RESURRECTION, FROM THE HEBREW BIBLE TO THE ROCK-CUT TOMBS: AN INSCRIBED CONCEPT

THE QUMRAN CHRONICLE 23, 2015 THE QUMRAN CHRONICLE 23, 2015424 425

CLAUDE COHEN-MATLOFSKYInstitut universitaire d’études juives Élie Wiesel,Paris

RESURRECTION, FROM THE HEBREW BIBLE TO THE ROCK-CUT TOMBS: AN INSCRIBED CONCEPT

In this study, I intend to stress the importance of the concept of res-urrection as evidenced by the practice of ossilegium (Liqut atsamoth in Hebrew), or bone gathering, in Second Temple Judaism. At the same time, although archeology has shown us the spread of this practice, I will demonstrate how the concept of resurrection is present in biblical sources as far back as the creation story recounted in Genesis 2. I will present some biblical and non-biblical passages carrying this concept.

In addition, I will seek to draw a parallel between the story of the creation in Genesis 2 and the prophetic passage of the dry bones in Ezekiel 37.

Indeed my intention is to show how Jews of Roman Palestine, includ-ing Jesus and his movement, expressed their belief in resurrection.

It seems that in Roman Palestine resurrection was considered a reviv-ification, a creation anew in the Garden of Eden. This belief is manifest in the funerary customs, burial practices including decorations, at least among the people who followed the Pharisaic school of thought1.

1 For Chaim Rabbin, Qumran Studies, Scripta Judaica II, (London: Greenwood Press, 1957), the Hymns and many other Qumran texts attest to the belief in resurrec-tion, therefore the Qumranites are Pharisees since the latter have widely demonstrated their belief in this concept. However, Puech develops the theory that the belief in res-urrection was well attested in the Essenes ideology as seen in the “sectarian” Qumran texts that, according to him, are to be attributed to this “community”; see the thorough analysis in his monumental work: Émile Puech, La croyance des Esséniens en la vie fu-ture: immortalité, résurrection, vie éternelle? Histoire d’une croyance dans le Judaïsme ancien, Études Bibliques, NS 22, (Paris: Gabalda, 1993).


I will trace the evolution of the concept of resurrection, while tak-ing into account all influences, on the Judeo-Christian civilisation. The influences being the Mesopotamian belief that man return to clay/dust after death and travel to the underworld, the Zoroastrian belief that res-urrection exists and the Greek philosophers’ belief in the immortality of the soul.

I will expand upon the funerary practices of Roman Palestine in the second part of my essay.

Nonetheless, I will begin by tracing the evolution of the concept of resurrection as seen in the various sources, while taking into consid-eration the acculturation phenomenon characteristic of the people of Israel’s numerous displacements throughout History. One has to start with the perception of Death and the Afterlife and I will start with the Mesopotamians.

Indeed, it is all about return, return of the soul/ghost for the most ancient civilisations: the Mesopotamians, and return of the body for the earlier ones: the Zoroastrians, followed by the Judeo-Christians.

Indeed, the Mesopotamians’ and Canaanites’ visions of the universe and of nature as described in their respective mythological narratives, have conditioned and explained their conceptions of life and death.

Jean Bottero, a French specialist of the mesopotamian civilisation, tells us that the Afterlife of the Mesopotamians is where the Goddess Ereshkigal and her lover, the God Nergal ruled2. The dead were in a state of ghosts and were asleep in an eternal sleep.

No judgement, no punishment, no real immortality, but a silent crowd of shadows united in a huge desolated place (“Le pays sans retour”), this is how Mesopotamians represented the afterlife in their minds.

In fact, this concept is not very far from the one developed by the Israelites in the Hebrew Bible.

To die in Akkadian language is also expressed by “to return to one’s own clay” and a parallel needs to be made here with bones returning to dust in our Judeo-Christian culture.

Gilgamesh, in the famous “Epic of Gilgamesh” (tablet IX) a text dat-ed to the XVIIIth century BCE, after the premature death of his best friend Enkidu, started to violently reject death and searched a way to avoid it that is to obtain immortality. He remembered that Gods had giv-

2 See J. Bottero, “Le “Pays-sans-retour”, Apocalypses et voyages dans l’Au-delà”, in Études annexes de la Bible de Jérusalem 14 (eds. C. Kappler and al. Paris: Cerf, 1987), 55-82.

en immortality to the hero of the flood in the past. Therefore Gilgamesh went on a long journey to find this hero of the flood in order to ask him how to obtain the same privilege of immortality. But upon his arrival, he was discouraged by a mysterious female who said to him: “Where are you running to, Gilgamesh, your ambition for endless life you will not get; when Gods created men, they gave them death, reserving immortal-ity for themselves only”. We learn from this text that “death was indeed the destiny of men”. Although before the flood, men used to live longer lives (thousands of years) and after, they lived only a hundred years.

Gilgamesh was eventually divinised and rendered immortal post mortem.

Then Greek philosophers introduced the thesis according to which men are composed of material (the body) and of a shape (the soul). For them death is define by the separation of body and soul.

However, according to the Mesopotamians, the Israelites and the Greeks prior to Plato and Aristotle, this dichotomy did not exist. Men were simply a body animated by blood in his veins and breath in his nostrils.

Mesopotamians did not practice mummification therefore the body was eventually reduced to its clay/dust when the bones decomposed. It was indeed a return to the earth.

Nevertheless, the spectrum, the shadow, the ghost, the soul whatever it was, of the deceased appeared in the dreams of his/her relatives. From this the Mesopotamians deduced that “something” of the deceased was remaining.

While other people would expose the dead for decomposition, or burn them, or mummify them, the Mesopotamians only interred them. They put their dead in huge jars or clay boxes, or in stone sarcophagus or in pits. The traditional place for the inhumation was the paternal house where a part was reserved for this effect (to parallel with paternal tombs in the bible: the Makhpelah cave of Abraham, all the way to paternal rock-cut tombs in Roman Palestine that I shall talk about later in this study.

Indeed for the Mesopotamians, cemeteries and necropolises, outside the paternal houses, were found only in big cities. The corpses were sleeping and no one should disturb their sleep and/or their bones, (very interesting to parallel with the insistence of not disturbing the bones found inscribed on ossuaries of Roman Palestine and in the Talmud, that I shall talk about later in the lines to follow).

Also the shadow/spectrum/soul/ghost of the deceased was believed


to have gone in the underworld. Therefore it was bad to leave someone without a burial because it was believed that his ghost would haunt the living beings in a negative way. Up until today it is recommended to give a burial shortly after death in Jewish tradition, and for the same reason.

The underworld was called “Le pays sans retour”, therefore no ques-tion of resurrection here.

Furthermore, a famous mythological poem “The descent of Ishtar (sister and enemy of Ereshkigal) to the underworld”, presents the con-tradictory representation of the world of the dead in Mesopotamian mentality: on one hand a quiet world where every one is asleep on the other hand a threatening world from which the dead as ghosts can return to hunt the living beings and do them evil.

In order to avoid the anger of the deceased’s spectra, Mesopotamians used salt and/or tamaris or also a wooden figurine representing the dead that they would burn.

The big difference between Mesopotamian and Judeo-Christian men-talities is that the latter would differentiate between the righteous dead who would go to “paradise” and the wicked dead who would go to the underworld (sheol/hell).

Furthermore, the concept of resurrection emerging from the Persian civilisation was adopted by the Israelites with the restriction to the righ-teous, according to some texts. I shall also come back on that.

Meanwhile, reading the Hebrew Bible, one cannot deny the similar-ities with these mythological narratives, especially the Gilgamesh and Ishtar/Baal texts, hence the cultural influence of the surrounding civili-zations on the Israelites.

