Visions of the Afterlife in the Bible and Dead Sea Scrolls with Ronald Hendel

the topic visions of the afterlife in the Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls is a very large topic and I'm going to give you some steps in the development of that process what the the punchline is that in the beginning in the Hebrew Bible there really isn't an afterlife and so what I'm going to show you is how the idea of the afterlife came into being okay so this is the origins of the idea of the afterlife in Judaism Christianity and Islam so this is very big significant stuff there's a lot of different directions a lot of different movements in the crystallization of this idea of the afterlife and I will really just be showing you some pictures some greatest hits in the development of this idea can you all hear me by the way okay good good good so this the this first slide and I'm pleased that I have a remote control here for the slide and I think if I push the wrong buttons I get the Simpsons so forgive me if that happens this is a picture behind the words is one of the Dead Sea Scrolls this is called the temple scroll and so these are very ancient texts and we're going to see that the Dead Sea Scrolls play a particularly pivotal role in the development and crystallization of the idea of the afterlife but first let's start at the beginning here we go in the beginning which is as Mary Poppins once said a very good place to start is that right with at the right movie oh no The Sound of Music okay sorry so you all remember that when I tell my students these things I just get blank stares in the beginning there's actually two different creation stories in the beginning part of the book of Genesis but this is the key one the creation of Adam in the beginning of Genesis 2 and here is a nice picture I don't think this was live this photograph but you can see there God has just created Adam and he's breathing into his nose the breath of life ok so this shows us in the imagery of the creation of the first human the concept of life and it also implies a concept of death and that is that humans are made of two different substances Adam is created from the earth there's actually a wordplay here between the word human which is AI Adam and the word for Earth which is Adam ah so with in Hebrew it's a wordplay Adam is created from the Adama and this has a lot of resonances humans are created from the earth so it says that God formed the first man from the first human from the earth and then breathed into his nose the breath of life now this is a concept of what humans are made of okay and it's fairly accurate okay we are made of Earth chemicals and things what happens when we die this is this will be on the quiz afterwards what happens to your body when you die you return to the earth so from dust to dust from the earth you come to the earth you go you biodegrade this is very ecologically sound what is this breath of life then well I can tell you that everybody here I assume is breathing okay because you need to breathe to be alive so in the ancient biblical conception people are earth features but they are enlivened by this breath which is God's breath if God breathes it in it's sort of like a CPR thing and you're alive as long as you're breathing what happens when you stop breathing you die and your body turns back into the earth okay so this is the biblical conception that life comes from God's breath when you die the breath goes back to God and your body dissolves into earth for the earth from which you were taken now notice here in this concept in the Garden of Eden story there is no afterlife okay so this is the opening move in this development that I want to show you today in the original in the earliest situation there is no afterlife you're made of two different things dirt and God's breath and when you die they separate and go back to where they came from no afterlife so we want to find where this idea of the afterlife comes from now the idea of death is is one of the concerns of the Garden of Eden story as some of you will remember there's two special trees in the middle of the garden the tree of the knowledge of good and evil the fruit there's the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and then there's also the Tree of Life now this is a little bit of a spoiler alert so be careful here the people eat from one of the tree and are expelled from the garden so that they don't eat from the other tree they eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and therefore they become knowledgeable they become in fact in the story they become like God's knowing good and evil and then God expels them from the garden so that they don't also eat from the tree of life and live forever okay so this so there is no living forever because people were expelled for the garden before they could eat of the fruit of the tree of life now this will come back later in my story after the idea of the afterlife comes into being that this idea that one can in some respects go back to the Garden of Eden and eat the tree of life and live forever but this is a later idea okay originally in the Garden of Eden people are cast out of the garden so that they don't live forever so in this picture you see the fruit of the tree of knowledge and the snake is there enticing the humans to eat it and then there's a skull at the bottom that once they eat it it says yet death enters the picture the story is a little ambiguous it says God says when you eat from this fruit of this tree on that day you will surely die but it turns out that they don't die in other words God becomes a little more chill is compassionate and doesn't kill them but he does expel them from the garden so that they don't eat of the fruit of the tree of life and live forever so when they're expelled God says you will eat from the the earth you will eat your bread by the sweat of your brow until you return to the earth for from dust you come into dust you shall return what I think is going on there is the consciousness of death that people gain knowledge and part of that knowledge is knowledge of mortality the knowledge that they will have to die so death comes into the picture both in terms of having to return to the dust but also in knowing that you have to return to the dust so this is the concept of life and death of what happens after you die in the Garden of Eden story you biodegrade you go to that great compost bin and become earth again and you return the breath of life to the source where it came from now this is a widespread picture of what happens to you in the ancient world okay that there really isn't any afterlife you just die but there is at the same time another stream of thinking where there is a kind of shadowy place where your breath or your spirit can go to but it's a very hazy and vaguely unpleasant place this is a picture of the Mesopotamian God maragall who is king of the underworld the underworld and this is in the Mesopotamian tradition and in the biblical tradition there is an underworld where your spirit in some sense has a post-mortem existence but it's a very shadowy existence you're sort of a shade in the Mesopotamian texts the afterworld the underworld is described as a kind of dusty place it's dark and there's some in some instances the people wear feathers like birds okay so it's dark dusty it's sort of like a really bad cheap hotel the lighting is bad and they eat dirt and it's a fairly unpleasant place so this is another concept of what happens that your that your spirit does go somewhere but it's a but it's not really alive in the afterworld okay there's a kind of dwelling place sometimes people can feed you they can make offerings to the ancestors who are living in this place and in the Bible this place is called the shell shell