Last week we were introduced to the early view of Judaism of the
afterlife.
·
We learned about
their 1-stage view of death, etc.
·
We saw they were
concerned primarily with the land and the people.
·
Their hope was
not in the afterlife, but in long life, children and the land.
·
And then during
exile, the hope expanded to include return and restoration.
·
And it was within
the expanding nature of their hope that their view of resurrection blossomed
into a 2-stage view of death.
1) TWO-STAGE VIEW OF
DEATH – THE HOPE BLOSSOMS
What is a two-stage
view of death?
·
It is “a two-stage expectation (a period of
waiting following the martyr’s death, and then bodily resurrection at some
future date),” – N.T. Wright.
·
So it wasn’t an expansion or further development
on their views of life after death – the afterlife.
o
We saw last week how unsophisticated these views
were.
o
The “waiting” was simply being asleep in Sheol,
the body having returned to the dust.
o
The pagans’ views, by comparison, were far more
developed.
·
But it was the addition to the equation of “bodily
life after ‘life after death’” – resurrection.
Quick Rabbit Trail:
I want to make a point before we begin.
·
Christians often speak of the Jews of the OT as
if they spoke with one voice and were in complete agreement about theological
matters.
·
In fact, they were no more homogenous than
Protestants or Jews are today.
·
And OT Scripture captures many of these
differences for us.
So, when we say of a text that “it wasn’t referring to this
or that”, or “that the Jews took it to mean this or that”, we are saying two
things:
·
(1) We are speaking about how various Jewish
traditions interpreted or understood the text.
o
It is, after all, through these folks and their
traditions that God choose to work and speak.
·
(2) We are not denying the objective or
typological meaning of the text that God Himself intended.
o
God meant exactly what He wanted, even if some
of that meaning was not visible until after the resurrection of Jesus.
o
“Typology can be defined as the study of
analogical correspondences between persons, events, institutions, and other
things within the historical framework of God’s special revelation, which, from
a retrospective view, are of a prophetic nature” – G.K. Beale (JETS).
o
We will see several examples of this as we move
forward.
BTW – It is, in
my mind, evidence of God working that on that third day in Jerusalem, all the differing
threads of Jewish History pertaining to death, the afterlife and resurrection were
gathered together into their final resolution and clarification in Jesus.
·
God knew what He was doing.
Let’s move on.
Exile – The Fertilizer of the Resurrection Hope:
All of the following
passages will leap off the page and scream bodily resurrection to us.
·
However,
each passage “is set in the context of the continuing affirmation of the Jewish
hope for restoration, for liberation from exile, persecution and suffering –
N.T. Wright.
·
So
whatever else they meant or came to mean, the foundation of their meaning was
the Return and Restoration we spoke of last week.
·
The
Jews’ primary concern, as we learned last week, was the Land and its People.
·
It was
through them that God’s covenant with Israel was being fulfilled.
(1) The most well-known
text that seems to speak clearly about bodily resurrection but referred instead
to Return and Restoration is Ezekiel’s dry bones text.
·
Ezekiel 37:1–14 (ESV) — 1 The hand of the Lord was upon me, and he brought me out in the Spirit of the
Lord and set me down in the middle
of the valley; it was full of bones. 2
And he led me around among them, and behold, there were very many on the
surface of the valley, and behold, they were very dry. 3 And he said to me, “Son of man, can these
bones live?” And I answered, “O Lord God,
you know.” 4 Then he said to me,
“Prophesy over these bones, and say to them, O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. 5
Thus says the Lord God to these
bones: Behold, I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live. 6 And I will lay sinews upon you, and will
cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you,
and you shall live, and you shall know that I am the Lord.” 7 So I
prophesied as I was commanded. And as I prophesied, there was a sound, and behold,
a rattling, and the bones came together, bone to its bone. 8 And I looked, and behold, there were
sinews on them, and flesh had come upon them, and skin had covered them. But
there was no breath in them. 9
Then he said to me, “Prophesy to the breath; prophesy, son of man, and say to
the breath, Thus says the Lord God:
Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe on these slain, that they may
live.” 10 So I prophesied as he
commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived and stood on their
feet, an exceedingly great army. 11
Then he said to me, “Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel.
Behold, they say, ‘Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are indeed
cut off.’ 12 Therefore prophesy,
and say to them, Thus says the Lord God:
Behold, I will open your graves and raise you from your graves, O my people.