The Epic of Gilgamesh is the best-known Mesopotamian text3. Moreover, the figure of Gilgamesh is mentioned in the Qumran Book of Giants, an Enochic document4. Indeed, just like Enoch in his journeys towards the Occident and the North (the latter considered as a heaven of Justice where God’s mountain and throne are set), Gilgamesh had to travel a long way to the Occident and the North in order to reach the

3 Interestingly enough a fragment of this text on a broken tablet was discovered at Megiddo, it is dated to the XIVth century BCE and telling about Enkidu’s disease at its terminal stage just before his death.

4 See Josef T. Milik and Matthew Black, The Books of Enoch: Aramaic Fragments of Qumran Cave 4, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976).

hero of the Flood5. We also learn from the biblical prophets, Hosea in particular, that

they opposed the Baalist cults, profoundly rooted in Canaanite beliefs. These cults were celebrating the rebirth of nature or the power of Baal in the underworld; they also included the cult of the dead and the practices associated with it. That alone constitutes evidence of the permanence of local Canaanite practices still observed by Israelites already settled in the land of Canaan.

I will contend that some of these practices, especially the rebirth of nature, were still in use as evidenced on ossuary decorations, up to at least the Herodian period and then sporadically during the time of Bar Kokhba, all the way to the Beth Shearim necropolis dating to the 3rd

and 4th centuries CE. Indeed one can see a mixture of customs in Judeo-Christian burial practices from Mesopotamian, Persian, Canaanite and Greek civilisations. No wonder since it is due to the superstitious char-acter associated with funerary customs and in people’s mind it is best to add rather than give up on practices.

However, other cultural influences especially Zoroastrianism and the refinement of Yahwism certainly favoured the evolution of a belief, from survival or immortality of the soul all the way to the concept of resurrec-tion. Indeed, the refinement of Yahwism could no longer tolerate such polytheistic practices, which were incompatible with emerging mono-theism. The concept of resurrection exists in Zoroastrianism6 and most probably influenced the Israelites who were exiled from Judea, when Persians took over Babylon in the 6th century BCE. For the Zoroastrians resurrection occurs at the end of time with the advent of “Saoshyant” who will re-establish Justice by a regeneration of the world. No one knows who or what exactly “Saoshyant” is. Nonetheless one can paral-lel it to some form of messianism in Judeo-Christian mentality.

Therefore, the concept of resurrection with its references to the rebirth of nature, and in a wider sense, the re-creation of the Garden of Eden, becomes a means for men to control their own condition of mortality.

In fact, according to Judeo-Christian mentality, in a prelapsarian state, man was to live an eternal life, just like God and at his side. With this in mind, the Genesis 2 story of the creation of the first woman could

5 Jean Bottero, L’Epopée de Guilgamesh, le grand homme qui ne voulait pas mourir (ed. and trans. J. Bottero ; Paris: Gallimard, 1992).

6 See for instance Jan N. Bremmer, “The Resurrection between Zarathustra and Jon-athan Z. Smith”, NTT 50 (1996): 89-107.


be interpreted as the final draft of the resurrection-creation anew. The Genesis 2 story records a state that implies mortality (God puts the man into a deep sleep) and resurrection-creation anew from a bone.

Therefore, the evolution of the belief in resurrection could explain why in Genesis 1 the first man and the first woman were created simul-taneously while in Genesis 2 the woman was created from a man’s bone.

The mechanism of flesh embodiment of a bone from a previous crea-ture is indeed the one of resurrection embedded in the story of Genesis 2. I contend that the practice of secondary burial, consisting in a gath-ering of the deceased’s bones, one year after the decomposition of the flesh, and reflecting the belief in a resurrection, is implicit in the de-scription of the creation of man and woman in Genesis 2.

Some historical context is needed at this point. The bitter experience of defeats, of the fall of Samaria and Jerusalem,

the exiles that followed and the inevitable contacts with other civiliza-tions and beliefs could only provoke religious consciousness and deep reflection among the sages loyal to the Covenant. These sages devel-oped a qualitative belief in the afterlife as a place in which the pious would be rewarded and the wicked would be punished.

As a matter of fact from the end of the Hellenistic period we have documents, attesting to the resurrection hope, in the book of Daniel and in the books of the Maccabees7. There the resurrection applies to the righteous and pious--but ordinary--people and this had been carried on by pharisaic ideology8 that was first shaped in exilic times.

Indeed, the following text of Daniel dating to the mid-second century BCE, presents this very concept of resurrection for the pious:

“Many of those sleeping in the dust of the earth shall awaken, some to everlasting life and some to everlasting peril” (Dan. 12:2).

The narrative of the martyrdom of the mother and her seven sons in the Second Book of the Maccabees is a good example of this notion of resurrection for the pious, especially when one of the sons says during the torture that preceded his death:

“…The king of the universe will raise us up to an everlasting renewal of life, because we had died for his laws” (2 Macc. 7:9).

Similarly, the mother herself says within the narrative, as an exhorta-

7 See especially Dan. 12:2 ; 2 Macc. 6:18-31 and 7. 8 See Josephus, J.W. 2.162-163 and Acts 23: 8.

tion to her martyred sons:

“…The creator of the world…will in his mercy give life and breath back to you again…” (2 Macc. 7:23).

For further understanding, it is necessary to position oneself in the nostalgic perspective of a pre-“schismatic” period (even though this term has a later Christian connotation).

In fact according to Genesis, man’s existence on earth was deter-mined by an individual’s disobedience, that of Adam/Eve. This dis-obedience has its parallel in the collective disobedience of the entire people at the time of the “schism” into the two kingdoms on their land. Indeed, according to the Deuteronomist tradition this “schism” eventu-ally provoked the destruction of Jerusalem and of its First Temple and lead to exile, even though historically speaking one can only record the Samaritan separation as occurring, most likely, at the dawn of the Hellenistic period around 330 BCE. Nonetheless, ever since this sit-uation of individual and/or collective disobedience, there was a need, in the spirit of the Hebrew Bible, for a possible redemption. It is pre-cisely this redemption that has been envisaged under the various forms of eschatology and messianism known in Jewish and Judeo-Christian ideologies that were being formatted through the numerous trends of Palestinian society of the Second Temple Period. Redemption was en-visaged through an individual and collective Covenant of a people with its unique God, as illustrated by the examples of Abraham all through to Moses.

Furthermore, following Jacob Neusner and many other reliable schol-ars of Judaism9, some of the books of the Hebrew Bible started to be written at the end of the 8th century BCE. They were then rewritten and compiled around the end of the 6th century BCE10 at the time of the Babylonian exile; this is the case of Genesis 2. Then upon the initiative of the prophets, who had a political agenda according to which the Jews had to return to their land and reunite as one people around one consti-tution, there was a need for Torah, a teaching of the Law. This explains why some of the Hebrew Bible books took shape around the 4th century

9 Jacob Neusner, ed., The Four Stages of Rabbinic Judaism, (New York: Routledge 1999). See also Albert De Pury and Thomas Römer, eds., Le Pentateuque en Question, (Geneva: Labor & Fides, 2002).

10 See discussions on the Pentateuch and its datation in Simon Claude Mimouni, Le judaïsme ancien du IVème siècle avant notre ère au IIIème siècle de notre ère, des prêtres aux rabbins, (Paris: Cerf, 2012), 12-18 and footnotes for bibliography.


BCE (accepted dating for the Samaritan separation) and up to the 3rd century (according to the Qumran Library).

One can therefore understand in this context, the logic behind the concepts of eschatology and messianism in the Hebrew Bible. It was indeed out of a historical necessity that the narratives in the Scriptures took shape.

