Resurrection in the Book of Mormon
The Book of Mormon has been under attack since the day it was published. One of the things it has been criticized for is its teaching of the resurrection, something that some have deemed to be anachronistic. In the realm of Biblical scholarship it is commonly thought that the Jews did not believe in a personal afterlife with reward or punishment prior to 200 B.C. [1] Indeed, scholars have made arguments that the idea of a resurrection was one that evolved over time, starting with the Hellenization of the Jewish people hundreds of years after Nephi left Jerusalem.[2] One of the problems is that compared to ancient Near Eastern literature and archaeological remains, the Hebrew Scriptures do not seem to convey a great deal regarding the afterlife. [3]
The idea regarding the evolution of the belief in life after death and resurrection essentially is that the earliest texts in the Tanakh, or the Hebrew Scriptures espoused a resurrection of the nation of Israel as a whole. This national hope with its national resurrection and final day of judgment was then later changed to assume an individual resurrection.[4] Many biblical scholars point to the Book of Daniel as the first canonized texts to explicitly discuss the resurrection, and they usually date this material to around 170-160 B.C. Some scholars push this date even further into the future. Indeed, as some scholars indicate, the most ancient Jewish text referring clearly to the resurrection of the physical body is no older than the first century, B.C.[5] On the other hand, In 2006 Jon D. Levenson (Harvard University) published a book entitled Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel: The Ultimate Victory of the God of Life. Levenson argues that Jewish belief in resurrection had a varied range of biblical antecedents, and that it did not simply appear in the second century before Christ.[6]
Rather, resurrection is an essential component in Israel’s redemption, which itself redeems history. While there were many historical events in the second century before Christ which shaped a more focused belief in a bodily resurrection in the afterlife, to only view these events as having influenced these beliefs, to Levenson, is short sighted.[7] Thus, the classical rabbinic position is fundamentally correct, that the concepts underlying the resurrection trace back to the beginning of the biblical period.[8]
Levenson explains that contemporary scholarship, rooted in the modern world with its emphasis on individualism, has a difficult time understanding the biblical concept of identity. If one asks, “Will I have life after death?” the discussion has already gotten off on the wrong foot. The biblical conception of afterlife is grounded in an identity intricately connected to the nation of Israel, and ancestors and descendants also are completely linked.[9] Jewish belief in resurrection is rooted in God’s promises to Israel, His power over life and death, and His preference for life. Although Daniel was the first to mention resurrection explicitly in the Old Testament, the ideas underlying this resurrection trace back to the earliest texts such as the narratives in Genesis.
Another Old Testament scholar that contends resurrection was an early belief of the Israelites is James Kugel. He cites many passages in the Bible that clearly presume an existence beyond this life into the next. For example, after he died, Abraham was “gathered to his people” (Genesis 25.8). Why would this be in the account if Abraham ceased after his mortal life?[10]
There are several other references in the Old Testament suggesting that death is not the end of man. There are two examples of death in the Old Testament that have puzzled many non-LDS readers: The taking of Enoch by God (Genesis 5.24), and Elijah’s being taken to heaven in a chariot of fire (2 Kings 2.11). At the end of the Old Testament the prophet Malachi states that Elijah will return in the future as the herald of the Messiah to bring about the new age (Malachi 3.23-24). We of course would be remiss if we left out the account of the Witch of Endor summoning up from the depths of Sheol (supposedly) the spirit of the prophet Samuel (I Samuel 28.11-14), as well as the narratives of both Elijah and Elisha bringing the dead back to life in 1st and 2nd Kings (I Kings 17.19–23; 2 Kings 4.32–36).
From these and several other references, Kugel convincingly concludes that “some decades ago, the cliché about the Hebrew Bible was that it really has no notion of an afterlife or the return of the soul to God or a last judgment or a world to come. But such a claim will not withstand careful scrutiny.[11]
The Book of Mormon illustrates that there were a group of Jews that held to First Israelite Temple theology, believed in a dying and rising Yahweh/Jehovah, and held to the view that this rising God would initiate a universal resurrection.[12] While historically this was not believed by all of the views in Jesus’ day[13], certainly Jesus believed this.[14] He taught emphatically that he was the great I AM of Exodus 3.14[15], the one who would both die and rise again, bringing to pass the resurrection of all mankind. While there is much we do not know of history regarding this topic, it has been demonstrated in the field of scholarship that a belief in an afterlife is demonstrated at least obliquely in the Tanakh and was held by at least some Jews and that a belief in the resurrection was something that was also held prior to 200 B.C. As the Book of Mormon does not necessarily represent the views of all the Jews in the second temple period (Jews of 600 B.C. wanted to assassinate Lehi for his teachings about a dying and rising Yahweh), we can expect a variation on beliefs regarding the resurrection. And yet, there is evidence that some of the Jews held to these beliefs.