And I will bring you into the land of Israel. 13
And you shall know that I am the Lord,
when I open your graves, and raise you from your graves, O my people. 14 And I will put my Spirit within you, and
you shall live, and I will place you in your own land. Then you shall know that
I am the Lord; I have spoken, and
I will do it, declares the Lord.”
Clearly this was originally an exilic text.
·
The concern was Return and Restoration of the
people to their land.
·
“Ezekiel is no more envisaging actual bodily
resurrection than he envisaged, when writing chapter 34, that Israel consisted
of sheep rather than people” – N.T. Wright.
·
And one way we know this is by the disconnect in
imagery between verses 1-10 and verses 11-14.
·
Verses 1-10 show the bones of Israel’s exiled
people scattered, unburied (presumably unclean), and far from home.
·
But verses 11-14 speak of the people of Israel
in a grave and being raised from the grave – back to Israel.
·
Plus, it “lacks the regular language of sleepers
walking, of dwellers in the dust, or of the resurrected shining with a new
glory” – N.T. Wright.
But here is the interesting thing about this passage.
·
It is difficult for us to not see some reference
to a literal resurrection.
o
And this is for good reason.
·
And so it was eventually with the Jews.
·
“The undoubted allegorical character of this
passage did not stop it being seen, from at least the early rabbinic period, as
a prediction of literal resurrection” – N.T. Wright.
(2) Our second text comes from Isaiah’s Suffering Servant
passage.
·
Isaiah 53:7–10 (ESV) — 7 He was oppressed, and he was afflicted,
yet he opened not his mouth; like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like
a sheep that before its shearers is silent, so he opened not his mouth. 8 By oppression and judgment he was taken
away; and as for his generation, who considered that he was cut off out of the
land of the living, stricken for the transgression of my people? 9 And they made his grave with the wicked
and with a rich man in his death, although he had done no violence, and there
was no deceit in his mouth. 10 Yet
it was the will of the Lord to
crush him; he has put him to grief; when his soul makes an offering for guilt,
he shall see his offspring; he shall prolong his days; the will of the Lord shall prosper in his hand.
Here is another Return and Restoration from exile text that
appears to be flirting with resurrection.
·
We see that the servant, the nation of Israel
(and later Jesus, of course), was dead.
·
The power of the LORD arrives in verse 10 with “Yet”.
·
And then the servant has prolonged days and is
prospering in the will of the LORD.
·
The power of God has Restored and Returned the
servant – the nation of Israel.
o
Note the reference to Israel’s ancient hope – “his
offspring” and “prolong his days” (vs. 10).
·
And the power of God that Returned and Restored is
represented by God’s power over death.
However, as with Ezekiel, this text also became to be read
as a resurrection text among many Jews.
·
“Daniel [we will see shortly] provides evidence
that some people were already reading Isaiah this way; and so…does the form of
the Isaiah text as we have it in Qumran” – N.T. Wright.
·
In other words, when the Qumran community copied
their version of Isaiah in Hebrew, they chose to emphasize the resurrection
aspect of this text.
Important Reminder:
As the Jewish view of resurrection developed on top of its
hope for Return and Restoration from exile, we can’t help but to rightly see
Jesus come more clearly into view.
·
This is no accident.
·
On to our third text.
(3) Our third text also comes from Isaiah.
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Isaiah 26:19 (ESV) — 19 Your dead shall live; their bodies shall
rise. You who dwell in the dust, awake and sing for joy! For your dew is a dew
of light, and the earth will give birth to the dead.
·
Wright
says there can be no doubt, even in the original Hebrew, that this text is
literally speaking of a bodily resurrection.
·
And as
with our previous texts, we know that Qumran and the LXX took it as such.
·
The LXX,
the Septuagint, was a Greek translation of the OT made in the 200’s B.C.
·
When
they translated texts like this, they deliberately chose cognates of the Greek
word for resurrection.
However, “It is still possible, of course, that here
resurrection is, as we [saw] in Ezekiel, a metaphor for national restoration;
but the wider passage, in which God’s renewal of the whole cosmos is in hand,
opens the way for us to propose that the reference to resurrection is intended
to denote actual concrete events” – N.T. Wright.
