Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel: The Ultimate Victory of the God of Life

by Jon D. Levenson

This provocative volume explores the origins of the Jewish doctrine of the resurrection of the dead. Jon D. Levenson argues that, contrary to a very widespread misconception, the ancient rabbis were keenly committed to the belief that at the end of time, God would restore the deserving dead to life. In fact, Levenson points out, the rabbis saw the Hebrew Bible itself as committed to that idea.
The author meticulously traces the belief in resurrection backward from its undoubted attestations in rabbinic literature and in the Book of Daniel, showing where the belief stands in continuity with earlier Israelite culture and where it departs from that culture. Focusing on the biblical roots of resurrection, Levenson challenges the notion that it was a foreign import into Judaism, and in the process he develops a neglected continuity between Judaism and Christianity. His book will shake the thinking of scholars and lay readers alike, revising the way we understand the history of Jewish ideas about life, death, and the destiny of the Jewish people.

Genres: Theology, Religion, Judaism, Old Testament, Nonfiction, History, Biblical Studies

304 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

Jon D. Levenson is the Albert A. List Professor of Jewish Studies at the Harvard Divinity School.

He is a scholar of the Bible and of the rabbinic midrash, with an interest in the philosophical and theological issues involved in biblical studies. He studies the relationship between traditional modes of Biblical interpretation and modern historical criticism. He also studies the relationship between Judaism and Christianity.

Levenson's foci include: Theological traditions in ancient Israel (biblical and rabbinic periods); Literary Interpretation of the Hebrew Bible; Midrash; History of Jewish biblical interpretation; Modern Jewish theology; Jewish-Christian relations.

Reviews

[Anne Hamilton · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a profound and wondrous book on resurrection.
I made copious notes.


‘When the resurrection of the dead, even in a non-literal sense, is no longer deemed credible… eschatology, in a word, collapses into creation, God’s supernatural act turns into humanity’s God-given nature, memory takes the place of redemption and the resurrection of the dead is quietly but eventfully redefined as the immortality of the individual soul.’ (p7)

The term ‘immortal life’ removes ‘the scandal of resurrection and transfers the focus of immortality… to something ostensibly more universal, creation itself. This upholds God’s miraculous power… but relegates the miracle safely to the primordial past and removes any expectation that something analogous to it will occur in the eschatological future.’ (p8)

In the substitution of immortality for resurrection, we restrict ourselves ‘to the identification of God as the giver of life without subscribing to the ancient… notion that he is the vanquisher of death.’ (p10)

As an unlikely and inexplicable reversal of a universal event of nature, resurrection surely qualifies as a miracle and thus becomes glaringly vulnerable to the powerful critique that has been levelled against the very idea of miracles in the past three and a half centuries. Resurrection, in brief, violates the laws of nature and it has never been reproduced under laboratory conditions. Add to this the suspicion of psychologists, learned and popular alike, that the source of all belief in an afterlife lies in the fear of death and the fantasy that death is only a temporary condition, and it begins to look as though the resurrection of the dead must itself be consigned to the dead-letter office of religious doctrine, never to be revived. In addition, the extraordinary advances that have been made in the life sciences in recent decades have given further impetus to the impression that human beings are ultimately machines—highly complex and sophisticated machines, to be sure, but machines nonetheless and thus unable to transcend their physical base. (p11)

That God’s promise to me might not be fulfilled in my own lifetime but only in that of my descendants or other kinfolk (including my nation) seems unjust today in ways that, for the most part, it did not in biblical times. However much it may offend the materialist orientation of much modern thought, the doctrine of personal immortality at least allows for the relative detachment of the individual from the group in ways with which many moderns feel more comfortable—and more comforted. (p14)