Notes
[1] Gowan, Donald E. (1 January 2003). The Westminster Theological Wordbook of the Bible. Westminster John Knox Press. p. 188.
[2] Endsjø, Dag Øistein (2009) Chapter 5: Jewish Beliefs on the Afterlife. In: Greek Resurrection Beliefs and the Success of Christianity. Palgrave Macmillan, New York, p. 122. Øistein: That Jewish eschatological beliefs merely equaled a belief in the physical resurrection represents a serious simplification not only of what constituted the religious landscape at the beginning of the Christian era but also of Judaism in general. One thing is certain: originally the belief in the resurrection, any kind of resurrection, was not at all the most typical Jewish idea of what would happen after death… One may speculate whether a conviction that there was no afterlife at all could be the most ancient Jewish idea… In her book on early Jewish and Christian resurrection beliefs, Claudia Setzer points out how “Be of good courage. No one is immortal” was a common inscription on Jewish graves in both Rome and Palestine. At an early point, the idea of the Sheol appeared, a shadowy afterworld similar to Hades, the depressing Greek abode of the dead. In Sheol, too, the dead souls remained forever in a dank existence that did not equal immortality. The apparent parallel was not lost on the ancients either, and in the Septuagint, Sheol is simply translated with Hades. Sheol is already mentioned on a number of occasions in Genesis, Numbers and Deuteronomy, always in connection with misery and mourning. According to Isaiah, the dead denizens of Sheol were even cut off from God, though there are also passages in which Sheol is depicted as not beyond the power of God, for example, in Job, Psalms and Amos. See also Claudia Setzer, Resurrection of the Body in Early Judaism and Early Christianity: Doctrine, Community, and Self-Definition. Boston & Leiden: Brill, p. 13.
[3] For a short overview of the Egyptian, Canaanite, Hittite, and Mesopotamian thoughts regarding death and the afterlife, see e.g.: Volkert Haas, “Death and the Afterlife in Hittite Thought,” in Civilization of the Ancient Near East, ed. Jack M. Sasson (New York, 1995; repr. in 2 vols., Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2006), 3:2021-2030; Leonard H. Lesko, “Death and the Afterlife in Ancient Egyptian Thought,” in Civilization of the Ancient Near East, ed. Jack M. Sasson (New York, 1995; repr. in 2 vols., Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2006), 3:1763-1774; Jo Ann Scurlock, “Death and the Afterlife in Ancient Mesopotamian Thought,” in Civilization of the Ancient Near East, ed. Jack M. Sasson (New York, 1995; repr. in 2 vols., Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2006), 3:1883-1893; Alan F. Segal, Life after Death: A History of the Afterlife in the Religions of the West (New York: Doubleday, 2004), 27-119; Paolo Xella, “Death and the Afterlife in Canaanite and Hebrew Thought,” in Civilization of the Ancient Near East, ed.
Jack M. Sasson (New York, 1995; repr. in 2 vols., Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2006), 3:2059-2070.
[4] Edmund Keller writes: The scope of the resurrection, limited by the earlier Apocryphal writers to Israel (Cf. II Mace. 6 : 26; 7 : 9-36; 14 : 46), was extended in the apocalypses of Baruch 49-51 : 4; II Esdras 7 : 32-37; Similitudes of Enoch 51 : 1 ; to include all mankind (Cf. Tobit 13:1-18; 14 : 5-6). The national hope with its national resurrection and final day of judgment no longer satisfied the intellect and human sentiment, and the resurrection now assumed a universal and cosmic character. As such it was an act of God to appear at the end of the Messianic era. This view is particularly evident in II Esdras 6:26-36, also in Baruch 97:10; 103:8; 104:5). Keller, Edmund, “Hebrew Thoughts on Immortality and Resurrection,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, Vol. 5, No. 1 (Spring 1974), p. 42.
