Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Herman Meester" <crazymulgogi AT gmail.com>]

2006/3/15, Karl Randolph <kwrandolph AT email.com>:

> The New Testament carried on the tradition that the
> afterlife was seldom mentioned; not because it was
> irrelevant, but because it was unimportant. It was
> theologians who really play up the issue. Even the
> New Testament book of Revelation finds the afterlife
> so important that it is described in only two of its
> 22 chapters.

I guess you're right, after all it is this life, first, that we are to
make the best of.

> Job, whom from his style I take as a late, pre-Exile
> writer, mentions that after death yet he will see
> his redeemer in a way that implies resurrection.
> Because of its lack of importance, I struggle to
> remember other verses I recall reading. Most of
> Tanakh is narrative and instructions for daily life,
> where discussing the afterlife logically does not
> fit in.

I'll take a good look at Job.

> Sheol is the place of the dead, all the dead. It is
> also a synonym for being dead, in a poetic manner.
>
> By the way, where do you get the idea that the book
> of Daniel was Hellenistic? Daniel wrote well over a
> century before Alexander the Great was born. Or was
> Hellenism the idea already suffused throughout
> Babylon and Persia during the Exile?

Needless to say Daniel is one of the controversial books of the
Hebrew/Aramaic Bible. First, it seems that Daniel belongs to the
pseudepigraphical tradition in which anonymous writers hide behind
legendary "types" (τυποι) such as Daniel, or Job. Daniel, as a
legendary sage, is already found in Ugaritic texts. Furthermore the
eschatological idea of times getting worse and worse and kingdoms
getting increasingly evil (cf. the "4 empires"), is a Greek (i.o.w.
Hellenistic) idea.

This idea cannot be found in the major prophets and the
Dodekapropheton. In those, the idea of the Day of the Lord is there,
but this is not eschatological; it is a day of reckoning where the end
of times is never mentioned. These two separate ideas merged in
Hellenistic times, and the result was Jewish eschatology, where times
get worse and worse until the appointed time of judgment, decided by
God, and this is in many ways the end of this world, has been reached.
Daniel in this sense is a Hellenistic text.

Another argument is that in the Jewish tradition the book Daniel does
not belong to the "Prophets", but to the "Writings". It seems people
realised the text is a pseudepigraph. All in all, scholarship (not
uncontested, of course) in majority concludes that the work originates
in the second century A.D.; cf. also the Maccabaean history,
Epiphanes, etc.

I realise that you may not agree; however, we have to note that dozens
of anonymous writers in Antiquity hide behind famous names. After all,
it is the message, not the author, that counts. One of my favourite
books is Qohelet, and I don't really care who wrote the book, king
Solomon, which I doubt is the case, or an anonymous Hellenistic-time
writer.

Another interesting text is 2Baruch (= Syriac Baruch, = Apocalypse of
Baruch), a text that talks, among other things, of the destruction of
the Temple in 70 A.D., but uses the setting of the destruction of the
Temple in 587/6 B.C. A reconstruction of the Second Temple is not
mentioned in the text to happen any time soon, so we can conclude that
to the writer, this was a hopeless expectation. Instead, the word
"Nomos" is used in an almost Pharisaic way, which places the writer in
the first or second century A.D. So the Baruch in this text is
unlikely to have been Jeremia's secretary.

regards,
Herman


> Karl W. Randolph.
>
> > ----- Original Message -----
> > From: "Herman Meester" <crazymulgogi AT gmail.com>
> >
> > I agree, the various notions exist side by side without cancelling each 
> > other.
> > However, the idea of eternal life whether for good or for bad (heaven
> > or hell) seems to be a novelty of the Hellenistic time that is not
> > there in the oldest/ most classic parts of the Hebrew biblical corpus
> > (of which Daniel isn't a part: Daniel is a rather Hellenistic text).
> >
> >
>
>
> --
> ___________________________________________________
> Play 100s of games for FREE! http://games.mail.com/
>
> _______________________________________________
> b-hebrew mailing list
> b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
> http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-hebrew
>