okay so there is a shadowy half under underworld existence but it's not something it's it's neither a place of reward nor a place of punishment it's sort of where all the spirits go and just sort of spend their time doing nothing okay so with these initial concepts of a kind of either lack of an afterlife or a kind of shady shadowy afterlife we move on to the next development of the steps towards an afterlife the first step comes with one of the characters in genesis named Enoch Enoch has a very small role in the genealogies of the ant the ancestors from Adam to Noah in Genesis 5 this is a picture of Enoch a edging of Enoch by William Blake and here's the text it's in one of these begets the so-and-so begets someone so begets someone so in Genesis 5 and all of a sudden you get to Enoch and it says when Enoch so jared begat Enoch and then Enoch lived 65 years he became the father of Methuselah after he became the father of Methuselah Enoch walked with God for 300 years now this is a strange thing to say and it's not clear what it means but it's a good thing we know that because Noah also walks with God and Abraham walks with God so it looks like an idiom that means something like was righteous okay but then at the end there's another twist altogether Enoch lived 365 years which is an interesting number of years it's less years than the other patriarchs from from Adam to Noah and it sounds like more or less the length of a solar year okay because there's 365 days in a solar year so there might be some sort of astronomical speculation that underlies the lifespan of Enoch in any case he lived 365 years anak walked with God then he was no more because God took him and then it goes on to Methuselah but what does that mean the walking with God is interesting but what does it what does it mean that God took him if God took he took him where he didn't take him shopping he didn't take him to Union Square he took him somewhere but the text doesn't say where it doesn't say what this means this is a very strange episode in the in the book of Genesis and it indicates that Enoch was a special figure there are other people in ancient Mesopotamia who did somehow go to heaven or gain some sort of immortality but they're very few and far between the hero of the flood in the Mesopotamian version actually is granted immortality the flood hero and his wife mr. and mrs. Edna pushed him gain immortality but they're the only ones that do it's not a it's not a category that's available to anybody else so it looks like Enochs story is something like the old Mesopotamian flood hero where as a special favor God took him up and maybe he lived somewhere special for a long time but the text doesn't say what happened so it's a cryptic text now when there are cryptic texts in the Bible particularly in the book of Genesis later writers and later interpreters tended to seize on these cryptic mysterious things and elaborate on them so not surprisingly and let me just say this this part of Genesis was written around the 6th century BCE not surprisingly about 300 years later someone wrote a sequel to these verses in Genesis called the Book of Enoch in other words when people want to know what happened to Enoch eventually someone will say here's what happened that is to say inquiring minds want to know that's that's my personal motto which I derived from what's it called the national enquirer that's when there used to be newspapers but in the National Enquirer you know they tell you things you want to know Elvis is alive aliens come down and live in the White House things like that so when you want to know about Enoch how did he walk with God and what does it mean that God took him someone finally three hundred years later said I've got the answer I've got a book that Enoch wrote okay and it's called The Book of Enoch and in this book Enoch tells what happened to him when God took him and what happens in the Book of Enoch there's a lot of other things that happen but one of the key things is that Enoch has a mysterious ascent to heaven at the end of his life and he gets a tour of heaven that is led by various angels so the idea of walking with God is reinterpreted as walking with angels in a tour group okay this is one of the first great tourist ventures in history and the angels lead him around in heaven and he looks down and sees things on earth and they show him all these heavenly and earthly mysteries now this picture here is the Book of Enoch the Book of Enoch is one of the most important ancient books that most people have never heard of because it didn't make it into the Hebrew Bible the Old Testament okay it was very influential but it didn't make the final cut it did however somehow remain in the sacred books in the Ethiopian Christian Church and so this is a copy of the Book of Enoch in Ethiopia okay in the Ethiopian Christian Church it was originally written in Aramaic and I'll show you in a minute how we know that but the translation and to eat the OP ik was the only fully preserved version of the Book of Enoch we lost the original versions okay so the only full version that we have is in Ethiopia it's got this beautiful script if you can see it here we know that it was actually written in Aramaic because fragments of the Book of Enoch were found in the Dead Sea Scrolls this is the first place where the Dead Sea Scrolls comes into my story this is a copy of the Book of Enoch the Book of Enoch as I said was probably written or the part that concerns us was probably written in the 3rd century BC this is a fragment from cave 4 of the Dead Sea Scrolls k4 of Qumran and so because the place where the Dead Sea's girls were found is called Qumran so we call it 4q meaning it was cave 4 from Qumran and it's the Book of Enoch and here we can see this is the original language of the book it was written in Aramaic and it was a big bestseller to the people of the Dead Sea Scrolls okay and we'll get to this later but to give away another spoiler alert is that it's in the Book of Enoch that the concept of the afterlife is most fully realized okay the crystallization of the idea of the afterlife probably begins in this Book of Enoch this is why I said it's one of the most important books that no one's ever heard of the idea of Heaven and Hell as destinations for people after they die is first found in this book ok so I will return to that later I want to go back and look at some of the initial stages but it was but I want to emphasize that the Book of Enoch is a response to this cryptic story about Enoch in Genesis he walked with God and was no more ok this is the this is the irritant like in a like to create that the irritant that created the pearl ok this is this bit of strangeness in the Bible that generated the idea that where anak went was heaven there's another that there's another cryptic story in the Bible that contributes to this strangeness of the Enoch story and that or that that echoes the strangeness of the Enoch story and this is the story of Elijah Elijah is a prophet in the book of kings and at the end of his life it says that God took Elijah up into the sky in a fiery chariot this is impressive - again the interested reader the inquiring reader wants to know what happened to Elijah once he went up to the sky in a fiery chariot okay in later interpretations in later books and we already see this in one of the later books of the Bible Elijah lives in heaven and then comes down to announce the coming of the Messiah this is this is one of the later ideas that develops out of again this cryptic text that says Elijah ascended up into heaven in a fiery chariot so what was Liza doing there and what was what was he waiting for in the Passover Seder every year Jews pour a cup of wine for Elijah and then you open the back door a little bit