·
In other words, the idea of a bodily
resurrection became a metaphor for Return and Restoration.
·
And it is likely that the idea of resurrection
began to “arise” as this metaphor.
·
But, as we will see in Daniel, blossomed into
much more.
(4) We will finish with the oldest, and for the Christian,
the most tantalizing of the OT Return and Restoration texts.
·
Hosea 13:14 (ESV) — 14 Shall I ransom them from the power of
Sheol? Shall I redeem them from Death? O Death, where are your plagues? O
Sheol, where is your sting? Compassion is hidden from my eyes.
·
And then
there is this interesting gem.
·
Hosea 6:1–2 (ESV) — 1 “Come, let us return to the Lord; for he has torn us, that he may
heal us; he has struck us down, and he will bind us up. 2 After two days he will revive us; on the
third day he will raise us up, that we may live before him.
“Hosea offers arguably the oldest passage in OT on
resurrection” – Wright.
·
These passages are dated to the 8th
Century B.C.
·
And interestingly, while our Ezekiel (and, as we
will see, Daniel too) text is Southern Kingdom and younger.
·
These texts, like Isaiah, come from the Northern
Kingdom just before it fell to Assyria.
·
So this development of Resurrection finding a
home in Return and Restoration texts was happening in two places.
·
And all the threads of resurrection developing
within the varied Jewish contexts of time and place were coming together just
in time for Jesus.
These Hosea exilic
texts were (like our other texts) taken in the Inter-Testamental period to have
resurrection overtones.
·
The
Christian, of course, comes to the first and recognizes Paul’s allusion to the
text from 1 Corinthians.
·
1 Corinthians 15:55 (ESV) — 55 “O death, where is your victory? O
death, where is your sting?”
·
Clearly
Paul is teaching us that this is a resurrection text.
·
And we
certainly can’t help but read the second and be struck by the phrase, “on the third day he will raise us up”.
·
At the
time, Hosea was probably referring to a blessing for many that would come “in a
little time, after a short delay” – AYBD.
·
But the
DJG calls this a “Pre-Christian Antecendent”.
·
Some
suggest that Paul alludes to it in 1 Corinthians 5:4 – AYBD.
·
Us
normal folk can perhaps be a little more overt – “Jesus in the OT”.
Summary thus far:
Speaking of the texts we have looked at thus far, Wright
says:
·
“What we have, in fact, in these passages can
best be seen in these terms: hope for bodily resurrection is what sometimes
happens when the hope of ancient Israel meets a new challenge, which might
include the threat of judgment, as in Hosea and Isaiah 24—7 [by God via the
Assyrians], and, more specifically, the fact of exile, as (in different ways)
in Ezekiel 37 and Isaiah 53” – N.T. Wright.
·
In other words, God used the reality of exile
and invasion to teach the Jew that their hope in just a Return and Restoration
was short changing His power over creation.
·
He had, in fact, much bigger plans in store.
The Big Pivot:
Now let’s move on to
the clearest, fullest and most obvious resurrection text in the OT – Daniel
12:2-3.
·
And Wright
suggests, and cites others that argue likewise, that the two Hosea texts and the
Isaiah texts we covered were of great influence to Daniel.
o This, by the way, further reveals that these
Return and Resurrection texts came to be seen as Resurrection texts as well.
·
Wright says Daniel 12 is so pivotal that to read
it is “to stand on the bridge between the Bible [the OT] and the Judaism of
Jesus’ day, looking both backwards and forwards, and watching the passage of
ideas that went to and fro between them” – N.T. Wright.
The Hope Fully
Blossoms – Daniel and Resurrection:
Daniel 12:2–3 (ESV) — 2
And many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to
everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt. 3 And those who are wise shall shine like
the brightness of the sky above; and those who turn many to righteousness, like
the stars forever and ever.
·
“There is little doubt that this refers to
concrete, bodily resurrection. The metaphor of ‘sleep’ for death was, as we
have seen, already widespread; sleeping in the dust of the earth (literally,
‘the earth of dust’ or ‘the land of dust’) was a clear biblical way of
referring to the dead. It was therefore natural to continue the metaphor by
using ‘awake’ to denote bodily resurrection — not a different sort of sleep,
but its abolition” – N.T. Wright.
·
But interestingly, however, this text speaks
only of the resurrection of some.