With this in mind, it is understandable that the second, Yahwist ver-sion of the creation of Man and Woman came to overlap the first, Priestly one, the latter containing a reminiscence of previous Mesopotamian/Canaanite beliefs, the former with Zoroastrian influence especially of resurrection, creation out of a bone.

The second narrative of the creation of the human being in Genesis 2 carries the psychology of the “schism”. This is true even through the Hebrew term used in it: wysr (ysr)WAYITSER “he fashioned, Man and Woman from earth and a bone”. Therefore it is a creation ex-materia and no longer an ex-nihilo creation as the one in Genesis 1, where the term wyvr (br)WAYIVRA is used.

Moreover Gen 2:7 says: “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life” followed by Gen 2:8

saying that God planted the Garden of Eden where he placed the man he had just fashioned. Therefore we will see that resurrection as described in some of the texts and archaeological data that I will review in this study, is a process reproducing the story of the creation of man and woman as in Gen 2:7; 2:8 and 2:21-24 with the Garden of Eden as the final background11.

Indeed, the creation in Genesis 2 presents a vivification of a bone, a clothing/embodiment of a bone with flesh, sinews, etc. I would call it then an archetype that comes as a legitimation of the concept of res-urrection as a revivification-creation anew as it was perceived in the Judeo-Christian mentalities of Second Temple Palestine.

Interestingly, Flavius Josephus in his Jewish Antiquities only retains the Genesis 2 story of the creation of Man and Woman12.

11 See the relevant and interesting discussion in Nicolas Wyatt, “A Royal Garden : The Ideology of Eden”, Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament 28, (2014) :1-35.

12 Ant. 1.35-36. One has to wonder what sources Josephus used for his “rewriting of the Pentateuch”, i.e. the Jewish Antiquities. Could he have brought with him to Rome his own private copy of the sacred books, since most intellectual of his rank possessed one at the time (cf. Philo and his writings, especially the De Specialibus Legibus)? Nonetheless, Flavius Josephus writes in Against Apion 1.1-2: “In my history of our Antiquities... That history embraces a period of five thousand years, and was written by

Nevertheless, I will not discuss Josephus’ testimonies13 on the after-life here because they are themselves highly problematic and further complicate the portrait in pre-rabbinic times. In fact, Josephus’ apolo-getic attempt to render Jewish beliefs about the afterlife in the raiment of Greek philosophy offers rather a deeper perspective into Judaism on-going relationship with Hellenistic afterlife conceptions. Indeed, Josephus’ complete suppression of any explicit reference to physical resurrection, for example, further illustrates the important conceptual impasse that still existed between the resurrection hope in early Judaism and philosophical immortality of the soul among the Greeks14. Indeed, physical resurrection must have been far more popular than Josephus’ descriptions would attest. A broad diversity of writings dating from around 200 BCE through the end of the first century CE supplies an in-valuable amount of evidence for the bodily resurrection15. Furthermore, as opposed to Josephus, both Hippolytus and the New Testament de-scribe the Pharisees and Sadducees beliefs in terms of resurrection, not immortality of the soul16. Interestingly, Josephus’ own terminology may betray that physical resurrection lies somewhere beneath the arti-fice of his Hellenization of Jewish faith in the afterlife. In fact in The Jewish War 2.163 he writes that Pharisees claim that the “soul” of the good person passes into a “different body”17 and in Jewish Antiquities

me in Greek on the basis of our sacred books”.Louis Feldman mentions in note a of Antiquities 1.1 (Loeb Classical Library edition)

that in fact for the Pentateuch, Josephus’s basis is the Greek version of the Bible of the Alexandrian Library, the Septuagint, that he merely paraphrases.

13 See Josephus well known description of the Pharisees, Sadducees and Essenes in J.W. 2.119-166; see also his catalogue of Jewish beliefs in the Against Apion 2.217-219, the speech materials in the Jewish War 1.648-650; 3. 361-382; 6.33-53; 7.337-388 and the brief editorial transition in the Antiquities 17.353-354; Josephus even alludes to Abraham’s faith in immortality in his account of the Aqedah in Ant.1.229-231.

14 For a thorough analysis on the topic see Casey.D. Elledge, “Understanding the Af-terlife, Evidence from the Writings of Josephus”, in The Tomb of Jesus and His Family, Exploring Ancient Jewish Tombs near Jerusalem’s Walls (ed., J. H. Charlesworth; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2013), 477-513 ; see also George W. Nickelsburg, Resurrection, Immortality and Eternal Life in Intertestamental Judaism, (Harvard Theological Studies 26, Cambridge : Harvard University Press, 1972).

15 See Dan. 12:2-3 ; 2 Macc. 7:9 ; 4 Ezra 7.32, 97 ; 2 Bar. 49.2; 51.5, 10 ; 1 En. 22. 13; 51.1-2 ; 58. 2-3; 61. 5; 4Q521 frgs. 2+4 II 1-12, frgs. 7+5; 4Q385 frg. 2.

16 See Hyppolitus, Haer. 9.26-29 and Mark 12:18-27//Matt. 22:23-33; luke 20:27-40 ; Acts 23:6-8 ; 24:15-17 ; 26:6-8.

17 Even though Puech, Croyance, and others have argued that this attests to the con-cept of metempsychosis: the travel of the soul from one body and its reincarnation into


18.13-14 Josephus writes that the Pharisees believe that for the souls of the good there is an easy passage for “revivification”. The latter term can be paralleled with the expression used in 2 Maccabees when phys-ical resurrection of the dead is described. Such terminology lead Louis Feldman for instance, to conclude that these are indeed references to the resurrection of the dead implied in Josephus’ writings18.

After historical considerations, let’s move now to the historiography of the concept of resurrection according to Nickelsburg’s thesis19.

Indeed the belief in resurrection may be found in some Davidic Psalms. Then chronologically this concept is undeniably developed in 1 Enoch dated circa 200 BCE, Daniel 12, 5Q521 (On Resurrection or The Messianic Apocalypse), 4Q385-388 (Pseudo-Ezekiel), Psalms of Solomon, Life of Adam and Eve, 4 Ezra, 2 Baruch, 2 Enoch, History of the Rechabites, Lives of the Prophets, 1-4 Maccabees, Pseudo Philo, Apocryphon of Ezekiel, Pseudo-Phocyclides, Sibylline Oracles, Testament of Abraham, Testament of Job, Testaments of the 12 Patriarchs, Apocryphon of Ezekiel, Odes of Solomon, the Didache, the Hellenistic Synagogal Prayers, the Amidah or 18 Benedictions. Some of the aforementioned writings were found at Qumran. Moreover, ac-cording to Hippolytus (as opposed to Josephus) the Essenes believed in the resurrection of the flesh20. The Samaritans believed that God would summon “his creatures” so that all of them would “arise in one moment before him”21. Furthermore, the concept of a bodily resurrection created and defined the Palestinian Jesus movement.

But let’s review with Nickelsburg a few of these sources.Nickelsburg investigated the topic of the afterlife in intertestamental

Judaism and early Christianity from three perspectives namely, resur-rection, immortality, and eternal life. His book focuses on the origins of these perspectives and the dynamics involved in the development of the theological understanding of Jesus’ resurrection in earliest Christianity.

In his book, he pays attention to the origins of these beliefs and the dynamics involved in their theological development. The intertestamen-

a different one.18 See The Jewish Antiquities (trans. H. St. J.Thackeray et al.; LCL; Cambridge:

Harvard University Press, 1930–1965), p.13 n. c.19 See G.W. Nickelsburg, Resurrection, Immortality, and Eternal Life in Intertesta-

mental Judaism and Early Christianity, (Harvard Theological Studies, 56; Expanded Edition; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).

