at its page on Amazon uk.
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