In ordaining the laws of nature and creating in human beings an immortal spirit that survives death, the God of Israel exhausted his supernatural mission. He is now encountered exclusively in the quiet, lawful continuities of nature and ethics and in the hidden providential guidance of human events, especially as they manifest progress. In this theology, God’s supernatural character is not denied but relegated to a vanished past. The laws God has devised are so perfect he will not violate them—even though they lead only and inexorably to the death of embodied persons. (p16)
Redemption, God’s reparative, restorative, and triumphant intervention into the tragedy of fleshly, historical life, has been replaced by the ethical striving of individual persons overcoming evil in a world in which the potencies of God’s goodness are, happily, already completely actualized. (p16) When redemption is collapsed into ethics in this way, human beings, in one sense, take the place of God. (p17)

“The resurrection will last only minutes; just long enough to impress observers and assure them that they are witnessing a miracle.” …Those resurrected… will undergo a second death from which they will never rise in bodily form. (p19)

‘Resurrection and immortality can be different in critical ways, and it can be profoundly misleading to subsume them under some simplistic master category, such as “afterlife” or “life after death”. More careful definitions are essential here. Resurrection we must define as an eschatological event, that is, one that is expected to occur in history, but also to transform and redeem history and to open onto a barely imaginable world beyond anything that preceded it. …at its source, resurrection is actually a prophetic vision relayed by necessity in mythopoeic language. To the visionaries themselves and to those who accepted their visions in faith and reverence, it served as a key element in the expectation that God will redeem the tragedies of history, not just for the few who survive till the end but for all who have lived, have lived rightly. 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 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.’ (p20f)
With a shift in emphasis towards immortality of the soul, the focus of resurrection in Jewish understanding moves ‘from God’s covenantal faithfulness to his people Israel in history and onto the moral strivings of the deracinated, supposedly universal individual.’ (p22)

Using a text from the Torah as a medical incantation was, according to Rabbi Akiva, sufficient to disbar a Jew from the World-to-Come. (p25)

The distinction between Abraham and his descendants as the recipient of the promise is quite foreign to biblical thought. (p29)

‘As an individual, Jacob is embedded in, indeed, indistinguishable from, his family in ways that we who are heirs to the more atomistic, individualistic cast of mind of the modern West find exceedingly difficult to fathom but that the Hebrew Bible, in the main, finds quite unexceptionable.’ (p29)

‘The irony (and the punishment) is that in the interim between his [Adam’s] emergence from the dust and his return thereto, he is to be a slave to the ground, toiling for his bread.’ (p32)

‘The imagery of grave and pit… of Sheol is only one component of the overlapping symbolic renderings of the netherworld in the Hebrew Bible. Some scholars, noticing that Ugaritic, a language closely related to Hebrew, lacks the word Sheol but uses ars (“land”) for the netherworld, draw attention to biblical texts in which the Hebrew cognate ‘eres seems to have a similar meaning.’ (p40)

As families grew and marriages took place, the older generations would move from room to room in a house. Their final ‘room’ would be a resting-place under the floor where they were still part of the family unit. The marzeah meal is seen by some scholars to be a part of a cult of the dead. (p48)
‘Societies do not forbid practices no one would think to perform.’ (p54)

Whenever death is due to unnatural causes, Sheol is mentioned. Whenever death occurs in the course of nature, Sheol does not appear. (p73) Sheol is mentioned in relation to those who die violently, unjustly, in punishment or with a broken heart. (p74) Jacob’s thought of going to Sheol. (p78) The opposite of Sheol in the Hebrew Bible is not heaven or the Garden of Eden; it is a life enveloped in the blessing of God and that gives persuasive testimony to that blessing. (p78)
‘The death of an individual has a different valence that constructs the self in familial and thus transgenerational terms more than we do. It is no coincidence that the report of Abraham’s death is sandwiched between two sets of genealogies of his descendants.’ (p83) If ‘individuals are fundamentally and inextricably embedded within their families, then their own deaths, however terrifying in prospect, will lack the finality that death carries with it in a culture with a more individualistic, atomistic understanding of the self. (p109)

An Assyrian text ‘speaks of the sacred ritual of the akitu, or New Year’s Festival, in a “Garden of Plenty”, the semantic equivalent of the Israelite Garden of Eden.(p85)