20 Haeresis 9.27.21 Memar Marka 4.12; Yom ad-Din 26.

tal period was theologically a brewing period for the doctrine of the afterlife. When Nickelsburg treated the question of resurrection, he also questioned whether it is a reference to a rising of the spirit or of the body. He concluded that, by the end of the intertestamental period and the beginning of the Christian movement, the belief in resurrection was clearly that of a bodily resurrection.

Nickelsburg dealt with the theme of religious persecution. He dealt with apocalyptic texts that have religious persecution as their underlying theme. Among the texts, Nickelsburg analyzed Daniel 12: 1-3. He also studied the Testament of Moses, Jubilees, and the Testament of Judah.

On Daniel, Nickelsburg concluded that the theology, which the book reflects, is that of people whose life situation is one of oppression. The Danielic resurrection belief therefore answered a religious need in the Hasidic (the Assideans) community in which the Book of Daniel arose. The political backdrop for the origin of this belief in Daniel was the persecutions of Antiochus and the death of many Hasidic Jews. These deaths presented a theological problem because the Jews who died, were those who were obedient to the Torah. Resurrection was the answer to this dilemma.

For Isaiah, according to Nickelsburg the resurrection of the righteous was in itself vindication for the righteous, because only the righteous will be resurrected. For Daniel resurrection was a means by which both the righteous and the wicked dead are enabled to receive their respec-tive vindication or condemnation. Daniel has gone beyond Isaiah in the sense that there will also be punishment for the wicked that are already dead. In Daniel both will be resurrected.

Another important resurrection text in the Hebrew Bible that Nickelsburg could have discussed in more detail is Ezekiel 37 (the vi-sion of the valley of dry bones). Nickelsburg all too quickly dismisses this important text by asserting that, rather than speaking of a resurrec-tion of a people who were literally dead, it rather presents “a picture of the restoration of Israel”. While this is true, it is equally true that the use of the metaphor of resurrection itself presupposes an a priori belief and understanding of resurrection as a rising of that which is dead.

The Testament of Judah, like Daniel 12 and Jubilees 23 promised post-mortem vindication for those who have been persecuted because they were righteous. The Testament of Judah 25:4ac and 3bc states that resurrection is promised to those whose religion has been the cause of their death, that is those who have died in a religious persecution.


The text states that only certain persons are raised. The choice of some and not others implies in itself a kind of judgment. Resurrection is thus according to Judah 25 a means of vindicating that pious behaviour which was responsible for their death.

To summarize: Daniel awaited a resurrection of the body. Jubilees 23 did not find it necessary to posit a resurrection of the body. The Testament of Judah 25 awaited a resurrection of the body as well as Isaiah 26. Most of these texts can be dated between 170 and 160 BCE. Daniel, Jubilees 23 and the Testament of Moses were written in the heat of the persecution. It communicated that the righteous who have died for God, will rise; thus post-mortem vindication.

According to Nickelsburg, the thesis of Wisdom of Solomon 1-6 is that unrighteousness leads to death and destruction, while righteousness leads to life and immortality. He examined the theme as it appears in Wisdom 2:4-5, Genesis 37-45 (the story of Joseph), the Story of Ahikar, the book of Esther, Daniel 3 and 6, and Susanna.

Nickelsburg sees the theme of the persecution and exaltation of the righteous person as fundamental and formative for the development of the belief in resurrection. The theme at this point is focused on an indi-vidualistic context: it is the singular righteous person who is persecuted and consequently exalted. Nickelsburg carried this theme into a com-munal setting with the persecution and vindication of the righteous as a group. Nickelsburg analyzed the text of 2 Maccabees 7 that tells the story of seven brothers and their mother who like the righteous man in Wisdom, were put to death on account of the Torah. As in Wisdom, a rescue after death was anticipated, although here it was not described. The story was also set in the time and in the presence of Antiochus.

“The brothers’ resurrection will be bodily (7:10-11), and this is ap-pealed to specifically as a remedy for their bodily tortures. God will heal what Antiochus has hurt; he will bring to life whom Antiochus has killed. What God created, God will recreate – in spite of the king’s at-tempt to destroy it (7:22-23, 28-29)”.

Then Nickelsburg examines the theme of the oppression of the righ-teous poor, with special attention given to 1 Enoch 94-104. The histor-ical setting of the situation in Enoch was the same as that of the texts described in the previous chapters of Nickelsburg’s book. Again it is about the righteous that suffer because of their faithful adherence to the Torah and a post-mortem vindication that awaits them.

Nickelsburg also investigated the theme of resurrection where it ap-peared unrelated to the themes of persecution, oppression, and injustice.

In all of these texts (Ps 3; 13; 14; 15; 1 Enoch 22; 4 Ezr 7; Sibylline Oracles 4; The Testament of Benjamin 10), once more, resurrection was set in the context of judgment. There was one new development namely that the “righteous are rewarded because of their obedience to the Torah, even if they have been rewarded during their lives, and although they may not have suffered or died because of their righteousness. The sin-ners are condemned for their wickedness in general and not specifically because they have mistreated the righteous”. The scope of resurrection and judgment were thus broadened.

Then an analysis was made of the Qumran material, it included an investigation into the view of the afterlife and whether it incorporated resurrection, immortality, or eternal life. Nickelsburg is of the convic-tion that belief in bodily resurrection appears to be lacking in Qumran. For him the Qumran texts make no reference to a persecution unto death that requires a post-mortem vindication. Nor do they speak of injustices and oppression in this life that need to be adjudicated after death, but they definitely refer to eternal life.

Mladen Popovic sums up most appropriately as far as I am concerned what one can find regarding resurrection in the Qumran documents.

In his article22Popovic states that the various texts from the Dead Sea Scrolls are rather reticent about describing the human body in death and resurrection. However we come across different ways of speaking about death and the afterlife.

Popovic examines The War Scroll (Milkhamah), the Thanksgiving Hymns (Hodayot), The Messianic Apocalypse (4Q521), some of the Pseudo-Ezekiel manuscripts (4Q385, 4Q386, 34Q88), and also the Qumran cemeteries.

In the War Scroll, says Popovic, many die during the various phases of the eschatological war. Very little is said about the slain bodies of the sons of darkness but we do learn that sons of light also die. The text is especially silent about the post-mortem destiny of the latter. While in 2Macc 2, 43-45 slain soldiers are expected to be resurrected, the War Scroll does not mention resurrection for the slain sons of light. In fact it is possible that their bodies were left unburied. The text does mention a ceremony by the High Priest. Christophe Batsch in his published doc-

22 See M. Popovic, “Bones, Bodies and Resurrection in the Dead Sea Scrolls”, in The Human Body in Death and Resurrection Deuterocanonical and Cognate Literature Yearbook 2009: 221-242.


toral thesis23, has suggested that the dead bodies were to be buried for the cleansing of the land 1Q 7:2 to parallel with the eschatological war of Gog against Magog in Ezekiel 39; 12, 14, 15. However the War Scroll does not mention the burial of the bodies.

Popovic continues, noticing that in several passages of Jeremy 8:1-2; 14:16; 16:4; 25:33 the dead bodies are not buried but left as dung; also in Ps. 79 and in Jubilee 23.

There are passages in IQM 14: 10-11, 4Q 491 8-10 i 8 (with parallels to 2 Macc 12:44) where it mentions that the soldiers who have fallen will rise again) saying that God is praised as the one who has raised the fallen with his strength. This leaves us to imagine that the ones behind the War Scroll were at least familiar with the concept of resurrection.

Let’s put together the 4Q521 and the War Scroll (especially 1QM 14:10-11). In the former it says that God will heal the slain and revivify the dead. One can easily imagine that we have described here the resur-rection of the sons of light from the War scroll that have fallen during the eschatological war.

