NOTES for

All peoples in every age knew well from their own bitter experience that the power of the world of shadows, called Sheol in the Bible, over man is absolute. Indeed, no matter how long a person lived on earth, his life still turned out to be temporary, while the world of shadows, the kingdom of the dead, which awaited everyone at the end of his earthly path, swallowed him forever. Besides, there was nothing comforting in this world: the existence a person led there could be called life only with very great qualification. In the world of shadows a person had neither full self-consciousness nor memory left. But the authors of the biblical books quite early begin to guess that the power of Sheol, the world of shadows, over man is not absolute, that it can be overcome, and overcome precisely with God's help. The thought of the possibility of the general resurrection on the last day becomes generally accepted, of course, only in the post-exilic period, but it appears that the first intuitive guesses of this began to arise among individual people even before the exile. What served as the basis for hope that the power of Sheol could be overcome? Possibly the story of Abraham, who, having experienced the power of the world of shadows, was freed from that power with God's help. Or perhaps prophetic experience: the prophets, like no one else, vividly experienced the reality of that life-giving breath of God without which there is no person as the image of God. In any case, even before the exile, it appears, the Yahwist community understood that God and death are incompatible. The Kingdom of God, however it was understood in the pre-exilic period, was by definition the kingdom of life, and life in all its fullness. Sheol, the world of shadows, on the contrary, was the kingdom of death, a world where it was impossible to live and where a person nevertheless was not allowed to die completely and depart into nonbeing once and for all. It is no wonder that such a mocking likeness of life could in no way be combined in the consciousness of the faithful with God's mercy. This confidence in God's mercy apparently became the basis of the psalm's expressed confidence in overcoming death and the power over man of Sheol, the world of shadows. And later, after the exile, this confidence took the form of faith in the general resurrection.