and hope the insects don't come in so that Elijah can come in the back door and drink the wine and that will welcome in the harbin Elijah as the harbinger of the Messiah as Elijah as the one who is will announce the coming of the Messiah so there's a hopeful thing that one does to get Elijah to come back down I don't know if Elijah likes the kind of cheap wine that we used when I was a kid in Passover Seder 'he's now that we're in California I hope he's upgraded his wine cuisine a little bit maybe that's why he hasn't come yet he really was waiting for that good Cabernet okay but this is another strange thing in the Bible that sets speculation going about what happened - Elijah what happened to Enoch and these are things that create this opening for the idea of an afterlife now another thing and here these are these are different intersecting causes for this idea another thing that happens that I think is really crucial in developing this idea that in creating the conceptual space for the concept of the afterlife is what I call rereading and resonance that is to say people read biblical texts very closely in antiquity okay and if the text had let's say metaphors that indicated or expressions or figurative tropes that indicated these kind of heavenly mysteries people seized on them and and this helped them to develop a full-blown idea of the afterlife so this is this is the most famous I don't think you can see the letters that this is Psalm 23 the Lord is my shepherd I shall not want this is one of the most famous poems in the Bible okay and this text is used very widely these days at funerals why because it's taken to be a text about heaven that describes people going to heaven and living with God in heaven now this this is an interpretation of the poem that wasn't originally what the poem meant okay originally the poem was written in a world that didn't have this full-blown idea of the afterlife and originally and this is this is a kind of scholarly construct that one could argue with but the general idea is that most of the Psalms most of the religious poetry in the Book of Psalms had to do with worship at the Temple in Jerusalem this was during the period when the Temple in Jerusalem was the central place of religious worship this Psalm in particular it has been argued and and I agree was probably is probably describing a pilgrimage to the temple according to the biblical laws people had to make a pilgrimage to the temple three times a year at the major festivals and offer sacrifices at the temple to worship God at the temple in Jerusalem so this song is arguably a beautiful metaphorical poetic description of people making a pilgrimage to the temple and then arriving at the temple and offering their sacrifices but the poem is done in such beautiful language that in a sense the language itself escapes its occasion that is to say the language conjures up a more transcendent more kind of mystical experience and so this is why it becomes interpreted as a story about heaven so let me read it to you this is very familiar to you it says the Lord is my shepherd I shall not want he maketh me to lie down in green pastures he leadeth me beside the still waters this is this this is a description of God through the metaphor of God as a shepherd God as the Good Shepherd okay and if God is the Good Shepherd people are his sheep and he's leading them somewhere where is he leading them in the last line it becomes explicit surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life and I will dwell in the house of the Lord well in the Bible and in the Book of Psalms the term house of the Lord refers to the Temple in Jerusalem that's God's house okay so this is a very specific term and this is where they're going so God is leading them like sheep going from one pasture place to another and he's leading them to the Temple in Jerusalem this is why this is probably a description or something that evokes the thrice annual pilgrimages to Jerusalem which would take you a few days to get to okay and so here in this imagery God is the Shepherd guiding the people along protecting them as they are going towards the Temple in Jerusalem so the people are sheep and it and they're happy sheep why because God is such a good shepherd he protects them so he maketh me to lie down in green pastures that's really good for a sheep you like green pastures he leadeth me beside still waters that's nice too okay so the the sheep are having a very nice time everything's fertile you get food yeah grass you get water the Shepherd is leading you he even restoreth my soul now in the Hebrew this means he kind of revivify be in a kind of psychological spiritual sense it doesn't mean the resurrection of the soul it doesn't mean the resurrection of the Dead but you can see that the I mean this is just really happy sheep okay they're really restored they feel great and it's the Good Shepherd that does this but you can see how the words themselves and the the evocative resonant quality of the words can give rise to the idea of restoring the soul that is to say make you alive after you're dead it doesn't originally mean that but it comes to be interpreted that way okay and so we can see that in the rereading and resonance of the words you have the seeds of the idea of the afterlife okay yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil for thou art with me thy rod and thy staff comfort me so even death doesn't scare these wandering sheep because God's rod and God protects you against death but notice that these images that are used of the valley of the shadow of death of restoring my soul putting these together starts gives an ambiance of the soul being resurrected in the face of death you see what I mean so it's when you read the text very closely the resonance of the words starts to create concepts that aren't actually the plain sense of the experience that's addressed in the text this is a pilgrimage to the temple which is like being restored and like being protected from death and you don't fear any evil because God is protecting you against evil and against death then you arrive you prepare us a table before me in the presence of my enemies that you anoint my head with oil my cup runneth over this table is in the temple where you make the sacrifice okay and after the sacrifice you have a festive meal so this is a festive banquet in God's house at God's table and the metaphor here flips from God being a good Shepherd to God being a good host not you know not just a good shepherd the best Shepherd and now when you come to his house he's the best host okay so you prepared Kia prepares this table this is the virtue of hospitality which is a huge thing in the Middle East to this day it's a huge thing in Jewish culture let me just tell you my grandmother told me I was her favorite grandson because I would eat whatever she put in front of me this is how important hospitality setting a table and eating it I never told my other cousins that I didn't want them to be jealous but this is the virtue of hospitality so God is your host and he's setting a table for you and your cup is running over meaning it's you know that we've been to restaurants before that wherever you take one sip they ran over and fill it up again that's what this is like when the cup is like running over there's there's complete abundance here surely goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever now goodness and mercy following you all the days of your life that's very nice that's ideal that's a paradise that's the feeling of being in the temple worshiping God at his table and at his house okay so being at the temple is a kind of perfect experience this is what is being evoked in the psalm and I would like to dwell there forever but let me let me tell you something though