The Hodayot poetry has provided evidence of the use of resurrection language. However it is not clear whether it is about a return to life after death or a realised eschatology of the members of the community once they entered it.

Nickelsburg considers that it is related to the entrance of the new members to the community. However 1QH 14:37 and 1QH 19:15 talk about bodies that would rise most probably in order to fight in the escha-tological war according to Nickelsburg et John Collins.

As for E. Puech, he reads in those passages of the Hodayot, that the bodily resurrection is given to the righteous in the eschaton.

Interestingly 1QHa 12:6-13:6 that deals with lament and hope has the expression in 12:23: “etodedah veakumah” he will stand and rise up which resonates well with bodily resurrection (to parallel with the way the bones were gathered in the Herodian ossuaries in Palestine but also to Ps. 20:9).

Anyways in the Hodayot it is clear that the human body was thought to play a role, but details about the exact nature of its role remain un-spoken.

The following two texts contain clear evidence for resurrection, or more precisely the revivification of the dead, according to most schol-

23 See C. Batsch, La guerre et les rites de guerre dans le Judaïsme du deuxième Temple, JSJSup 93; Leiden-Boston : Brill, 2004, 107-112.

ars and these are: The Messianic Apocalypse (4Q521) and the Pseudo-Ezekiel (4Q385, 386 and 388).

4Q521 2+4 ii 12 mentions: “He will heal the sick and will revivify the dead” (oumetim yihyeh).

Indeed on line 6 of this fragment entitled “On Resurrection or The Messianic Apocalypse”, Emile Puech reads: “Yaqim hamehayeh eth matey ‘amo, (the “revivifier” will raise the dead of his people)”24.

Therefore in 4Q521 7+5 ii 6: God is referred to as “the one who re-vivifies the dead of his people” (hamehayeh eth matey amo).

Popovic questions the corporeality of the resurrected body: that is the aspect that the human body will have at resurrection, 4Q521 still does not give us any indication. Will it be the same body as the one that was buried? On the other hand, Pseudo-Ezekiel, which is reworking Ezekiel 37, does give details about the resurrected body: it speaks of bones that connect with each other, flesh, sinews and skins that cover the bones, in fact apparently the same bodies that were buried. The earliest manu-script of Pseudo-Ezekiel is 4Q391 and is dated to the last quarter of the 2nd century BCE and would constitute the first example of an under-standing of the dry bones vision of Ezekiel 3, pre-dating 4Macc 18-17 and the early Christian interpretations.

It is important to keep in mind two categories: the martyrological resurrection that is the revivification of individuals briefly after their demise and the collective revivification of the people at the end of time.

Puech has also gathered the literary evidence of the vocabulary of res-urrection, especially for the expressions: “mehayeh hametim” and “me-hayeh matey ‘amo”25. Indeed he has given many biblical and non-bibli-cal occurrences for the expressions “He will revivify the dead” and “the one who revivify the dead of his people”. “Mehaye hametim” is also one of the 18 benedictions of the Amidah prayer in the synagogal liturgy.

The three copies of Pseudo-Ezekiel among the Qumran documents, refer to the passage of the dry bones in Ezekiel 37: 1-14. Pseudo-Ezekiel interprets the Ezekiel 37 passage of the dry bones as referring to the resurrection of the pious and as their eschatological reward.

What can these two texts teach us about the role played by the human corporeality in the context of dying, death and resurrection?

In Pseudo-Ezekiel we have a dialogue between God and Ezekiel. In

24 See Emile Puech, Discoveries in The Judaean Desert 25, Qumrân grotte 4-XVIII, (ed. E. Puech ; Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1998): 1-39.

25 See idem, Croyance, 641-657.


this passage 4Q388 7 2) God says to the people of Israel (or more likely to a limited number of the people of Israel, that is the pious observers of the covenant): “you will not die” (velotamutu). Then Ezekiel 4Q385 2 2-3//4Q386 1i 1-2//4Q388 7 4-5 asks God when these things will come that the pious of Israel will be rewarded and God answers that he will make the sons of Israel see (er` eh) and they will know that he is the Lord. Then in 4Q385 2-4 the vision of the bones follows, but Pseudo-Ezekiel omits the scenery of the valley in which the dry bones lie that belongs to Ezekiel 37:1-2. Pseudo-Ezekiel also leaves out the question of whether these bones can live (because in Ezekiel 37 the prophet ac-tually prophesizes about the revivification of these dry bones). Then to the same question of the timing asked by Ezekiel God answers 4Q385 2 10: “A tree shall bend and shall stand erect”. This expression, accord-ing to Devorah Dimant26has its parallels in Deut. 20:19; Isa 65:22; Ez 17:24; 37:7-20). Dimant also points out that “stand erect” is associated in 4Q521 2+4 ii 8 with reward to the righteous and resurrection.

Pseudo-Ezekiel has transformed the meaning of Ezekiel’ s vision from a metaphor for national restoration into a description of the future bodily resurrection of the righteous dead.

As in Ezekiel 37:11-15 it is when the bones are dry which is linked to a lost hope in these passages, that God makes the people of Israel rise from their tombs and live again. One has to make the parallel here with the secondary burial (one year after the decomposition of the flesh=dry bones) in the rock-cut tombs of roman Palestine, a practice upon which I shall expand later in this essay.

Then 1Enoch 25 with parallels to Isaiah 26:19 and 66:14 mention resurrection linked to nature and possibly to the Gan Eden. 1En 25 talks about a fragrant tree and Isaiah mentions: “bones shall flourish like the grass”.

Now what do we learn from the cemeteries and tombs of Qumrân?Joseph Milik has suggested understanding the way that the dead were

interred at Qumran as a reflection of their belief in resurrection. Indeed most of the bodies are buried with the heads to the South and they would be facing North when they rise at resurrection. North is where Milik located paradise according to Enochic tradition. So he suggested linking the position of the interred bodies with the belief of a paradise in the North. Puech has further continued this line of thinking and also applied

26 See D. Dimant, Discoveries in the Judaean Desert 30, Qumran cave 4-XXI, (ed. D. Dimant ; Oxford : Clarendon Press, 2001): 29.

it to the cemetery of Ein el Guhweir, which presents similarities with the Qumrân one. Furthermore, Pierluigi Piovanelli has added that since the enemy comes traditionally from the North, therefore the people of Qumrân would have prepared their dead to rise facing North for the eschatological war27.

A few problems are noticeable here from the archaeological point of view. Of the 1200 tombs at Qumrân only about 50 were excavat-ed. Therefore the data is too scarce; and most importantly we have no epitaphs or any funerary inscription that could help us understand any belief in resurrection behind the burials at Qumrân.

The Qumrân cemeteries are therefore not helping in a clear cut-way in understanding the notions of afterlife and resurrection.

Of all the Dead Sea Scrolls and Qumran site data, only The Messianic Apocalypse and the Pseudo-Ezekiel attest to a belief in a bodily resur-rection. These two texts still do not give any information about the as-pect of the resurrected body. Will it be the same as the buried body? Will it be an angelic or astral body? But while for Popovic these questions remain unanswered, it is clear to me at least from the Pseudo-Ezekiel but also from The Messianic Apocalypse that the resurrected body is the same as the buried body (only purified and/or rewarded after judge-ment). In this regard the Christians did not invent anything.

After some historical context and the historiography of the concept of resurrection, I shall now move to the archaeological data and more spe-cifically to the practice of ossilegium. I will attempt to link this practice with the evolution of the concept of resurrection in the Scriptures as I described it thus far in my study.

