A Hint of Heaven?

Who knows if a man’s lifebreath does rise upward and if a beast’s breath does sink down into the earth?  Ecclesiastes 3:21  JPS

Rise upward – Scholars often note that the Tanakh is almost silent concerning an afterlife.  Abraham dies and is gathered to his kin.  The end.  Job notes that all go to the grave and none return.  She’ol awaits the righteous and the wicked.  In just the previous verse, Qohelet writes: “All go to the same place. All came from the dust and all return to the dust” (3:20)  Only a handful of verses give any hint that there is life after the grave.  Now, suddenly, Qohelet seems to provide a ray of hope.  Is this verse one of the “afterlife” justifications?

Michael Fox comments:

Ecclesiastes, alone in the Bible, is aware of the belief that at death the soul goes upward to the heavens, rather than down to Sheol.  This idea is not Semitic in origin, but it was found in popular Hellenistic religion, which held that the soul rises to the ether, the heavenly seat of the gods.  As the author portrays Koheleth, the sage had heard of this notion, but he does not know if it is true, and he refuses to be comforted by conjecture.[1]

Fox’s citation brings to mind the invention of the “soul” in Christian thought.  Jacques Ellul wrote about this decades before:

Hebrew thought was sown in a field nourished by Greek thought and Roman law. [in a footnote] A familiar example of the mutation to which revelation was actually subjected is its contamination by the Greek idea of the immortality of the soul.  I will briefly recall it.  In Jewish thought death is total.  There is no immortal soul, no division of body and soul.  Paul’s thinking is Jewish in this regard.  The soul belongs to the “psychical” realm and is part of the flesh.  The body is the whole being.  In death, there is no separation of body and soul.  The soul is as mortal as the body.  But there is a resurrection.  Out of the nothingness that human life becomes, God creates anew the being that was dead.  This is a creation by grace; there is no immortal soul intrinsic to us.  Greek philosophy, however, introduces among theologians the idea of the immortal soul.  The belief was widespread in popular religion and it was integrated into Christianity.  But it is a total perversion.  Everything is not now dependent on the grace of God, and assurance of immortality comes to be evaluated by virtues and works.  All Christian thinking is led astray by this initial mutation that comes through Greek philosophy and Near Eastern cults.   . . .  belief in the soul’s celestial immortality arose in the second half of the fifth century B.C. on the basis of astronomy.  Pythagorean astronomy radically transformed the idea of the destiny of the soul held by Mediterranean peoples.  For the notion of a vital breath that dissipates at death, for belief in a survival of shades wandering about in the subterranean realm of the dead, it substitutes the notion of a soul of celestial substance exiled in this world.  This idea completely contaminates biblical thinking, gradually replaces the affirmation of the resurrection, and transforms the kingdom of the dead into the kingdom of God.[2]

“Hebrew thought had its own tools of knowledge that are fully set forth in the language.  We should bow and submit and convert to these instead of forcing God’s revelation into the strait-jacket of Greco-Roman thinking.”[3]

The invention of the immortal soul, and Qohelet’s acknowledgement of that idea, is one of the reasons scholars consider Ecclesiastes a post-exilic work, not the product of Solomon as traditionally held.  In fact, by the time of Yeshua, most of Judaism had been radically affected by this Greek idea, principally because it solved the riddle of unequal justice in the phenomenal world.  If there is an afterlife, then the righteous can be rewarded and the wicked can be punished even if that basic principle of justice doesn’t seem to apply in this life.  Qohelet hints at such a solution, but, as Fox notes, refuses to abandon his empiricism for a wishful hope.  We, on the other hand, know that the grave isn’t the end.  There is in at least one case proof of resurrection.  Perhaps the origin of the idea is Hellenistic, but the verification is quintessentially Jewish.

Topical Index: soul, afterlife, resurrection, Hellenism, Ecclesiastes 3:21

[1] Michael V. Fox, The JPS Bible Commentary: Ecclesiastes (2004), p. 26.

[2] Jacques Ellul, The Subversion of Christianity, p. 25.

[3] Jacques Ellul, The Subversion of Christianity, p. 26.