Judaism in Late Antiquity 4. Death, Life-After-Death, Resurrection and The World-to-Come in the Judaisms of Antiquity

Abstract

Judaism in Late Antiquity: Part 4, Life-after-Death, and the World-- to-Come in the of Antiquity, edited by Alan J. Avery-Peck and Jacob Neusner. Handbuch der Orientalistik, Erste Abteilung: Der Nahe and Mittlere Osten 49. Leiden: Brill, 2000. Pp. xi + 342. $115.00. Life-after-Death, and the World-to-Come in the of Antiquity exists at two levels and must be evaluated at each. First, the volume is a collection of essays on death and the afterlife in Judaism from the biblical through the rabbinic periods by some of the foremost interpreters of ancient Judaism. As such, it is both authoritative and stimulating, including both essays that sum up a generation of scholarship and others that make new departures. Jacob Neusner's introduction to the collection, however, casts it as a test case for the superiority of the method in the study of ancient Judaisms over what the writer terms the nominalist, harmonistic, and theological methods, seeking to demonstrate the diversity of ancient through the variety of views concerning death and the afterlife. In this regard, the book is a failure in several respects. effort to represent the volume as a test for the historical method seems to be an artificial excuse for a collection of essays that has a valid reason for existence in its own right. Here one need only note that the discussion of Judaisms is not explicitly carried through by the authors themselves, although they amply demonstrate the diversity present in the material studied. collection likewise pursues a fairly narrow set of ideas through Judaism in the ancient world, making it impossible to move directly to diverse forms of Judaism and their associated social constructs and worldviews. actual arrangement of the volume and assignment of essays reflects not but the literary and sometimes canonical categories into which modern scholarship divides the literature of ancient Judaism. In addition to the preface by Avery-Peck and Neusner and the introduction by Neusner, the volume contains thirteen essays arranged in five sections: the first section, The Legacy of Scripture, includes and Afterlife: Biblical Silence by R. E. Friedman and S. Dolansky Overton; and Afterlife in the Psalms by J. Goldingay; Memory as Immortality: Countering the Dreaded `Death after Death' in Ancient Israelite Society by B. B. Schmidt; and and Afterlife in the Wisdom Literature by R. E. Murphy. In the second section, Judaic Writings in Greek, J. J. Collins examines The Afterlife in Apocalyptic Literature; G. W. E. Nickelsburg Judgment, Life-- after-Death, and in the Apocrypha and the Non-Apocalyptic Pseudepigrapha; and L. L. Grabbe Eschatology in Philo and Josephus. third and fourth sections, The Dead Sea Scrolls and Earliest Christianity, contain a single essay each, the first by P. Davies, Death, Resurrection, and Life after Death in the Qumran Scrolls, and the second by B. Chilton, Resurrection in the Gospels. final section, Judaism, includes and Afterlife in the Early Rabbinic Sources: Mishnah, Tosefta, and Early Midrash Compilations by Avery-Peck; and Afterlife in the Later Rabbinic Sources: Two Talmuds and Associated Midrash-Compilations by Neusner; and Afterlife: Inscriptional Evidence by L. V. Rutgers; and The of the Dead and the Sources of the Palestinian Targums to the Pentateuch by P. V. M. Flesher. While it would be difficult in a review of this scope to comment in any depth on each of the articles, the real need is to step back and look at the collection of essays as a whole to see what one learns about the topic by bringing them together, since this task has been left to the reader by the editors. In this regard, the initial essay, and Afterlife: Biblical Silence by Friedman and Overton, lifts the entire collection from the status of a reference survey and raises some important questions about the interpretation of the evidence throughout the periods covered. …