Since my first article published in 1991 on the Jewish funerary cus-toms in Roman Palestine28, my approach had always been to link the practice of ossilegium, gathering of the bones, to the belief in the in-dividual bodily resurrection/revivification, a concept widely attest-ed among at least, the Pharisees in Roman Palestine. Moreover in my judgment, the floral, fruit and animal decorations on various Jewish and Judeo-Christian ossuaries, can only add evidence to the link with res-

27 See P. Piovanelli, “Les mystérieux cimetières de Qumrân”, in Le monde de la Bible, 107: 29-31.

28 See Claude Cohen-Matlofsky, “Controverse sur les coutumes funéraires des Juifs en Palestine aux deux premiers siècles de l’empire romain”, L’Information Historique 53 (1991): 21-26.


urrection in these burial practices29. Indeed, there are discussions in the rabbinic literature about resurrection described as a phenomenon inscribed in the revival of the nature. See Babylonian Talmud tractate Sanhedrin 90b, among others, referring to Isaiah 66:14: “Your bones will flourish like the grass”. Moreover Rabbi Gamaliel II (1st century), Rabbi Meir (2nd century) and Rabbi Ishmael (2nd century) refer clearly to the initial creation of the world when discussing resurrection in this tractate of the Talmud.

Furthermore in Christian literature, admittedly, elements of a vegeta-tive rebirth of nature may serve as metaphors of eternal life: resurrection as germination of a grain30.

Therefore, resurrection is a concept perceived at least by certain com-munities of Late Second Temple Judaism, as a world creation anew that includes nature and animals. Hence, these types of floral, fruit and ani-mal decorations are found on ossuaries.

For James Charlesworth “resurrection means that someone who lived and has died will be raised by God to an eternal existence with God”31, in fact, the prelapsarian state that I was mentioning earlier.

In the Second Temple Period 900 family tombs were rock-cut and 60 individual graves were hewn in a ring of about 4km around the city of Jerusalem. Burials were prohibited inside towns, with an emphasis for this prohibition on Jerusalem because of the laws of purity and impurity that applied more strictly to this city. The tombs were hewn within fam-ilies’ agricultural estates.

The Mishnah Baba Batra 6:8 describes in detail the process of hew-ing tombs. This text also gives the description of a plan of a tomb with kokhim (in Hebrew) loculi (in latin), niches carved in the walls of the tomb and this corroborates exactly what the archaeologists excavated in the Jerusalem and Jericho necropolises.

The Gospel of John mentions a garden at the site of the crucifixion surrounding the unused tomb in which Jesus was temporarily laid32. The

29 See Rachel Hachlili, Jewish Funerary Customs Practices and Rites in the Second Temple Period, (JSJSup 94; Leiden: Brill, 2005); also idem, Ancient Jewish Art and Archeology in the Land of Israel, (Handbuch Der Orientalistik 7; Leiden: Brill, 1988).

30 1Cor. 15:36-41.31 See James H. Charlesworth, “Where Does the Concept of Resurrection Appear

and How Do We Know That ?”, in Resurrection the Origin and Future of a Biblical Doctrine (ed., J. H. Charlesworth and al. ; New York : T&T Clark, 2006), 12-17.

32 See John 19:41-42.

archaeological record as well as literary sources such as Josephus33and the Mishnah Taanit 4:8; Nazirim 7:3 for instance support this picture. It is well known that ornamental gardens surrounded cemeteries in the Greco-Roman world and in particular around Jerusalem, together with orchards and vegetable gardens.

The most common type in the Jerusalem necropolis of the Second Temple Period is the rock-cut kokhim tomb. The origin of this type of tomb is to be found in Leontopolis from the Hasmonean times according to Rachel Hachlili34.

In these rock-cut tombs from the Herodian period up to the end of the Bar Kokhba Revolt, of Jerusalem, Jericho and vicinity, Jews performed a primary burial; then after about a year, they did a secondary burial by gathering the bones of the deceased, a process called liqut atsamot (in Hebrew) or ossilegium (in latin), sometimes in a stone box called ossu-ary. More than 3000 ossuaries have been found, mostly in the Second Temple Jerusalem necropolis, of which about 1200 were ornamented or plain with inscriptions and are in collections in Israel especially in the Levy Yitshaq Rahmani’s catalogue35, the Israel antiquities authority’s collection and in the most recent Hannah Cotton’s Corpus36.

The practice of ossilegium was used in the Second Temple period and is widely attested in the rabbinic literature37(Moed Qatan, Sanhedrin, Pesahim, Semachot). In Israel, the substantial number of ossuaries dat-ing from the Second Temple period and containing carefully gathered bones corroborates this very belief in resurrection. In the Scriptures, the earliest references to ossilegium and transfer of bones are found in the Hebrew Bible, Genesis 50:1-14, Joseph sends Jacob’s remains to Canaan. Also in Genesis 50:25, Joseph commands his brothers to transfer his remains to the familial tomb in Makhpelah (Canaan), that Abraham had bought for his family’s funeral use, as we learn from Genesis 2338. First Samuel 31:13 says: “They burned Saul and his sons

33 See War 5, 54: 6, 106.34 See R. Hachlili, Jewish Funerary Customs, 2005, p. 10.35 See L.Y. Rahmani, A Catalogue of Jewish Ossuaries in the Collections of the State

of Israel, (Jerusalem: Israel Antiquities Authority and Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1994), 53-55.

36 See Hannah Cotton-Paltiel and al. (eds.), Corpus Inscriptionum Iudaeae/Palaesti-nae, I, Jerusalem Part 1, (Berlin/New York: De Gruyter, 2010).

37 m. Moed Qat. 1:5; Sanh. 6:6; Pesah. 8:8; y. Moed Qat. 1:8, 74; tractate Semahot 12:4, 6-9; t. Sanh. 9:8.

38 In this chapter of Genesis, verses 3, 8 and 13 appears the first evidence of a sale


corpses and then gathered their bones.”Let’s dwell a moment on Mishnah Mo’ ed Qatan 1:5:

…“Furthermore, R. Meir said, a man may gather his father’s and moth-er’s bones, since this is (an occasion) of ‘joy’ for him; R. Jose says, it is (an occasion) ‘of mourning’ for him. A person should not stir up wailing for his dead, nor hold a lamentation for him thirty days before a feast”39.

What strikes me most when I read this Mishnah is “(an occasion) of ‘joy’” while talking about the bone gathering of one’s dear parents. Then, and this will only be an interpretation of mine without going into the Gemara of this Mishnah, I can only explain it with the link to res-urrection. Indeed, the bone gathering, as a warrant to resurrection, a belief well attested among the Pharisees and the “Essenes”, but also the Sadducees (who just did not agree to the traces of this concept in the Torah), could very well be an occasion of rejoicing for the close rela-tives of the deceased, and this rejoicing would then not interfere with the general rejoicing inherent to the mid-festival days, the context in which we find this verse of the Mishnah.

Archaeology confirms the practice of the ossilegium in the Levant as early as the Chalcolithic Age. Gal, Smithline and Shalem write:

“Below these bones there were additional groups of bones intentionally laid in ordered fashion, similar to the fashion of re-entering bones in ossuaries. This suggests an earlier stage of secondary burial”40.

Archaeology again confirms the practice of the transfer of bones to be buried in Jerusalem in an inscription on an ossuary found in a tomb of

of an agricultural field with a burial cave. Then in Genesis 23:16-20 one may find the details of the transaction between Abraham and Ephron regarding the purchase of the agricultural field containing the famous burial cave of Makhpelah (near Hebron) and this, in order to bury Sarah. Genesis 23:6 is evidence of the possibility for a foreigner to use a burial cave already hewn. Genesis 23:11 and 23:15 is evidence of a gift of a ready hewn burial cave and this is to be linked to the story of Joseph of Arimathea’s gift of his freshly hewn tomb for the burial of Jesus (cf. Matt. 27:57-60; Mark 15:46; Luke 23:50-53; John 19:38-41).