·
“The passage is not attempting to offer a global
theory of the ultimate destination of the whole human race…” – N.T. Wright.
Wright calls this passage the crown of all that had gone
before.
·
“Any second-Temple Jew who pondered the book
would find in 12.2—3 not a new and outlandish idea, unanticipated and
unforeseen, but the crown of all that had gone before” – N.T. Wright.
·
In other words, as we have seen, resurrection
“fit” the Jewish theology of Return and Restoration.
·
And no passage makes this clearer than Daniel
12:2-3.
So this text does not abandon the Return and Restoration
ideas of the previous texts.
·
But it firmly places them upon a literal bodily
resurrection.
·
And not only does this text clearly speak of a
bodily resurrection.
·
But, importantly, it also begins to give it a
specific shape.
Shape of Resurrection in Daniel 12:
·
(1) It speaks of a glorified risen body.
o
“…Resurrection is not simply a resuscitation in
which the dead will return to life much as they knew it before. They will be
raised to a state of glory in the world for which the best parallel or
comparison is the status of stars, moon and sun within the created order” –
N.T. Wright.
·
(2) It speaks of the judgment of pagans and the
vindication of martyrs.
o
“Israel’s god will reverse the actions of the
wicked pagans, and raise the martyrs, and the teachers who kept Israel on
course, to a glorious life. Simultaneously, he will raise their persecutors to
a new existence: instead of remaining in the decent obscurity of Sheol or ‘the
dust’, they will face perpetual public obloquy [public disgrace]” – N.T.
Wright.
·
(3) Resurrection happens to individuals, but it
is the individuals of Israel who are raised and vindicated together.
o
In other words, it is corporate in shape.
o
“…this is not something other than God’s
long-promised act of vindication for the exiled nation” – Wright.
Conclusion – Two-Stage View of Death and Resurrection:
Concerning all the texts we have just covered, N.T. Wright
says,
·
They all point to “…the common hope of Israel:”
·
What was
the common hope of Israel?
·
“…that YHWH would restore her fortunes at last,
liberate her from pagan dominion, and resettle her in justice and peace, even
if it took a great act of new creation to accomplish it. This is where the solid
hope of the earlier period (hope for nation, family and land) joins up with the
emerging belief in the creator’s faithfulness even beyond the grave” – N.T.
Wright.
And whatever the Jew thought about resurrection’s
relationship to its ancient hope of Return and Restoration,
·
(1) It was not a move away from it but an
affirmation of it.
o
The development of resurrection “…is not a move
away from the hope which characterized all of ancient Israel, but a
reaffirmation of it” – N.T. Wright.
·
(2) Resurrection, in fact, could be seen as fitting
metaphor for Return and Restoration.
o
Exile itself is “the strange half-life
lived after that death, and return from exile to be seen as life beyond
that again, newly embodied life, i.e. resurrection – N.T. Wright.
·
(3) Like Israel’s ancient hope (and unlike the
pagans), resurrection was grounded in the goodness of creation, life and the
body.
o
The development of resurrection in Israel “…grew
directly from the emphasis on the goodness of creation, on YHWH as the god who
both kills and makes alive, and on the future of nation and land” – N.T.
Wright.
And because of the way in which Resurrection depends on
Return and Restoration, Wright even suggests that ultimately,
·
“…the meanings of ‘bodily resurrection for dead
humans’ and ‘national restoration for exiled/suffering Israel’ are so closely
intertwined that it does not matter that we cannot always tell which is meant,
or even if a distinction is possible, in relation to particular passages; that
is part of the point” – N.T. Wright.
·
“The either/or that has tended to drive a wedge
between different interpretations of key passages (either ‘individual
resurrection’ or ‘national restoration’) must be exposed as fallacious. In
Daniel 12, the resurrection of God’s people (at least in the persons of the
martyrs, seen as representing the nation) is the form that national restoration
takes. This is the real end of the deepest exile of all” – N.T. Wright.
Having traced the development of the 1-stage view of death
into, through the idea of resurrection, a 2-stage view of death, we can now
come to Jesus and Easter Sunday ready to fully fathom what happened.
·
And as we do so we will look at the options
available to the Jew at Jesus’ time.
o
From the Sadducees’ denial of resurrection
o
To Martha’s resurrection on the last day.
·
We will deal with this next time.
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