the text doesn't actually say forever it says for length of days which means for a long time or a few mean in the this is the King James Version and for some reason they translated as forever okay once you have it translated as forever instead of just being I'd like to stay here for as long as I can once it says forever again that sounds like immortality that sounds like a vision of the afterlife of living in heaven and let me give you one more piece of the puzzle here at a certain point the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed first the Babylonians destroyed it in the 6th century and then you had the Babylonian exile then later the Jews came back to Jerusalem and built another temple which scholars very cleverly call the Second Temple scholars are very clever about these terms and then a few centuries later the Romans destroyed the second temple so after the destruction of the second temple there's no temple anymore so there's no physical house of the Lord to visit anymore this Psalm is still in the Bible though the referent therefore of the house of the Lord comes to be seen as not his earthly house but his heavenly house okay and so this is how this psalm becomes a psalm about living in God's heavenly house after you're dead okay he defeats death he restores your soul you live in the house of the Lord in heaven forever so it becomes to be understood as a saw as a psalm about the afterlife and this is why the psalm is used in is recited at funerals in Judaism and Christianity today one of the things that we see in this psalm is the development of the idea of the afterlife it wasn't originally there in the words of this Psalm this was about taking a pilgrimage to the temple of God in Jerusalem and offering sacrifices there and the wonderful spiritual experience that one would have doing that okay but after there's no temple anymore and even maybe when there was still a temple the words are so powerful the metaphors are so evocative that they become more than metaphors and come to signify eternal life and living in heaven and defeating death you see what I mean so the the development in this respect the development of the idea of the afterlife is is based on reading poems like this really intensely and understanding some of their figurative and metaphorical language very literally so the idea comes from the words themselves and from the poetry themselves from the resonance of the poetry now let me just say this is great poetry and so great poetry can create all sorts of new meanings and that's precisely I think what happened with this psalm and this is one of the things that creates the idea of the afterlife isn't that interesting next time you hear this poem but don't tell anyone this don't tell them that it originally didn't mean that but the words kind of created its own resonance its own echoes and developed into a new idea okay now back into the Bible there are other texts that also give rise to these sorts of ideas some of them like Psalm 23 are and these are mostly poetic texts some of these are poetic texts that initially did not refer to the afterlife but the poetry is so good the expressions are so powerful that they give rise to that kind of resonance okay sometimes metaphorical language is used but the metaphor itself is about overcoming death so one of these we have in or the the the prophet Isaiah is one of the key people here this is a painting by Chagall about Isaiah's initiative vision where he sees God in his heavenly temple and it's all smoky and it's shaking and Isaiah thinks he's about to die one of these is very strange angels they're called Seraphim flies towards him with a smoking ember in his hand which is from the heavenly altar and let me just say this is this is a very frightening vision okay Isaiah thinks he's going to die and if you saw a six winged Seraphim fly at you with this smoking hot thing in his hand and coming for your face you would think you were gonna die too so this is a near-death experience but in the heavenly temple in this vision it's an out-of-body experience in California we can have those things right but instead of dying the Sarah touches Isaiah's lips and says your lips are now pure your lips are now made holy so you essentially so that you can now speak God's holy words and this is what makes Isaiah a prophet a prophet is basically someone who speaks the words that he hears God's saying in in heaven okay I described the prophets as a sort of religious UPS person they deliver the message that God sends from heaven so his lips are purified and now he can speak these divine words now this vision of God in heaven itself is something that gives rise to ideas of the afterlife okay and this near-death experience also contributes to that so one can see Isaiah's vision as giving rise to later visions of what the Spirit of the Dead will see when they go up to heaven it's not what it means originally but it can be but it flows into that kind of resonance now later in the Book of Isaiah there is a description of this Cataclysm at the end of this era and Isaiah says your bodies will live but yordanos you mean but your dead will live their bodies will rise you who dwell in the dust wake up and shout for joy your do is like the dew of the morning the earth will give birth to her dead this is a very key text in the development of the idea of the afterlife because he's talking about dead people waking up you who dwell in it a dust wake up and shout for joy that doesn't usually happen okay this is the resurrection of the Dead but scholars agree that he doesn't really mean it that that is to say this is a metaphor this part of Isaiah was written by someone who wasn't Isaiah but was his writings were stuck into the Book of Isaiah scholars very cleverly referred to him as either second Isaiah or third Isaiah and this was probably written around the time of the Babylonian exile when the thing that was hoped for and anticipated was a return of the Exiles to Israel okay and one of the expressions one of the metaphors that was used to describe that hope was that Israel is dead and God will bring it back to life by bringing the people back to their land back from the suburbs of Babylon to Israel so most scholars will agree that this is actually a metaphor by saying your Dead will live it means your exiles will be restored to life by the exiles being able to return to Jerusalem now if that's the context of this passage in Isaiah we've lost that context I mean if if this I see an ik prophet was saying this to the people in exile that you know God will your your dead will live your bodies will rise up if that's a metaphor for returning from exile to the promised land that metaphor would have been evident when Isaiah was saying this to the people in exile but once you write it down and it becomes part of the Book of Isaiah that context is not there anymore so what was probably a metaphor in this text when you read it as a text it looks like it's not a metaphor it looks like Isaiah is saying the Dead will rise the earth will give birth to her dead you're dead we'll live their bodies will rise so this is a text again whose resonance is very clear the Dead will rise okay even if it was originally intended as a metaphor once you lose that context that says this is a metaphor it looks like a text about the resurrection of the dead so this is another key moment in the development of this idea it comes from the resonance of the words it comes from the in a sense reading a metaphor as a literal statement now one can say that that's a misreading but it's not really a misreading because there's no clues that it's a metaphor unless you say this was written you know said in the 6th century to the people in exile so once it becomes textual eyes you lose that context and it