Joshua 24:26 – the oak of the sacred precinct of the Lord at Shechem. (p86)

The phrase ‘mountains of Zion’ appears only in Psalm 133. (p91) The geography of Psalm 133 maps out spiritual, not terrestrial, realities. (p92) Psalm 15 may set forth an ‘entrance liturgy’ by which priests guarding the gate to the Temple set out the moral conditions for admission. Egyptian parallels suggest that the conditions were actually inscribed on the lintels or doorposts as a warning or self-curse against unauthorised entry. Psalm 15 goes further and gives those who qualify for entry the same characteristics of impregnability and inviolability as the sanctuary itself. (p 93)

The Temple is the antipode of Sheol as life is of death. (p95) Jonah’s prayer is a pastiche of different verses taken from the Psalms. (p96)

Mankind being ‘driven out’ of Eden could be interpreted as ‘broken’, ‘crushed’. (p97)
Unlike the “soul” in most Western philosophy, the biblical nepes can die. (p111)
A human being is not a spirit, soul or consciousness that happens to inhabit a body; the union of body and soul is basic to the person. (p112)

People today are generally not deeply embedded in social identity, and our authenticity is not dependent on others but tends to be associated with individual traits at the expense of conformity, and with the attainment of personal autonomy and independence. (p113)

All the reward in the world—wealth, longevity, having God as a personal protector—cannot compensate Abraham for childlessness. Children played a central role in the identity of parents in ancient Israel. Barrenness, childlessness was equivalent to death and to be cut off from kin like a curse of extinction. (p115)

Given the construction of personal identity in the Hebrew Bible, infertility and the loss of children serve as the functional equivalent of death. (p119)

The story of the woman of Shunem echoes the story of the Isaac: both stories begin with great hospitality, with disbelief on the part of the mother-to-be, with the use of the rare term “in the time of life”, with a woman standing in a doorway, with the near-death of a son. (p124f) This story of the revived boy also echoes part of the story of Ishmael. (p127)

The decree of Pharaoh to kill all the male babies is an attempt, given the patriarchal descent of the times, to wipe out the Israelites in a single generation. (p129)

The plague deity Rashap. The hero, Kirta, who makes a vow of gold to Asherah and then forgets it, and is afflicted by a terminal illness and the land is overtaken by famine. El pronounces: “Death - be broken! Shataqat – be strong!” Shataqat, healing goddess. (p134f)

The expectation of covenant was that a vassal must serve his liege lord and a suzerain must rescue his faithful servant. (p140) God was conceived as Kinsman.

The reference to the Flood in Isaiah 54:9-10 relates the return of children to cosmic renewal. (p148)

The restorative action of God… is not simply supernatural, it is contranatural. It reverses the pattern of national death and loss by reactivating powers within nature – principally the power to procreate – that had shrivelled and virtually disappeared before God’s new intervention. This reversal of national death anticipates (but does not yet quite approximate) the end-time resurrection. (p155)

Resurrection features in Zoroastrianism (p157) and Ezekiel’s vision has parallels with it; but there are also parallels with Mesopotamian rituals for the consecration and activation of cultic idols. (p158) The Persians brought Zoroastrianism and, while it undoubtedly influenced ideas of resurrection, it appears to have done so distantly. Zoroastrians neither buried their dead or spoke of resurrection in the language of waking. This was more in affinity with Canaanite belief. (p215)

“If those who never existed can come to life, those who once lived – all the more so!” from the Babylonian Sanhedrin (p159)

What does not die is the people Israel, because God has, despite their grievous failings, honored his indefeasible pledge to their ancestors. Israelite people die, like anyone else; the people Israel survives and revives because of God’s promise, despite the most lethal defeats. (p163)

In ancient Israel, the individual is scarcely a viable entity – socially, economically or juridically. (Robert di Vito) Levenson adds ‘religiously’. (p 167)

Death, in the strict sense of the term, is for the Israelite the weakest form of life. (Aubrey Johnson) It could be seen as the most severe of diseases, and thus there is a possibility God might heal it. (p172)

