: surrounds the familiar words of Job, "I know that my redeemer "—my next of kin, my avenger and advocate -"liveth, and shall stand at the latter day upon the earth and though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God: Whom I shall see for myself, and mine eyes shall behold, and not another." The passage is extremely difficult and uncertain in meaning. Instead of "in my flesh" the Revised Version reads "from my flesh," and has a marginal explanation that this may mean "without," i.e. apart from my flesh. It seems, however, clear that Job did look beyond the present age to a life after death, and that in that life he rises, above the gloomy thought of Sheol, to the conviction that hereafter his "advocate" will make known his innocence, and that he will see God. Again, we gather from the many denunciations of those who had "familiar spirits," that something of the belief which we now call Spiritualism was very prevalent in the early days of Israel. It is evident that those who had this "familiar spirit "—the "mediums "professed to be able to communicate with the dead. When Saul went to consult the woman at Endor he said, "I pray thee, divine unto me by the familiar spirit, and bring me him up, whom I shall name unto thee. . . . Then said the woman, Whom shall I bring up unto thee? And he said, Bring me up Samuel." Then when the woman had done as Saul commanded, he inquired 1 Job xix. 25-27. of the woman, saying, "What sawest thou? And the woman said unto Saul, I saw a god (R.V.) ascending out of the earth." And when "Saul perceived that it was Samuel he stooped with his face to the ground, and bowed himself. And Samuel said to Saul, Why hast thou disquieted me, to bring me up?" Here it is evidently from Sheol that Samuel is said to come "up," and it is to this nether world that he summons Saul with the words, "To-morrow shalt thou and thy sons be with me." Samuel the prophet of God, and Saul the worldly, rejected king of Israel, are each represented as destined to go to the same place. When we pass from the historical books and come to the Psalms and Prophets we find evidence of the dawn of a clearer hope. It is true that many commentators would wish us to believe that David and the Prophets were not able to anticipate the life of the world to come -that their announcements must be limited to the present dispensation. This view surely does violence to the plain text of Scripture, and is quite as arbitrary an assumption as any that has been put forward by extremists on the other side. We find the expression of a confident hope of a future life in many of the psalms; for instance, in the 23rd, "Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil for Thou art with me"; in the 17th, "I shall be 1 1 Sam. xxviii. 7-19. The departed in Sheol are seldom spoken of as "souls" in the Old Testament, owing to the inability of early Israel to think of the soul without a certain corporeity. satisfied when I awake with Thy likeness"; in the 16th, "Thou wilt not leave my soul in Sheol." Again, in the 49th, “They [men] are appointed as a flock for Sheol; Death shall be their shepherd: and the upright shall have dominion over them in the morning; and their beauty shall be for Sheol to consume, that there be no habitation for it. But God will redeem my soul from the power of Sheol for He shall receive me."1 And once more, in the Book of Proverbs we are told that "to the wise the way of life goeth upward, that he may depart from Sheol beneath."2 These and similar passages are surely inconsistent with the belief that death is the end of all conscious individual existence. Again, did David mean nothing more than that he too must die by the touching words in which he spoke of the loss of his child: "I shall go to him, but he shall not return to me "?3 It is quite true that against these hopeful passages may be set others very different in tone; there are certainly passages that appear to deny the survival of the spirit, or at least to negative any continuity of its faculties. The thought of God was to many in Israel the very stay of the soul throughout life; how terrible then must have been the conviction that, "in death there is no remembrance of Thee," and the thought of the cessation of the praises of God implied in the question, "In Shoel who shall give Thee thanks? "4 1 See an explanation of this by Rabbi Akiba, p. 128. 2 XV. 24. R.V. 3 2 Sam. xii. 23. 4 Ps. vi. 5. "Shall the dust praise Thee? shall it declare Thy truth?" or in the yet more positive assertion, “The dead praise not the Lord, neither any that go down into silence."2 In the Prophets the sad, forlorn state of the disembodied spirit is much less prominent, and the hope of a final restoration is proclaimed through the resurrection of the body. It is in this connection that the first note is sounded of a warning that the new life will be preceded by a severe judgment, and followed not only by rewards, but also by suffering in the case of those who have lived wickedly. • ... 3 The lament that Hezekiah made before God was that "the grave cannot praise Thee; they that go down into the pit cannot hope for Thy truth"; but the Holy Ghost "Who spake by the prophets gave through Hosea a promise that was full of a joyful expectation of immortality: "I will ransom them from the power of the grave (Sheol); I will redeem them from death: O death, where are thy plagues? O grave (Sheol), where is thy destruction? "4 In the Book of the prophet Isaiah we have a dramatic description of the tranquillity of the earth after the death of the Babylonian king, and how Sheol was moved at the entry of his spirit among the ghosts of the departed; "The whole earth is at rest and is quiet : Hell (Sheol) from beneath is moved for thee to 1 Ps. xxx. 9. 3 Isa. xxxviii. 18. 2 Ps. cxv. 17. 4 Hosea xiii. 14 (R.V.); cf. 1 Cor. xv. 55. meet thee at thy coming: it stirreth up the dead for thee, even all the chief ones of the earth.”1 Joel has a vision of judgment, symbolised by the punishment of the enemies of Israel in the valley of Jehoshaphat:2 Isaiah foretells "the new heavens and the new earth," and then describes the destruction of the unrighteous by the figure of the valley into which are flung the carcases of men, a prey to the undying worm and the fire that is never quenched. The same prophet speaks also of the resurrection of the flesh: Thy dead men shall live, together with my dead body shall they arise. Awake and sing, ye that dwell in dust for thy dew is as the dew of herbs, and the earth shall cast out the dead." The symbolical use by Ezekiel of a resuscitation of the dry bones to express a national deliverance may perhaps not unfitly be also thought of as including the hope of a personal resurrection."5 4 A later prophet is still clearer in his vision of judgment: "Many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt. And they that be wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament, and they that turn many to righteousness as the stars for ever and ever.' "6 Besides these actual references to the difference between the condition of the righteous and the wicked 2 Joel iii. 12-16. 1 Isa. xiv. 7-9. 4 Isa. xxvi. 19. 5 Ezek. xxxvii. 1-14. 3 Isa. lxvi. 22, 24. |