becomes a literal idea of the literal statement of the resurrection of the dead you see what I mean so here's another place where the resonance of the text gives rise to idea even if that is was not the original context or the original meaning or the original intention of the text okay and we're going to see some of the metaphors and expressions of this text in a later text in just a moment now before we go into that I want to introduce another prophet and this is Ezekiel Ezekiel is an amazing prophet he also was doing his prophetic activity during the time of the Babylonian exile he actually lived in a place called tel aviv which was one of the suburbs of babylon and those modern see the is railey city of Tel Aviv was named after where Ezekiel lived in the Babylonian exile so easy kills in exile and he has this very strange vision that is in his inaugural vision that makes him into a prophet much like Isaiah's very strange vision and he also sees these multiple winged cherubim flying around they have eyes in their wings and there's fiery wheels it's an amazing vision this his vision also flows into later ideas of what one will see when you die and go to heaven what it looks like to see God on his heavenly throne so Ezekiel has this great vision Ezekiel has a bunch of other visions too the one that I want to talk about in particular here that plays a role in our story is Ezekiel's vision of the dry bones okay many of you will know this there's an old song about this them bones them bones them die bones Oh hear the word of the Lord it's I think it was a slave spiritual here's here's part of what it says I got a little too busy on google finding little Bible verses it starts out and God said to me this is Ezekiel speaking son of man can these bones live and I answered Oh Lord God you know so Ezekiel is having this vision that God gives him of all of these bones in the valley the valley of the dry bones and God says can these bones live and then later he says dry bones hear the word of the Lord this is what the sovereign Lord says to these bones I will put breath in you and you will come to life then you will know that I am the Lord well this too looks and smells and feels like a story of the resurrection of the Dead it's a bunch of bones that God breathes the breath of life into and they come back to life and so that's what happens in Ezekiel's Val vision in the valley of dry bones but then God gives a clue later on that this is a metaphor he says then he said to me son of man these bones are the whole house of Israel behold they say our bones are dried and our hope is lost but I God will breathe life into these bones and the people of Israel come back to life by being essentially brought back into the land of Israel so God tells Ezekiel that this is a metaphor that his vision of the dry bones coming together is a metaphor of the restoration of the people of Israel who will be brought back to Israel from Babylonian exile so this one's much clearer than that example in Isaiah that this is a metaphor this vision is a metaphor for restoring the people bringing them back to Jerusalem but nonetheless the resonance remains that is to say God gives the punchline here that this is a metaphor for the restoration of Israel but the scene itself of the coming together of the dry bones and of God bringing the back to life is so impressive that it's very easy to read it as the prophecy of the resurrection of the Dead so this is another step in the development of this idea of the afterlife originally it's a metaphor and in this text it's very clear that it's a metaphor but it's very easy to take the power of this text the power of this vision and take it as a real prophecy of the future resurrection of the dead the text didn't originally mean that but it's such a great text that it kind of carries its meaning to this second level of significance that just overwhelms you okay and this is how most people have read this passage in the thousands of years since Ezekiel just bracketing the part where God says by the way this is just a metaphor now some of these things come together in too late books one is the Book of Daniel and the other is the Book of Enoch which I already introduced to you go let's go to Daniel first here's Daniel here's a picture of him in the Sistine Chapel you'll notice he's got a lot of wonderful bright colors it used to be all kind of gray and kind of Schmidt see but they cleaned it up do you know about that they restored the Sistine Chapel it used to be much darker now it's very bright but some people don't like it some people like the dark version it's more somber so this is the Book of Daniel the Book of Daniel is the latest book that made it into the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament the Book of Daniel is written by someone who's read all of the previous books and he's very strongly influenced particularly by the book of Isaiah and in the Book of Daniel we see the Book of Isaiah being read as a prophecy of the resurrection of the Dead we see this in in in this passage here that relies on the text that I showed you just a minute ago in Daniel chapter 12 he has a vision of this great change of the era the end of this world and the beginning of the next world and he has this vision which the angel Gabriel deciphers for him and the angel Gabriel says many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake some to everlasting life and some to shame and everlasting contempt so here for the first time explicitly we have the vision of the afterlife as consisting of the good people going to heaven the bad people going to hell or the well the good people going to a nice place some of them shine in the sky like stars and the bad people go to a place of shame and everlasting contempt and in the Book of Daniel this is meant literally this is literally a prophecy of the end of the world the day of judgment when the good will rise the bad will rise and they go to their respective places okay now what I want to point out is that I the Daniel the author of Daniel here is explicitly drawing upon the language of Isaiah that we saw a few few slides back this one here the you who dwell in the dust wake up and shout for joy now this is probably a metaphor for Israel being restored in Isaiah but here in Daniel many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake this is basically quoting Isaiah but now it's not a metaphor now it really is talking about the resurrection of the Dead the literal resurrection of the Dead okay but if you put this text side-by-side with Isaiah it looks like the same text he's just quoting the same words but now he's taking it literally and not metaphorically so this is the crystallization of the idea that we don't just turn into dirt okay and we don't return our breath to God but rather we stay in the earth for a while and that at the end of this era at the time of the great judgment people will wake up again and you'll have this great sorting where the good people have everlasting life which is in a nice sense and the bad people have everlasting shame and contempt now this is in the Book of Daniel okay and it could have been an innovation of this author or this could have been the normal way that people read Isaiah and Ezekiel and the stories of Enoch and and Elijah at this time the first time that we see these ideas really being put into practice by a whole community oh by the way here's a picture of the resurrection of the Dead this is a Christian picture so I think it's Jesus in the middle who's resurrecting but he's welcoming other people coming out of their coffins to the first community that really accepted these ideas and put them into practice was the people of the Dead Sea Scrolls okay we saw some pictures of deaths girls previously this is where