Describing the messianic era, the prophet especially mentions the full and final victory over death. In general, the Bible says much about victory over death and about the universal resurrection at the end of time. As for what happens after death, the biblical books say almost nothing about it. The Bible says nothing about the immortality of the soul and recompense beyond the grave...
Describing the messianic era, the prophet especially mentions the full and final victory over death. In general, the Bible says much about victory over death and about the universal resurrection at the end of time. As for what happens after death, the biblical books say almost nothing about it. Unlike Egyptian or Greek texts, the Bible says nothing about the immortality of the soul and recompense beyond the grave. This is not surprising: an immortal soul existing separately from the body is not yet life in all its fullness.
Life in all its fullness can only be the life of the whole human being, soul and body together, not apart. But that is not the only point. The point is also how the Bible sees the human being. We, people of the modern age, look at the human being more through the eyes of a Greek philosopher than through the eyes of the authors of the biblical books. For us, a human being is an eternal and unchanging soul joined to a temporary and fragile body. But in the Bible the soul is by no means unchanging.
In the biblical books, the soul is not a structure at all, but a process. It is the flow of human life in all its manifestations, from the highest spiritual aspirations to simple physiology, such as breathing and blood circulation. And into this essentially natural flow enters that "breath of life" which God "breathes" into the human being's "nostrils" at creation.
At the point where these two flows intersect, God's "breath of life" and natural existence, as a modern philosopher would call the biblical "soul," the human person is born. The fullness of human life is determined by the intensity of this natural process. And the intensity of the process depends on what determines its quality: nature or God's "breath of life." Here there are many possibilities, from the fullness of life in the Kingdom to its minimum in Sheol, in the world of shadows, where one can speak of life only in a very qualified sense.
In the Bible, death is not the disappearance of the human being, not his departure into nonbeing, but the draining away of life within him to the minimum that turns the dead person into an empty shell, a lifeless shadow. The opposite of death is not simply life, but life in fullness, in that fullness which is possible only in the Kingdom. In the Kingdom there is no place for death in any of its forms and there can be none. Therefore the coming of the Messiah and the arrival of the messianic Kingdom put an end to death: as long as death has not disappeared completely, life has not yet won. That means the Kingdom in all its fullness has not yet come either.
