A History of Death in the Hebrew Bible

Abstract

In the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, a good death meant burial inside the family tomb, where one would join one’s ancestors in death. This was the afterlife in biblical literature; it was a postmortem ideal that did not involve individual judgment or heaven and hell—instead it was collective. In Hebrew scriptures, a postmortem existence was rooted in mortuary practices and conceptualized through the embodiment of the dead. But this idea of the afterlife was not hopeless or fatalistic, consigned to the dreariness of the tomb. The dead were cherished and remembered, their bones were cared for, and their names lived on as ancestors. This book examines the concept of the afterlife in the Hebrew Bible by studying the treatment of the dead, as revealed both in biblical literature and in the material remains of the southern Levant. The Iron Age mortuary culture of Judah is the starting point for this study, and the practice of collective burial inside the Judahite rock-cut bench tomb is compared to biblical traditions of family tombs and of joining one’s ancestors in death. This archaeological analysis, which also incorporates funerary inscriptions, will shed important insight into biblical literature concerning such issues as the construction of the soul in death, the nature of corpse impurity, and the concept of Sheol. Death was a transition managed through ritual action. The connections that were forged through such actions, such as ancestor veneration, were socially meaningful for the living and ensured a measure of immortality for the dead.