they lived they lived there called the Dead Sea Scrolls cuz I've lived by the Dead Sea okay and these are some of the caves where the scrolls were squirreled away and the place where they lived is on the plateau above these caves now you'll notice this is not California this is a hot dry really unpleasant place it's more like Phoenix it's hot it's dry the big lake there is called the Dead Sea it's called the Dead Sea cuz nothing can live in it it's so minerally in say Lyon and stuff if you go if you go to it you float but nothing lives there it's dead it's hot dry it's one of the most unpleasant places to live in the world now why would you want to live there why would these people of the Dead Sea Scrolls want to live there they lived there for a couple of reasons one was to purify themselves from the bad things of this world and so you go out into the desert you sweat you separate yourself from civilization and so you're purifying yourself the second reason that they went there is because if you read the books of Isaiah and Ezekiel very closely it gives you some clues about where the end of the world will happen and where paradise will be and this is where they thought paradise was going to be they thought that this most horrible unpleasant place in the world by the Dead Sea was going to become the new Garden of Eden okay and they get this from a passage in Isaiah where it says make let me make sure I get this right a voice calls out prepare in the desert the way of the Lord and make straight in the wilderness a road for our God okay so they said Isaiah says to do this so we do it we're preparing in the desert the way of the Lord so this is where they went but why this desert in particular in Ezekiel in one of his visions he sees a river flowing out from this new temple that will be built in this new era and the river from the temple is called one of the rivers of Eden and it flows down south and makes the Dead Sea alive again so in this Ezekiel's vision this is an easy kiyul chapter 42 this river from new temple will make the Dead Sea live and not only live but become a paradise so this area here by the shores of the Dead Sea now let me just say this is very sound real estate you buy low and then it becomes paradise and it's a wonderful place to live so they expected this to become essentially the new Garden of Eden okay so it looks terrible and they're purifying themselves they're sweating but this is going to be paradise central when the Judgment Day comes so they are preparing themselves for the Judgment Day they're purifying themselves so that they will be those who gain everlasting life in a good sense and they're preparing themselves essentially to re-enter the Garden of Eden because this will become a new Garden of Eden in the Dead Sea Scrolls that we call these people Essenes there's a lot of texts that describe what they're doing it says these are the spiritual found eight in one of their texts it says these are the spiritual foundations for the sons of truth in the world and they regarded themselves as the sons of children of truth the reward of all those who walk in it will be healing plentiful peace in a long life fruitful offspring withal everlasting blessings eternal joy with endless life here's immortality and a crown of glory with majestic robes in eternal light so essentially they're going to be living forever a life of perfection a life were they shine with a crown of glory and majestic robes and eternal life and it says God chose them into them begun belongs all the glory of Adam so here's an idea that they're returning to the Garden of Eden but in an even better Garden of Eden instead of being like Adam made out of Earth they will be an Adam that shines like the the illuminated sky that shines like the Sun okay a crown of glory with majestic robes in eternal light so it's sort of like a new heavenly Adam and that's the life that they're going to be living in this new paradise so this is what the essence were doing in Qumran in this hot dry place they were living according to one of their text says they're living in the company of angels this means that they are still human with their getting ready for the great transformation into eternal life into eternal light into glorious garments of light in a sense they're sort of turning into angels okay and they're living in the company of angels we call this realized eschatology that is to say the end hasn't come yet the Judgment Day hasn't come yet but they went to Qumran to live this life as if the end had already come and they'd already been given eternal life and turned into quasi angels so this is what they were doing and this is why the sceen community expanded greatly during this period because people wanted to go that's a nice place to go to it's gonna be paradise you're already living the life in this new Garden of Eden this Qumran community the essence very strange interesting people as I as I said these are the first people that really had a full-blown idea of the afterlife they were putting into effect what they had been what they read very intently from the books of Daniel from the books of Isaiah Ezekiel older stories of of Enoch and so forth and let me let me say they loved the Book of Enoch I showed you a picture of the Enoch from Qumran let me do that again here we are 4q Enochs so this is a this is a fragment of enoch a scroll of the book of enoch from cave four of Qumran and this is one of the favorite books of this sceen community they loved reading The Book of Enoch so I want to go back and tell you a little bit about what they were reading in the Book of Enoch that they were putting into effect in the Book of Enoch as I said angels give Enoch a tour of heaven and he sees the heavenly mysteries and he sees all things all sorts of things down on earth one of the things that he sees is the place where people go after well a place where people's spirits dwell after they die and then where they get assigned to after the Judgment Day okay and this is actually earlier than the text of Daniel that I showed you a minute ago and so it looks like the Book of Enoch is where these ideas really first crystallized okay and the Dead Sea scroll people love this so here's an excerpt of the Book of Enoch where the angel Raphael is giving Daniel excuse me giving Enoch this tour and he shows him the mountains of the Dead in Raphael says to Enoch these hollow places are where the spirits of the souls of the Dead will be gathered for this purpose they were created and here the souls of all human beings should be gathered and look these are the pits for the place of their confinement thus they were made until the day on which they will be judged until the time of day of the end of the great judgment that will be exact it from them now let me say the Book of Enoch is not written very well it's not beautiful prose this is probably the reason that it didn't make it into the Hebrew Bible okay it's also written in Aramaic there's no Hebrew in it which is probably another reason why it didn't make it into the Hebrew Bible the Book of Daniel is half Hebrew and a half Aramaic okay and so it made it in probably because of the Hebrew so the Book of Enoch didn't make it in even though it was tremendously influential so this thing I just read you is Enoch seeing on his tour of heaven the hollow places in these mountains where the spirits of the Dead wait for a Judgment Day isn't that interesting this is the very first occasion of that idea then he goes on and founds finds yet the mountain of God where the Tree of Life is okay and he says here on this mountain was the most wonderful tree the tree of the Tree of Life and the angel says the high mountain who you saw this peak is like the throne of God and as for this fragrant tree no flesh has the right to