The connection of the healing of Naaman with resurrection. (p174)
The rise in belief of resurrection in Israel may be connected to the loss of belief in a fortunate death. (p175)

Sleep in the Hebrew Bible is not characterised primarily by refreshment and renewal. It is a dangerous, liminal state. Momentous events, such as the creation of woman and the prediction of future history, occur during sleep. See 1 Corinthians 15:20 (p186)

The last word of the God of life is not death and sterility but revival and “fresh growth”, the awakening of the dead to new life. (p198)

No victory of God can be complete until the dead are resurrected. Mot might be the ultimate enemy of God. The classical belief in the resurrection is not simply the idea that departed individuals will receive their due. It is the confidence that God will fulfil his outstanding promises to Israel, even to those who sleep in the dust. (p200)

‘And look to Him’ in Hosea 14:9 may be a play on the name Asherah. (p204) Hosea 13-14 has parallels with Isaiah 26-27. (p205)

Whenever hyh and qwm appears as word pairs, the meaning is resurrection, not simply healing. (p206)

Death encompasses drought, infertility, famine and defeat. Nature convulses when the Divine Warrior manifests his wrath, and responds when he has won his victory. (p207)

The concept of the Divine Warrior is misunderstood if it is seen as violent religious fanaticism. The Divine Warrior is not a portrayal of destruction of enemies but of the enthronement of God in righteousness and justice. (p208)

Levenson considers that the ultimate origin of the idea of resurrection is the transformation that nature undergoes because of the Divine Warrior’s victory. (p217)

The devil kills but his prey are not passive victims. They are actively complicit in their own demise, choosing the path that leads to death rather than its life-giving, life-extending alternative. (p220)

Resurrection without the restoration of the nation was, to the rabbis, incomprehensible. (p229)

[Laurin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a fantastic read on the topic of resurrection in the Hebrew Bible and early Jewish thought. It is written from a Jewish perspective, though it does have some references to Christian conceptions as well. The book does a superb job of demonstrating how the concepts of life and death in the Hebrew mind (and ANE) were different from how we view them, and challenges readers to gain a deeper understanding of resurrection through the many images and "intimations" of resurrection the that can be found throughout Hebrew Bible (Old Testament). It is an insightful book for biblical scholars, whether Jewish, Christian, or otherwise and will likely challenge much modern scholarship on this topic. While I may disagree with Levenson on various points, I gained much useful information that already has aided me in a deeper understanding of the Bible.

[Bob Price · Rating 5 out of 5]

Is there evidence of a belief in the resurrection of the dead in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament)? Esteemed scholar Jon Levenson presents his findings in this little book Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel.

Levenson's main thesis is that there is evidence that ancient Jews believed in the resurrection of the dead. He argues that such beliefs are present in the Torah as pre-beliefs to a full blown doctrine of resurrection.

Levenson is writing from a scholarly perspective. As such, there is a great deal of academic language, but ultimately he provides a clear understanding.

I highly recommend this book to Christian, Jewish and other readers who are interested in the development of doctrine in from the Hebrew Bible to the NT.

Grade: A+

[One · Rating 5 out of 5]

An absolutely incredibly compelling account of the development of the doctrine of resurrection in ancient Judaism.

[Shawn Brace · Rating 4 out of 5]

There was a lot about this book to like. Besides tracing the idea of resurrection throughout the Hebrew Bible, Levenson also touches upon other subjects that deserve further consideration. Among these, he calls into question the idea of an immortal soul, which he deems to be a later construction; he also deals some with the corporate way of Israelite thinking, which is so foreign to the modern man.

Of course, perhaps the book's greatest challenge is the diachronic approach to the Hebrew Bible. Though it is to be expected to a large degree from a modern critical scholar, those who approach scripture synchronically (ie., as unified in its theology and message) will struggle with this alternative method. But there is still a lot to glean from this book if one has that caveat in mind when approaching it.

[Judy]

scholarly look at the history of ideas about afterlife in Judaism