Main news for 11 March 2024

All peoples in every age knew well from their own bitter experience that the power of the world of shadows, which the Bible calls Sheol, over the human person is absolute. Indeed, however long a person may live on earth, his life still turned out to be temporary, while the world of shadows, the kingdom of the dead, awaiting everyone at the end of his earthly path, swallowed him forever. Moreover, there was nothing comforting in this world: the existence a person led there could be called life only with a very great stretch, for neither full self-awareness nor memory remained for a person in the world of shadows. Biblical authors, however, quite early begin to sense that the power of Sheol, the world of shadows, over the human person is not absolute, that it can be overcome, and overcome precisely with God's help. The thought of the possibility of a general resurrection on the last day becomes commonly accepted, of course, already in the post-exilic period, but the first intuitive guesses about this probably began to appear among individual people even before the exile. What served as the basis for hope that the power of Sheol could be overcome? Perhaps the story of Abraham, who experienced the power of the world of shadows and, with God's help, was freed from this power. Or perhaps prophetic experience: for prophets, like no one else, vividly experienced the reality of that life-giving breath of God without which there is no human person as the image of God. In any case, even before the exile there was apparently an understanding in the Yahwist community that God and death are incompatible. The Kingdom of God, however it was understood in the pre-exilic period, was by definition a kingdom of life, and life in all its fullness. Sheol, the world of shadows, on the contrary, was a kingdom of death, a world where it was impossible to live and where the human person nevertheless was not allowed to die completely in order to depart once and for all into nonbeing. It is not surprising that such a mocking likeness of life did not fit at all with God's mercy in the consciousness of the faithful. This confidence in God's mercy apparently became the basis of the psalm's confidence in overcoming death and the power of Sheol, the world of shadows, over the human person. Later, already after the exile, this confidence took the form of faith in the general resurrection.