conkermaniac

Could someone please clarify what the Old Testament has to say about Heaven and the afterlife? It seems like the concept is mentioned only in the New Testament.

spin

I thought I'd already responded to this.

With the exception of two strange passages, there is no evidence at all of an afterlife (other than the place of departed souls, sheol). The two passages are

1) Saul causing Samuel to be congered up from the dead, and
2) Daniel 12:2 which seem strongly to indicate resurrection (though this could have been a unique political moment, for two the books written at the same time include references to resurrection as well (Enoch's Animal Apocalypse and 2 Maccabees).

While there are indications that an afterlife was not in vogue during the writing of all but one Hebrew texts, Josephus tells us that the Pharisees accepted the notion of resurrection:

The normal idea in early Jewish thought was that, when you die to go down to sheol, never to return. The day of the Lord would bring to the faithful still alive, God's largess.


spin

Apikorus

Spin missed a relevant verse from Isaiah:

The Hebrew is quite corrupt in the first part of the verse (it literally says "...my corpse they will rise..."). Blenkinsopp points out that other religiously controversial passages in the Hebrew Bible are similarly corrupt (he cites Job 19:25-27 as another example). Interestingly, in the LXX of Isaiah as well as in the DSS 1QIsa^a, the address to the dead here is in the future tense.

Still, spin is quite correct in asserting that the Hebrew Bible presents essentially no identifiable belief structure concerning the afterlife. Just the dreary Sheol, where all souls go after death.

judge

But it seems there is an easily identifiable structure.

The dead went to sheol to await resurrection.

This is a structure and it has been identified here.

More verses can be found in line with this in the psalms for example.

That heaven existed can be seen as early as genesis where Jacob saw the angels descending from there in a dream. It was not the immediate destination of the dead though.

spin

Whoa thar, Nelly.

"The dead went to sheol..."

Yeah, this is what we get from all the Hebrew references to sheol, but

"... to await resurrection"

This addition is not justified from bulk of the Hebrw biblical material.

We would probably disagree on all of them.

Heaven is not a destination for the dead at all. It is the abode of God and his fellow beings. The xian literature talks of a new earth.

The problem that must be faced is that the theological positions of one era need not reflect those of another. Changing circumstances mean changing beliefs. I date the resurrection stuff to a specific moment in time, that of the Hebrew war against the Seleucids. It was quite appropriate then, as Jewish terrorists/freedom fighters (depending on whose side you were on) were facing the might of the Seleucid armies and therefore faced a good chance of death. The promise of resurrection was obviously appealing in such circumstances. That's when Daniel was written, along with Enoch's Animal Apocalypse and 2 Maccabees, each referring in some way to resurrection. However, later, the Sadducees didn't adhere to the notion of resurrection, so it was obviously not part of traditional Judaism. (There is very little trace among the Dead Sea Scrolls of resurrection and none of the primary texts from Qumran feature it.)


spin

Apikorus

One could say that all souls went to Sheol, where they waited. They awaited the Babylonian destruction and exile, the Persian period, Israelite religion's consequent intersection with Zoroastrianism, and the resulting syncretism in which the concept of an afterlife emerged within the former. Then the souls waited a little longer until the Hellenistic period, when the political status quo was once again upset. They continued to wait, those souls did, until the Hasmonean era and texts like Daniel 8-12, 2 Maccabees, etc. Finally, after the concept had been fully developed, some of those souls could at long last be resurrected. But they had to wait even longer to "get to heaven," as that concept required even more time to congeal. Some poor souls may have had to wait for the advent of Mormonism, when they were felicitously converted by a remote descendant. So there was a lot of waiting, indeed.