touch it until the great judgment in which there will be vengeance on all and a consummation forever and then it meaning The Tree of Life will be given to the righteous and the pious in its fruit who will be fruit for the chosen so when the Judgment Day comes and the good people who've been waiting in this area in this it's sort of like one of the halls in SFO where you wait for your flight forever this is where you are and then finally you get to board and the good people you know the first-class people get to go and eat from the fruit of the tree of life okay this is essentially going back to the Garden of Eden this is a view of the afterlife as paradise and you eat from the tree of life which Adam and Eve were not able to do now you finally get to do it and you live in this paradise forever on the other side of this mountain the angels show Enoch a nastier place a valley a deep valley that's of hard rock and no trees are on it and I Enoch marveled at this and said why is this other land blessed and why is this valley cursed and then another angel probably named sorry el one of the Holy Angels who was with me said this cursed Valley is for those who are cursed forever here will be gathered all the cursed okay and here is where they will be forever so that's what happens Oh Andy and and also says these are the pits for the place of their confinement excuse me oh here is their here these spirits are separated for this great torment where they have scourges and tortures of the cursed forever so this is the invention of hell in the Book of Enoch where the bad spirits go after they die and it's just down the street from this new Garden of Eden where the good people go so this is what they're reading at Qumran they're reading The Book of Enoch they're reading the Book of Daniel they're preparing themselves for this day of judgment and they're purifying themselves so that they will be the ones who get to eat from the fruit of the tree of life who will take on the glory of Adam and live forever in this wonderful existence let me add Oh back to Qumran yeah these people yeah put it this here so they're there what looks like a godforsaken desert II wilderness in their expectations will become a new Garden of Eden in this painting you can see in the upper left Adam and Eve being expelled from the garden in this new vision of the afterlife the idea is that the good people get to go back to the Garden of Eden and dwell there forever in this new kind of angelic way now let me add that while they're preparing for going back to the Garden of Eden in this hot dry place they also in these people living there the Dead Sea Scrolls people these Essenes invented a kind of asceticism that is to say they were celibate they were in the the group in the desert were all men they wore white linen garments and they believed that they were living a kind of angelic life now part of being living like angels in their understanding was that they didn't have sex why because angels don't have sex why because angels don't really have bodies okay but angels also wear white linen garments we see this in the Book of Daniel so they're inventing this ascetic existence where they separate themselves from material possessions oh yeah they also invented socialism I so I should tell Bernie this the Dead Sea scroll people when you entered into the community of the essence you had to give up all of your material possessions in all of your wealth and they were put into a bank for the whole community so the invented socialism or communism they invented asceticism and they out first people that put into effect this idea of the visions of the afterlife of heaven and hell and Judgment Day so they invented a lot of stuff some of this stuff we call apocalypticism this expectation of the Judgment Day and the defeat of evil and the resurrection of the Dead and the coming of the Messiah now the Dead Sea the essence were very fruitful thinkers they actually expected three messiahs not just one three is better than one isn't it devotees of the Trinity would certainly say that so they they expected a royal Messiah a descendant of King David they also expected a prophetic Messiah who would be like Elijah and they expected a priestly messiah who would be a new high priest like Aaron so they expected three messiahs now let me add something they're living by the Dead Sea they have this full-blown apocalyptic world view this ascetic worldview preparing for the end of the world and the dawn of a new paradise they're also very close to the Jordan River now there was somebody else and they're living there in the second century and first century BCE and then the first century CE II in other words they're straddling the B C's in the in the a DS there are contemporary and a little earlier than some other very famous people namely Jesus John the Baptist and Paul in fact John the Baptist was doing his thing at the Jordan River probably just a few miles away from Qumran he was also out in the wilderness prepare ye in Isaiah prepare in the wilderness the way for the way of the Lord this is what John the Baptist quotes in the Gospels that's why he's out in the desert preparing the way of the Lord baptizing people to purify them from their sins okay the essence were doing something very similar they're purifying themselves and they had outside of their dwelling place they had these ritual baths where they would purify themselves whenever they came inside so they were essentially taking little baptismal baths every day when they went inside the community so - so that they would be ritually pure inside their community so that they could live with the angels in their midst so this idea of immersion and water to cleanse you from sins of preparing for the way of the Lord the kingdom of God is coming the language that we see in the New Testament is also the language of these Essenes in Qumran they're all expecting the same sort of things isn't that interesting Judgment Day the coming of the Messiah the resurrection of the Dead so this is a really interesting community some people have even speculated that John the Baptist might have been in a scene I think that's a little too strong of a speculation because some of the things about early Christianity are different than the S scenes for example in Christianity there's only one Messiah not three but I think John the Baptist and the S scenes were neighbors okay and they shopped at the same stores and things like that so it's too much to say they're the same religion but they're different groups of Jewish yeah they're different Jewish groups who are living at the same time and preparing themselves in the desert for this cleansing and sorting and destruction and resurrection so this is one of the really interesting things about the Dead Sea scroll community they not only show us this new community with these new ideas that we hadn't seen before but they show us other things that are going on at the same time as the very earliest Christian ideas activities one of the things that the people that Qumran did they they believed themselves to be living in the company of angels they had worship poems on the Sabbath where they would have a kind of collective ascent to heaven and sing songs of praise to God in heaven with the Angels this was part of their Sabbath liturgy okay as I said they also believed that they were camped out in the future' Garden of Eden now Paul who's one of the great creators of early Christian theology was doing some very same things here's a picture this picture is a picture from what Paul in the New Testament writes about in 2nd Corinthians and let me read you this text Paul says and Paul is an amazing stylist he likes to be very suggestive and obscure and oblique and kind of play a little bit with the audience so he often