Abraham breathed his last and died in a ripe old age, an old man and satisfied with life; and he was gathered to his people.  Genesis 25:8  NASB

Satisfied with life – Let’s talk about death.  In particular, let’s talk about the death of Abraham.  Abraham is the father of our faith.  Paul holds him up as the paradigm of God’s redemptive grace.  He is first in the heroes of the faithful.  His life is the foundation of God’s chosen people.  God’s promise to Abraham is the reason we serve the Lord today.  There is hardly a more important figure in the Tanakh than Abraham.

But far too often we think of Abraham’s faith in our categories, not his.  We forget that Abraham didn’t have a single line from the Bible.  He didn’t have the historical hindsight of our generation.  He didn’t know anything about Yeshua.  And most of his life, he experienced God’s silence.  Abraham could not have endorsed our creeds, produced a modern statement of faith, written a systematic theology or recognized anything in our worship services.  He is our father, but his understanding of YHWH was radically different than ours.

Some of this is just a matter of God’s progressive revelation.  Abraham didn’t know because God didn’t reveal it to him.  He knew what he had to know.  But some of this enormous difference is the result of cultural importing.  Instead of reading Abraham as an ancient near-eastern Semite, we read him as if he sat in the back of the sanctuary, saying “Amen” to our stage performance.  Perhaps we can begin to appreciate how much we have misread Abraham if we consider his death instead of his life.

Notice that the verse says absolutely nothing about life after death.  Not a hint!  Abraham lived a long and fruitful life.  Then he died.  The NASB glosses the Hebrew idiom zaken vesavea, literally “aged full.”  The idea that Abraham was satisfied with his life is a contemporary cultural import.  We are the ones who demand to be satisfied with life.  There is no indication that such an expectation was part of Abraham’s culture.  In fact, there are several ancient near-eastern cultural facts that overturn such a translation.  Consider these:

1.  H. W. Wolff argues that  “man does not have nephesh, he is nephesh, he lives as nephesh.”  Nephesh is granted to Man.  It still belongs to God.  God is its source.  We do not have it as a piece of divinity now inherently resident in us.  Genesis 35:18 suggests that nephesh departs at death.

2. “Where the nephesh is related to awareness and perception, the ruah is related to consciousness and vitality.  Like nephesh, the ruah is not understood as continuing to exist once the person dies.  Indeed, it is difficult to demonstrate that a person has his/her own ruah.  Rather, each person has God’s ruah.”

“What continues to exist in Sheol after death is neither nephesh nor ruah.” [1]