[5] Ibid., p. 128. Øistein essentially makes the case that the first ancient text to make this assertion is the Second Book of Maccabees. He writes: The Second Book of the Maccabees relates the gruesome story of seven brothers who were martyred, one after another, by the Seleucid king Antiochus Epiphanes. Having witnessed his two elder brothers having their tongues, arms, and feet cut off before being fried, still alive, the third brother holds forth his tongue and hands, proclaiming, “These I had from heaven and for his laws I despise them, and from him I hope to receive them again.”
[6] Levenson, Jon D., Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel: The Ultimate Victory of the God of Life, 2006, Yale University, p. 156, 214.
[7] Levenson writes, “The expectation of a resurrection in Second Temple Judaism, when it does
appear, was thus not a total novum. Rather, it was the end product of a centuries-long process by which these old traditions (and others that we have explored but not listed here) coalesced. This fateful coalescence may well have received additional stimulus from the two sources to which scholars often attribute this expectation exhaustively, the indirect influence of Zoroastrianism, which affirmed a future resurrection of the dead, and the immediate trauma of persecution in the days of the Maccabees, when the faithful were put to death precisely for their faithfulness. But, as I have been at pains to argue, these two factors, whether alone or in tandem, cannot account for the shape the belief in resurrection assumes in Judaism. They may have served, in their different ways, as catalysts for that fateful reaction, but they were not themselves the reagents. To concentrate on them alone is to miss both the rich praeparatio of antecedent tradition and the complex trajectory that resulted in a belief in resurrection among many Jews of the Second Temple era. Ibid., p. 218.
[8] The rabbis who influenced the Mishnah, the first major written collection of the Jewish oral traditions (written in the third century AD), argued that the roots of resurrection doctrine lie in the very earliest texts of the Tanakh- the first books in the Hebrew Scriptures known as the Pentateach. As Levenson states, “The Pentateuch is, in fact, the text to which the rabbis devote the most attention, and their tendency is to treat the other books of their Bible as subordinate to it and even as commenting on it. The high status of the Written Torah is the major reason that the rabbis expended so much effort to root the resurrection of the dead therein. To them it was inconceivable that something as central to the relationship of God to humanity as resurrection would have been unknown to Moses or unanticipated at Sinai.
[9] Ibid., preface xi. This is not unlike the LDS teaching of the linking of the sons back to the fathers, the daughters to their mothers. As assistant to the Twelve, Theodore M. Burton stated, “We must be linked to them, and they to their fathers and mothers back to Father Adam and Mother Eve, and they to Jesus Christ, and he to God as his Only Begotten Son in the flesh. Thus to save our own selves and to complete our own salvation, we must have our hearts turned to our fathers seek out their identities, and perform the work of salvation for them. (Conference Report, April 1965, p.113). Joseph Fielding Smith put it this way: Through the restoration of the priesthood held by Elijah, knowledge has been given to the Church that each family unit, where the parents have been married for time and for eternity, shall remain intact through all eternity. Moreover, each family unit is to be linked to the generation which went before, until all the faithful, who have proved their title to family membership through obedience to the gospel, shall be joined in one grand family from the beginning to the end of time, and shall find place in the celestial kingdom of God. In this way all who receive the exaltation become heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Jesus Christ in the possession of eternal family relationships. (Doctrines of Salvation, 2:67)
[10] Kugel, James. The Great Poems of the Bible: A Reader’s Companion with new Translations, New York: Free Press, 1999, p. 192-210.
[11] Ibid., p. 209-210. He goes on to explain that there is yet so much we do not know regarding how these ideas were connected by the people that wrote these texts. He states, “The truth evidenced above is that each of these rathe distinct ideas (regarding the resurrection) can be located in the Hebrew Bible; one difficulty, however, is that there is little indication of how (if at all) they were conceived to overlap or work together. This much is clear: both later Judaism and Christianity, heir to these teachings, passed them on within the framework of their own faiths. While many know this about Christianity, a surprising number of people erroneously believe that Judaism has no doctrine of resurrection or the world to come; indeed, they sometimes suppose that the absence of such teachings in Judaism is a faithful reflection of the Bible’s own teaching. They are wrong on both counts.”
[12] Alma 11.39-45
[13] Mark 12.18
[14] John 11.25
[15] In my translation of John 6, I find Jesus emphatically stating that he is the “I AM” of the Old Testament. He uses the phrase Ἐγώ εἰμι ὁ ἄρτος τῆς ζωῆς = I am the bread of life in John 6.35, but the phrase Ἐγώ εἰμι is used to emphasize that he is literally the “I am.”