doesn't say what exactly what he means but circles around until you get the idea he says in 2nd Corinthians I will go on to visions and revelations of the Lord ok so one of the things that I've shown you is a bunch of different visions of God in in his temple Isaiah Ezekiel Elijah these other pictures here is Paul's visionary ascent to heaven he says I will go on to visions and revelations of the Lord I know a person in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven now this is very coy of him he says I know a person in Christ who had this experience it's really himself okay but it's not quite admitting it and this this picture is of him he says and whether this being caught up into heaven was in the body or out of the body I do not know God knows so does the heavenly ascent is that something that you do with your physical body or is that something that's a purely spiritual body Paul hedges okay he says I don't know only God knows but these are the two possibilities and he doesn't want to commit himself I only know that such a person whether in the body or out of the body I do not know God knows was caught up into paradise and heard things that are not to be told that no mortal is permitted to repeat so here is Paul's experience his own visionary experience vision and revelation of being ascending to heaven and what's what does he find in heaven but paradise he's having an ascent to the Garden of Eden but the heavenly Garden of Eden okay this is like Enochs vision of the Garden of Eden and the Tree of Life in in heaven where the spirits of the of the good Dead will go so this is Paul's experience it's very much like the experience of these Dead Sea scroll people but he's doing it solo okay and to him he says was revealed things that are not to be told that no mortal is permitted to repeat so these are the secrets of heaven the secrets of the afterlife the secrets of salvation now again Paul is very coy he says he heard things that are not to be told that no mortal is permitted to repeat but then he goes on and in all of his letters he tells you these things he tells you what's gonna happen at the end he tells you how the spiritual ascent happens he tells you all these other things so here's another text from first Corinthians where he spills some of these beans he says behold I will tell you a mystery we will not all die but we will all be changed in a moment in the twinkling of an eye at the last trumpet for the trumpet will sound and the dead will be raised imperishable and we will be changed for this perishable body must put on in perishability in this mortal body must put on immortality well here he says that the final ascent to heaven the resurrection of the dead is not in the body but in the spirit so he hedged about that before but now it comes and tells you it's an the physical body puts on an imperishable body the mortal body puts on immortality ok this is the collective ascent to heaven that Paul says is the resurrection of the Dead after Judgment Day after the Messiah comes and of course our Paul the Messiah is Christ but it's the second coming of Christ that will do this he says that this imperishable spiritual body that people will put on yeah here's what he says is and here I'm making a link with the theology of the Dead Sea scroll people where the people put on the glory of Adam in this new immortal existence what Paul says is that the Reza's the righteous resurrected dead will will put out not put on the body the spiritual body of Adam but will put on the spiritual body of the new Adam who's the new Adam in Paul's theology the new Adam is Christ so he's doing something to this older theology of going back to the Garden of Eden as a new Adam now he says you're going back to the heavenly Garden the heavenly paradise in the body of the new Adam so here's how it describes this and again Paul is very elliptical he's elusive he doesn't tell you straight out but he says the first man Adam became a living being but the last Adam became a life-giving spirit so here he's linking Adam with Christ Adam now he says was the guy who had a body Christ is the new Adam who's simply spirit but it is not the spiritual that is first but the physical and then the spiritual the first man was from the earth a man of the dust so this is Adam from dust to dust the second man is from heaven as was the man of dust so are those of the dust as is the man of heaven so are those have happened just as we have borne the image of the man of dust so we will also bear the image of the man of heaven this is how Paul talks it's very poetic it's very illusive he's saying our physical body is the body of Adam that when we turn into spirits we become we take on the body of the new Adam the spiritual body of Christ okay and so this is what is going to happen he says and this is in 1st Thessalonians we who are alive who are left will be caught up in the clouds together with the resurrected dead so the dead fly up to heaven in their spiritual bodies but also those who are alive who are Christians who are the righteous will also fly up into the sky we will be caught up in the clouds together with the resurrected dead to meet the Lord in the air and so we will be with the Lord forever that's it that's a very clear description of the afterlife and in the New Testament we have all of these things laid out the goats are separated from the sheep the good people from the bad people the good people fly up the bad people go to hell sorry bad people so here's a picture of Hell this becomes the standard view and let me say when Paul is saying these things he's giving a Christian inflection to traditional Jewish ideas we know that because we see those Jewish ideas in the essence of the Dead Sea Scrolls so much of what Paul is saying and what the Dead Sea scroll people are saying are are separated by a just a couple of decisive boundary markers right who's the Messiah when it's gonna be but the picture of what's going to happen is very much the same because it's mostly drawn from intensively close readings of Old Testament texts but also Enoch oh look I have to tell you one more thing about Enoch Enoch is actually quoted in the New Testament Enoch the Book of Enoch it didn't make it into the Old Testament but it was a religious text not only to the Essenes but also to the early Christians so in the book of Jude which is one of those really small books I think was written by Paul McCartney but John Lennon made it better sorry my wife tells me not to make jokes like that the book of Jude quotes Enoch quotes the Book of Enoch as if Enoch is a sacred text so the early Christians were reading The Book of Enoch also so they're all reading the same books so these are ideas that are shared in in Judaism and in early Christianity at the time so these become standard ideas in Judaism and Christianity and from there it goes into Islam here's a nice picture of hell from a medieval mosaic and and one of my favorite paintings by Hieronymus Bosch there's the one of the Lords of Hell the demon up there that's eating people so it's a very unpleasant place here's a picture of heaven from a Persian miniature there's often more than one heaven in this picture there 7 happens ok in I think Paul says that there's 3 heavens but heavens good things tend to grow so you end up getting 7 heavens and so here's a beautiful picture of the seven heavens and there's all sorts of angels and there's sacred tree there's probably the tree of life in these different heavens and this becomes then the standard view again in Judaism Christianity and in Islam thank you

Channel: Asian Art Museum

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Keywords: AoA Lectures

Id: 5Nt3MDJ6DZs

Length: 83min 56sec (5036 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 13 2020