39 Translation of Isidore Epstein, The Babylonian Talmud, (ed. and trans. I. Epstein ; London : Soncino Press, 1938), 40-41.

40 Zvi Gal, Howard Smithline and Dina Shalem, “A Chalcolithic Burial Cave in Peqi`in, upper Galilee”, IEJ 47 (1997): 145-154. See also D. Shalem, “Do the Images on the Chalcolithic Ossuaries Comprise Attributes?”, P. Bieliński, M. Gawlikowski, R. Koliński, D. Ławecka, A. Sołtysiak and Z. Wygnańska eds., Proceedings of the 8th In-ternational Congress on the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East, Vol. 1, Harrassowitz Verlag -Wiesbaden (2014): 505-523.

the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem41. Also, in Hannah Cotton’s Corpus42 this inscription in Aramaic is read as follows: “Yoseph son of El`asa Artaka (?) brought the bones of ‘mk’ his mother to Jerusalem” (CIIP 225).

Artaka, a Persian word, could be a nickname based on the place of origin of the family.

Rachel Hachlili, Amos Kloner and Boaz Zissu43 have excavated many tombs and they have extensively written on burial practices in Roman Palestine. I disagree with Hachlili’s chronology regarding the ossilegium in Jerusalem and Jericho44. I see a contemporaneity of gath-ering of bones either in pits or in ossuaries both in Jerusalem and in Jericho all through the Second Temple period. In my judgment the in-troduction of ossuaries in Herodian times did not preclude the ossile-gium in a pit inside the tomb, for purposes of space, economics and time in the turmoil of wars against the Romans. I therefore even see a possibility of a tertiary burial: transfer of bones from ossuaries to pits sometimes, especially in light of the well recorded fact that ossuaries were occasionally reused45.

Parallels ought to be made between the raising of the dry bones from Ezekiel, the story of the creation in Genesis 2, the “tequmat haneveilot” of the Talmud and the “he was raised” of the New Testament and espe-cially “God who raises the dead”46and finally the practice of ossilegium.

Ezekiel 37:1-14, dated to the 6th century BCE, contains the vision of the dry bones. One cannot avoid the parallel of this passage with the narrative of the creation in Genesis 2:7-8, that is, the creation of man out of the earth with the words: “...breathed into his nostrils the breath of life”, followed by Genesis 2:22: “And the rib, which the Lord God had taken from the man, made He a woman...”

Interestingly enough, Ezekiel 37:4-5 also mentions dry bones reviv-

41 See pp. 355-358 of Emile Puech, “Ossuaires inscrits d’une tombe du Mont des Oliviers”, LA 32 (1982): 355-372.

42 Hannah Cotton-Paltiel and al. (eds.), Corpus Inscriptionum Iudaeae/Palaesti-nae,vol. I, Jerusalem Part 1, (Berlin/New York: De Gruyter, 2010).

43 See Amos Kloner and Boaz Zissu, The Necropolis of Jerusalem in The Second Temple Period (Interdisciplinary Studies in Ancient Culture and Religion 8; Leuven: Peeters, 2007).

44 See Hachlili, Jewish Funerary, 450-464.45 See Cohen-Matlofsky, “Controverse”, 23.46 2 Cor 1:19 and Acts 26:8.


ified by a breath of life: “Then He said unto me: prophesize over these bones, and say unto them: O ye dry bones, hear the word of the Lord: thus saith the Lord God unto these bones: behold, I will cause breath to enter into you, and ye shall live.”

Therefore the ruah (rh) of Ezekiel 37 corresponds to the neshamah (nsmh) of Genesis 2.

This passage of Ezekiel 37:1-14, refers to an individual and collec-tive resurrection of all the dead of the Israelites on their Land of Israel. Moreover Ezekiel 37:6 says:

“And I will lay sinews upon you, and will bring up flesh upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and ye shall live...”

This resurrection is a resurrection-revivification.The mechanism of this resurrection-revivification of the Ezekiel’s

passage is to be paralleled with Genesis 2: an embodiment of bones/a bone with a ruah/neshamah (rh/nsmh) breathed into it.

In his book47 Alan Segal argues that the rabbis could have chosen the technical, more explicit term tequmat hannebelot (tqmt hnblt), in Hebrew: raising of the corpses, rather than tehiyat hammetim (thyt hmtm), in Hebrew: vivification of the dead, when dealing with resurrec-tion in their texts. First of all, both terms are taken from Isaiah 26:19. Both terms are in the same sentence in this passage of the Hebrew Bible. Therefore in my judgment, it really does not matter which one the rabbis chose since the concept of vivification of the dead, tehiyat hammetim (thyt hmtm) along with raising of the corpses, more precisely “dressed again dried bones”, tequmat hannebelot (tqmt hnblt), is very well de-veloped in Ezekiel 37:4-10, and I do not see why the rabbis would have based their discussions on resurrection only on one part of verse 19 of Isaiah 26.

Segal states as well that the rabbis were only dealing with matters of resurrection because they were pressured to do so by the intellectual en-vironment in a context of acculturation. It was not at the centre of their preoccupations, since they were lawmakers. I agree that rabbis were not theologians. However weren’t they first and foremost discussing the written Law? Therefore one has to take into consideration the following:

1- In the written Law itself there is no such a thing as a homogeneous concept of afterlife, since this literary source contains also multiple

47 Alan Segal, Life after Death: A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion (New York: Doubleday, 2004), 606-607.

“borrowings” (or rather similarities) from neighboring cultures, as seen above, in this study.

2- While it is true that there is no such a thing as a complete order of the Mishnah related to issues of resurrection, it does not allow one to assume that the concept itself was not at the center of the layper-son’s daily life preoccupations in early Roman Palestine.

3- Moreover, a similar situation is to be seen with regard to messian-ism. There is no complete order of the Mishnah dedicated to mes-sianism either, and for the same reasons. Therefore to say that it was not at the center of the rabbis preoccupations and not a reflec-tion of the layperson’s belief at the time would be just another big assumption.

In fact at a time of formative Judaism, when rabbis, an elite by in-tellect and not by blood, as I like to call them, were democratizing reli-gious observance, it is easy to imagine that the concept of resurrection became the perfect tool for their pedagogical endeavours, even though they could not devote a significant place to such a subject in the frame-work of their legal documents. Therefore, the rabbis could not legally frame concepts related to the afterlife because they were more preoccu-pied by “present-life” issues (if I may say), but the laypeople were very much preoccupied by these concepts in early Roman Palestine.

Ezekiel 37:12-14 states that tombs would be opened and resurrection should occur in the land of Israel, with an implicit idea of the transfer of bones to the land of Israel.

Furthermore, in my judgment there is little doubt that the resurrec-tion belief is revealed by the practice of ossilegium in Roman Palestine, especially as evidenced by the numerous rock-cut tombs and ossuaries, and is a direct reference to both Genesis 2 and Ezekiel 37 as a resurrec-tion-revivification-a creation anew.

Indeed I maintain that the concept of resurrection is a parameter not to be neglected in the custom of ossilegium, along with others: the con-cern for space and the continuation of an old practice, as seen earlier in this study48.

Rahmani was amongst the first, if not the first to relate the practice of

48 See C. Cohen-Matlofsky, “The Imperfect Tomb of Jesus and Family”, in The Tomb of Jesus and His Family?: Exploring Ancient Jewish Tombs near Jerusalem’s Walls: the fourth Princeton Symposium on Judaism and Christian Origins, Eerdmans: 2013: 76-107.


ossilegium to the concept of resurrection49, and I agree with him adding to the theory that the manner or order in which the bones were gathered in the ossuaries constitutes another evidence of the link between this practice and the concept of resurrection. Legs were placed at the bot-tom, then spine and arms, then skull on top, a deceased ready to rise50.

