NOTES for Ma2 12:45

The biblical books tell us nothing or almost nothing on the fate of the deaths afterlife. And the little we know, hardly we can consider as an element proper to the Yahvist’ revelations. The representations of hell, the kingdom of the dead, the world of darkness, which sooner or later awaits everyone, existed to all the people of the antique Middle East, and not only to them. There is nothing original, nothing proper to yahvism in them. One could say that the yahvist revelation is entirely and completely concentrated on the resurrection, which awaits for everybody on the day of Judgment, when each receives by merit accordingly to his life lived on earth. And what happens before the Judgment? The Bible does not answer this question, sending us towards the traditional representations of before Bible.

But all the same at the period of Hellenism, a few centuries before the coming of Christ, in the Jewish environment, there were certain representations on the fate of the righteous after death. Their essence led to the fact that, contrary to those who did not know the way of righteousness, the righteous avoids hell. By God’s grace at the moment of death he dives into a certain sleep, similar to the earthly, to wake up on the Day of Judgment and receive the deserved reward.

So he avoids the painful existence in the world of darkness, of which can be called life, only with big stretching. In these representations based not on biblical texts, but on Jewish tradition, obviously is reflected the understanding of the fact that the merciful God cannot leave His person to his own fate, delivering him to the power of the world of darkness; idea originating from the representations of the Kingdom, as plenitude of God's life, in which there is no place for death.