Planting Salvation and Raining Resurrection in Ancient Judaism

Abstract

This essay questions contemporary claims in biblical scholarship that ideas about resurrection were not fully expressed in the early Hebrew Bible until the late post-Exilic era, implying that such ideas were either culturally irrelevant or inexistent prior to that point. This position posits that only later did the pre-Exilic notions of a dark and gloomy Sheol come to take on post-Exilic ideas such as immortality, retribution after death, and bodily resurrection mostly if not entirely due to the effect of ‘foreign’ influences upon Jewish thinking, such as Greek and Persian views. The argument here is that this dichotomized understanding of the historical development of ancient Judaic views about the afterlife widely accepted in biblical scholarly circles today is grossly over-generalized and exaggerated. This essay shows that ideas about resurrection had been vibrant and well-established all along many centuries before Daniel in ancient popular Jewish culture largely in the form of agrarian metaphors and imageries, making it possible for beliefs about bodily resurrection in Christ to be seriously considered by 1st-century Jews. Such ideas were deeply reflected in Jewish prayer books, liturgy, and rituals, and in descriptions of natural processes such as raining, planting, and harvesting. The veracity of this position is demonstrated through a detailed review of death and resurrection ideas before Daniel and beyond, in the Songs of Moses and Hannah, the Elijah and Elisha narratives, the Book of Psalms, the prophecies of Hosea, Ezekiel’s vivid resurrection imageries, and Isaiah’s apocalypse, to name just a few.