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  • From: Rolf Furuli <furuli AT online.no>
  • To: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] hell
  • Date: Thu, 16 Mar 2006 03:23:25 +0100

Dear list,

I have two short comments to this discussion.


Herman Meester wrote:

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


snip

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.



Looking at the case from the point of view of lexical semantics, we should be careful both with our definition of Hebrew concepts and with our expression of these with English words.

Applied to the Tanakh the term "afterlife" can be misleading, as well as "the netherworld" that often is used. I read Hebrew and Akkadian texts almost every day, and I see a great difference between the mindset of those who wrote the Akkadian and Hebrew texts. The two mentioned terms fit excellently Akkadian thought, where there is "a land of no return" where people go after their death, and where there is a kind of miserable life. However, it is not a spiritual part of man that goes down to the "netherworld" but rather the whole creature (cf. Isthar's descent to the netherworld).

In Hebrew thought the NP$ dies and and go down to $)WL, to the grave, where there is no life. So any "afterlife" in the sense that man continues to live after the body dies, is not found in the Tanakh (including Daniel).



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'

I am at present studying astronomical and historical cuneiform documents from the New Babylonian Empire in order to test the accepted chronoology (which I doubt). I am also reading secondary literature, and regarding the question about the date of the book of Daniel, I would recommend D. J. Wiseman (1983) "Nebuchadrezzar and Babylon". It is a small book of 140 pages, but it abounds with footnotes and is very informative. Wiseman is one of the great assyriologists (cf. his book "Chronicles of the Chaldean kings 626-556 B.C. (1956)), and he draws from his great knowledge of the original documents. Different sides of the personality and acts of Nebuchadnezzar II are portrayed in the book of Daniel, and Wiseman, who do not reject the possibility that the book, or parts of it were written in the sixth century B.C.E. quote several cuneiform sources that give information about Nebuchadnezzar strikingly similar to the information given by Daniel. It seems to me that scholarly writings about the book of Daniel often lack balance: to much weight is put on arguments in favor of a second century dating at the expense of arguments in favor of a much earlier dating. Therefore, Wiseman's book is really a good read.

Best regards,


Rolf Furuli

University of Oslo

s secretary.

regards,
Herman








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