Author’s Introduction
Background
- In the ancient world, many different cultures had a belief that the dead continued in some form after death. N.T. Wright gives a lot of material on this.
- In Sumerian cultures the place of the dead contained gods/goddesses, dead humans, and malevolent spirits. In epics like Gilgamesh the life of the human shades or spirits was not good, though artefacts buried (sometimes as in Ur with human sacrifices) indicate that for some expectation might be better. The dead shades/ghosts had to be cared for in some way by living relatives or might become demons and come back to harm them.
- In the Greek tradition, Homer portrayed the place of the dead as similarly grim. The ghost of Patroclus returns to visit his friend Achilles, but after proper burial will go to the gloom of hades. Later, Odysseus visits hades, but the ghosts there are miserable and angry. The classic Greek idea of hades in Homer was that it contained shades (skia), ghosts (psychai) phantoms (eidola). These are insubstantial and incoherent.
- As Wright indicates, the burial of household objects with corpses indicates that there was some expectation of continuation of life activities, but much restricted. There was an Elysium (paradise) for a few virtuous souls, and Homer’s contemporary Hesiod seems a bit more optimistic that some heroes could make it there.
- In later Greek Platonic thinking the human soul or being is immortal. After death there is a judgement, and some go to the Isles of the Blessed and the wicked to Tartarus. In early Greek mythology (and in Plato) a living hero (eg Odysseus or Er) could visit hades, but this was exceptional.
- In the ancient world, necromancy (consulting the dead) was also widespread. The ghosts of the dead could reveal secrets of how they had died and who was to blame, and for some reason might also be able to foretell the future.
- Hebrews did not have a Greek body-soul dualism, and man in Genesis 2:7 was not ‘given’ a soul but became a living soul with the breath of life. At death the body went to the grave and the spirit or personality to sheol, a place of gloom and darkness where there was no remembrance of God, proclamation or praise (Job 10:21; 26:5; Ps 6:5; 30:9; 88:11; 115:17). Any existence was shadowy or minimal, and there was no coming back to life (Job 14:12, Ezek. 26:20–21).
Comment:
See Marston - Can Dead Believers Interact with the Living?.
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