Hachlili seems to agree with Rahmani on the link between ossilegium and resurrection.51

Moreover, Hachlili says that ossuary ornamentation corresponds to the idea of death and resurrection at that time52. Hachlili also lists fu-nerary inscriptions with special formulae53. It looks like the formulae evolved from protective ones--an admonition not to disturb the tomb and/or the remains of a deceased54, sometimes with an implicit or ex-plicit threat/vow and oath55in Herodian inscriptions-- to clearly includ-ing references to resurrection in the 3rd and 4th centuries CE. Various examples of the latter were found in the necropolis of Beth Shearim56. Another later ossuary inscription from Beth Shearim mentions resurrec-tion and is listed in Schwabe and Lifshitz57.

I am inclined to believe that the implicit/explicit threat/vow and oath in the funerary formulae inscriptions can only relate to resurrection. Hence the very special care and concern expressed already in Herodian times with regard to the bones of the deceased and their importance in the process of resurrection. Furthermore, the consolatory inscrip-tions can also be understood as implying the belief in resurrection. For example on an ossuary of the Herodian period from Mount Scopus, Jerusalem, one can read:

49 See Levy Yishaq Rahmani, “Ancient Jerusalem Funerary Customs and Tombs”, BA 45 (1982): 43-52.

50 See Cohen-Matlofsky, “Controverse”: 24.51 See Hachlili, Jewish Funerary: 114, 302, 522.52 See Hachlili, Jewish Funerary Customs:112-113.53 Ibidem: 494-506.54 Ibidem: 497-501 ; Nos. 2, 3, 4, 5, 9, 10,11 ; see also L.Y. Rahmani, A Catalogue

of Jewish Ossuaries in the Collections of the State of Israel (Jerusalem: The Israel An-tiquities Authority, the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1994), Nos. 142, 259, 455, Pl. 66, 559, 610.

55 Ibidem: 496-506 ; Nos. 1, 6, 7, 8, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 20 ; see also Rahmani, Catalogue, 18, n. 89.

56 Ibidem: 504-506, Nos. 18, 19 ; see also Moshe Schwabe and Baruch Lifshitz, Beth Shearim, vol. 2, The Greek Inscriptions (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1974), 113-114, No. 129, Pl. IV, 4 ; 139, No. 162, Pl. VI, 1.

57 See M. Schwabe and B. Lifshitz, Beth Shearim, No. 194.

“No one has abolished/cancelled his entering, not even El ` azar and Shappira”.

Similarly on another Jerusalem ossuary from the same period one may read in Greek the more explicit consolatory formula:

“ Cheer up and feast, you brothers who are living, and drink together! No one is immortal!”58.

The particular formula “no one is immortal” is also found on inscrip-tions in the Beth Shearim necropolis59. In addition, an inscription in a corridor of the Jewish catacombs of Beth Shearim reads as follows:

“Best wishes in the Resurrection!”60.

In my judgment, individualization of the deceased became an essen-tial factor in burial practices of Herodian Palestine and is thus to be related to the concept of resurrection, well rooted in the Jewish thought of the time and especially in the period between the two wars against the Romans. This concept is based on Ezekiel 37 as well as Isaiah 26:19. Following the end of the Babylonian exile in the 6th century BCE, Jews in Palestine expressed mutually exclusive perceptions regarding the afterlife. According to the Sadducees, death ended human existence. However, while Josephus and the Christian literature agree on this state-ment, the Talmud, especially tractate Sanhedrin 90b, seems to state that the Sadducees only disagreed to finding traces of the concept of resur-rection in the Torah, therefore it does not mean that they did not believe in it.

In any case, the concept of the resurrection of all or only the righteous became widely popular after 200 BCE as attested in the various sources.

In Ezekiel 37, the bones are used as material for creating new bodies and a new community; their role is to express the continuity of the hope. In the turmoil of early Roman Palestine this concept corresponded well with the democratization of religious practices suggested by the rabbis and with the open tomb theme in early Christian writings. In this con-text one may understand that the belief in bodily resurrection among the Pharisaic community as well as the Judeo Christians was influenced by

58 See Claude Cohen-Matlofsky, Les laïcs en Palestine d’Auguste à Hadrien : étude prosopographique, (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2001), 62-63 No. 167 ; 148 No. 527, 198 ; see also H. Cotton, Corpus, Nos. 93 and 395.

59 See M. Schwabe and B. Lifschitz, Beth Shearim, Nos. 59, 127, 130, 136.60 Ibidem, No. 194.


the metaphor of dry bones from the passage in the Hebrew Bible.Moreover, every Jew should be buried in Jerusalem and vicinity, as

stated in Ezekiel 37. While Kloner and Zissu are of the conviction that the “transfer of bones to Jerusalem (is) for family reunification purpos-es”61, I contend: “Not only for that!”, and Gafni corroborates:

“Those buried in the land of Israel were conceived as the first to be res-urrected with the arrival of the messiah”62.

Therefore Jews believed in resurrection even though they were still aware that someone was in a grave.

This belief in resurrection that could only occur in the land of Israel could partially explain the presence of a geographical origin outside of Palestine in some ossuary inscriptions found in tombs excavated around Jerusalem. Such is the case for the Akeldama tombs with people originally from Seleucia in Syria63. In other tombs some came from Capoua64 and from Chalcis65.

It could mean either that they immigrated to Jerusalem or that they were non-residents who were only buried in rock-cut tombs in Jerusalem and vicinity for resurrection purposes. In the latter case, they would most likely and for most of them, perform a secondary burial following the ancestral custom of transferring bones to the land of Israel, attested in the above-mentioned literary sources.

Furthermore, there is no trace of rock-hewn tombs containing os-suaries in Galilee between Herod the Great’s rule and the end of the Bar Kokhba Revolt, after which, the centre of Judaism moved from Jerusalem to Galilee in a forced internal diaspora movement. There is no trace of ossuaries in Galilee until the much later Beth Shearim ne-cropolis, dating to the third century CE.

It seems that in the Second Temple period the Jerusalem necropo-lis was quite large compared to other contemporary neighbouring ne-cropolises, and that means that it probably included tombs of Diaspora Jews in substantial numbers, and this for the purpose of resurrection in Jerusalem.

Christianity as an heir to apocalyptic branches of Judaism was quite

61 A. Kloner and B. Zissu, The Necropolis of Jerusalem: 21-122.62 See Isaiah M. Gafni, Land, Center and Diaspora: Jewish Constructs in Late An-

tiquity, (SupJSP 21 ; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997): 79-95.63 C. Cohen-Matlofsky, Les laïcs, 110-111 No. 351.64 See ibidem, 116 No. 381.65 See ibidem, 104 No. 334.

consistent in always affirming a belief in a resurrection, but the fact remains that belief in a resurrection is well attested prior to the rise of Christianity, and this belief also persists in certain communities of Jews after the rise of Christianity.

I have attempted to show in this study that not only do we find attesta-tions of the belief in a resurrection in the Hebrew Bible, the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, some of the Qumran texts, the New Testament and the Mishnah, but also in the epigraphic material and the archaeological data at large.

In sum, although not all Jewish people of the Late Second Temple Period accepted the notion of resurrection, there are texts and inscrip-tions of this period that demonstrate that a fair number of them did.

Documents

RESURRECTION, FROM THE HEBREW BIBLE TO THE ROCK-CUT TOMBS: AN INSCRIBED CONCEPT