Bible-Center

Main news for 10 July 2012

Reading the Bible, it is easy to notice that the biblical books tell us almost nothing of after death. Nothing or almost nothing is said either about a life after death, or about a posthumous reward in the Bible. And “almost” leads to this experience, which exists to the other peoples of the Middle-Eastern cultural region. It is about the world of darkness, about the kingdom of the dead, where man is, when the strength of life leaves him.

In this dark world, man is transformed into shadow, and the existence there can be called life only with big rigor. It remains in man neither the will, nor memory, his mind barely glimmers, so it can’t be a question of thoughts and feelings. It is not surprising that the author of the book denies a possibility of glorification of God by the deaths: existence in this world of darkness (in the Bible it is named is in the Jew way "she’ol", and In Greek "Hades") is incompatible with any spiritual life.

Representations on the posthumous rewards and on the good of the after death in the Middle East existed in the antiquity only in Egypt and Greece, and there, and there they appeared late and had no effect on the yahvisme. On the other hand they had an undeniable influence in the Middle Ages on Christian representations of the after death and the posthumous reward, engendering the doctrine of paradise and hell.

All the hope for the reward in the yahvisme, and later in the Judaism was only connected in the day of judgment and the general resurrection, representation of which already in the Hellenistic period had become wide-spread everywhere and accepted by all in the synagogue. And it was already no more questions here about after death, nor of "half-life": God returns to everyone life in all its plenitude, if only man is able to accept it and to enter into the Kingdom of God, becoming its inhabitant.

God does not agree for something smaller, even if man would have accepted half-measures. Such is the biblical answer on the question of death: the resurrection and a complete victory over death, as over this evil, which is not compatible with the Kingdom in general.

NOTES

 

The authors of the pre-Christian era say nothing about the original sin in this sense, of which for example Paul says in his epistles. They do not think that man is born sinner, the only chance which - the Savior, without help of Whom we shall not free ourselves from the original sin... 

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