Resurrection (4)

Now at that time Michael, the great prince who stands guard over the sons of your people, will arise. And there will be a time of distress such as never occurred since there was a nation until that time; and at that time your people, everyone who is found written in the book, will be rescued.  And many of those who sleep in the dust of the ground will awake, these to everlasting life, but the others to disgrace and everlasting contempt.  Daniel 12:1-2  NASB

Continued from yesterday

Isa. 26:19  Your dead will live; their corpses will rise. You who lie in the dust, awake and shout for joy, for your dew is as the dew of the dawn, and the earth will give birth to the departed spirits.

Isaiah 26:19.  This verse seems to say exactly what you wish, but the problem is that verse 14 of the same chapter flatly contradicts this view.  How can both be correct?  Robert Alter offers this: the problem is the term “your.”  It is more likely that Isaiah is speaking of national renewal rather than personal resurrection.  “Your,” that is, “all of you as a national identity” will live again.  If you take this to mean each person, then you have the contradiction of verse 14.  With this in mind, we can examine the next verse you offered in Isaiah (within the same context).

Isa. 25:7 And on this mountain He will swallow up the covering which is over all peoples, Even the veil which is stretched over all nations.
8 He will swallow up death for all time, And the Lord God will wipe tears away from all faces, And He will remove the reproach of His people from all the earth; For the Lord has spoken.

Isaiah 25:7-8

Clearly, these verses in Isaiah deal with death.  But the end of death, as verse 8 promises, does not necessarily mean a new, resurrected life.  The question is the genre of this passage.  Many of Isaiah’s verses are metaphorical hyperbole (e.g., mountains dripping with wine).  The usual biblical view is that death is inevitable and permanent.  In fact, there is no need for a resurrection if death is somehow going to be eliminated.  Of course, later Jewish and Christian theology claimed an end to death with the general resurrection, but once again, we should be careful not to read that theology back into the text.  From the Pentateuch forward, death is man’s ultimate end and she’ol the only approximation of any kind of after-death experience.  There is no return to life as we understand it.

What is the context of these verses from Isaiah?  The text from Chapter 24 to Chapter 27 is about God’s judgment on the earth.  The overwhelming theme is the power and magnificence of God.  Isaiah employs metaphor after metaphor describing the dismal state of the earth and God’s total control over it.  Essentially, the passage is a divine consolation and justification of Judah.  “On this mountain, God will prepare a lavish banquet for all people, and He will swallow up the covering over all the people and He will swallow up death.”  The end of verse 8 gives us some clue about Isaiah’s meaning.  It is the “reproach” that God will remove.  What is this “reproach”?  That Israel has been subject to disgrace and humiliation at the hands of evil nations, that Israel’s God has been insulted.  Isaiah uses the strongest possible hyperbole to give the people of Israel hope.  It reminds me of the metaphorical use of the permanency of death in Song of Songs 8:6 “For love is as strong as death.”  One can hardly imagine that the author means love and death are intimately joined together.  The metaphor serves another purpose: to point out how unbreakable her love is.  Of course, the metaphor only works if death is permanent.  It seems that Isaiah is communicating a similar, but opposite, message.  That hope is so strong is can overcome death.  Does this verse give us explicit endorsement of a general resurrection of the dead?  If the prophecy is about Judah, the answer must be “No.”  If we claim it is about all humanity, it’s hard to imagine that the people of Isaiah’s time could have believed this prophecy was about some future, long away, final day.  The prophecy has to mean something to them!  It was intended to give them hope.  Perhaps that’s all it was intended to do—to help them realize that God still cares for them despite all that has happened.  At any rate, for our study this verse doesn’t explicitly support resurrection even if it tells us that somehow, someday death will no longer hold sway of humanity.

Dan. 12: 1-2  Now at that time Michael, the great prince who stands guard over the sons of your people, will arise. And there will be a time of distress such as never occurred since there was a nation until that time; and at that time your people, everyone who is found written in the book, will be rescued. 2 Many of those who sleep in the dust of the ground will awake, these to everlasting life, but the others to disgrace and everlasting contempt.

Daniel 12:1-2

If we were to ask for a verse that explicitly declares a resurrection and judgment, this would probably be the best verse we could find in the Tanakh.  There are only a few problems.  First, it’s from Daniel.  As Robert Alter notes, “Daniel is probably the most peculiar book in the Hebrew Bible.  It is also clearly the latest.”[1]  Alter goes on to say that there is almost no doubt it was written between 167 and 165 B.C.E.  What does this mean?  “Given this late date, it is not surprising that Daniel more closely resembles the apocalyptic texts of the Apocrypha and of the Dead Sea Scrolls,  . . . and the book of Revelation in the New Testament, which draws on Daniel, than any similarity to earlier biblical books.”[2]  This, of course, is a real problem.  What it means is that Daniel was written in a time when a theory of the general resurrection of the dead was already developed.  Therefore, we should not be surprised to find it here, and at the same time, must recognize that this does not give support to the idea in the Tanakh written during or before the Prophets.

Second, Daniel is a product of Judaism after Hellenism.  Its theological vocabulary is post-prophetic.  Despite its inclusion in the Hebrew Bible, it really doesn’t support a theory of resurrection before the Babylonian Captivity.  Therefore, it can’t be used as a proof text about resurrection before 538 B.C.E.  Daniel isn’t part of the biblical prophetic genre.  The prophets are interested in what happens to Israel.  Daniel is interested in what happens to the entire world. Daniel’s themes incorporate ideas that stretch across all times and all peoples, neither of which is found in the earlier prophets.  Alter notes: “The prospect of the resurrection of the dead, certainly new to biblical writing in such a literal form, is an intrinsic element of this end-time, when all things would radically change.”[3]  Notice Alter’s comment “certainly new to biblical writing.”  Before Daniel the idea of resurrection doesn’t exist.  After Daniel it does.  How did that happen?

We could suppose that God revealed the critically important fact to Daniel who communicated it in his prophetic visions.  Or we could ask for the historical context that brought the idea into Daniel’s frame of reference.  It is the latter that seems likely since during the Second Temple period, resurrection became a hotly debated topic.  Daniel is one voice among many who espoused the view in late Second Temple thought.  Enoch and the apostles are others.  But, of course, times change, and ideas change with the times.  Daniel is an example of a new idea making its way into Scripture and evolving into a foundational element of Messianic theology.  Unfortunately, this does not mean it was in place before Daniel and Second Temple Judaism.

So, there you have it.  We’ve looked at them all.  Daniel is the only one that explicitly endorses resurrection, with a significant caveat.  Therefore, my answer remains the same:  “But the Tanakh really has nothing to say about the end of death.”

“Outside the commonly accepted belief in a sort of colorless existence in the nether world shared by all, the only sign of yearning for a significant immortality was the desire to leave behind a good name.  Hence, in the system of individual reward and punishment, the difference between the fate of the righteous and that of the wicked was that the righteous left behind him a memory that was to be for a blessing, while the name of the wicked was sure to rot (Prov. 10.7).”[4]

Sincerely,

Skip Moen

Topical Index: resurrection

[1] Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible: Vol. 3, p. 747.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Mordecai M. Kaplan, “Introduction,” in Moses Hayyim Luzzatto, Mesillat Yesharim: The Path of the Upright, p. xxx.