(b) The Resurrection. But generations of faithful Israelites passed, and the Messiah did not come. Would they miss the glory when it came? At least since the time of the Syrian persecution (B.C. 168-165)— the time of the Apocalypse of Daniel— it was taught that death formed no in- superable barrier to the inheritance of tlie King- dom. Probably the author of Daniel (12=') had in
' The Jerusalem Talmud {Taan. 64a) remarks on Ex 162= that 'if Israel only kept one Sabbath according to the command- ment, the Messiah would immediately come.' See Ederslieim's Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah, vol. ii. p. 713.
view mainly (we cannot say exclusively) those Israelites who had sealed their fidelity to the law of Jahweh with their blood, but it may be taken for certain that, long before the time represented by the Gospels, all idea of the blessings of the King- dom being restricted to members of the holy nation who had suffered death for their fidelity (if such an idea was ever entertained), had completely disap- peared. It was taught that there would be a resurrection of the riffhteous (Lk W*), i.e. of those who kept the ' Law ' and the ' Tradition.'
(c) Hades, Gehenna, Paradise. There is nowhere in the Gospels an explicit statement of what was held regarding the state of the dead ; but four times (Mt 11=^ 16", Lk 10'= 16=^) the word Hades (Ai'Sijs) occurs. In the LXX this word is the almost invariable equivalent of Sin^fi ; and when Jesus used it without comment, it must be held to liave conveyed to His hearers the associations proper to that word. The NT as well as the OT * is dominated by a view of things in which the modern idea that annihilation may be the fate of some men has no place. The dead are in a land of darkness and forgetfulness, cut off from knowledge of afl'airs human and Divine. Still, in this condi- tion— at most the pale reflexion of full-blooded life — they exist. Two things, however, must be observed : (i.) There is in the OT itself a marked, if not systematized, protest against the idea that permanent detention in Sheol or Hades can be the fate of the righteous, who had found their portion in the living God (see esii. Ps 16 and 73 and Job 14 and 19). Historically, doubtless, the experience of suffering under the various oppressors of the nation (Assyrian, Chaldajan, Grseco-Syrian) had much to do with the development of this protest ; but it is probably a mistake to suppose that it was when they were actually suffering under the yoke of the world-powers that the people of Jahweh adopted from foreign sources much or anything that bore on the problem of what lay beyond death. This caution applies specially to the rela- tion of Hebrew thought to the mythological ideas of Babylon or Egypt. The impregnation of the Hebrew spirit with ideas coming from these sources dates in all probability from a much earlier period than the 6th cent. B.C. All we can say for certain, perhaps, is that the experience of national humiliation quickened in a special degree the peculiar Hebrew genius, leading it at this time (say from the 6th cent, onwards) to place the peculiar stamp of the Jahweh faith on mythical ideas or pictures, which in some cases it had carried with it since the days of its infancy in Mesopotamia, (ii.) Although there is no hint in the OT itself of effect being given to moral distinctions between the wicked and the godly in Hades itself, yet the suggestion of a possible escape for the godly from the gloom of the underworld could not but raise, and ultimately decide, another question, viz. whether the distinc- tion between the godly and the wicked was not observed from the moment of death. For perhaps about 100 years before Christ the idea of separate compartments in Hades, for the godly and the wicked respectively, had more or less prevailed (see Apocalyptic Literature, esp. the part dealing with the Book of Enoch). Obviously our Lord could not have uttered the parable of the Ricli Man and Lazarus (Lk 16'»«r-), or said to the penitent malefactor (23"), 'To-day shalt thou be with me in Paradise,' had He not been addressing people accustomed to the idea that in the inter- mediate state, previous to the resurrection and the final judgment, moral distinctions were accorded a real, if incomplete, recognition. It is obvious
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from the entire tenor of our Lord's references (see esp. the instructive passage Mt 5-"') to Gehenna that He ^.poke to those to whom tliis term repre- sented the utmost condemnation and punishment. It represented the fate of those who should still be enemies of Jahweh in that day when Jerusalem should be renewed by righteousness, and all flesh (i.e. all living) should go out and behold the car- cases of those who had transgressed, for ' their worm shall not die, neither shall their fire be quenched' (Is 66^'')- See artt. GEHENNA and Paradise.
(d) The Final Judgment. In our Christian minds, as with the NT writers, the idea of the Resurrection is inseparably associated with that of the Judgment which follows it. In the main track of OT thought, indeed, this association did not exist. The habit of conceiving the subject of the Divine favour or punislimeut rather as a nation than as a number of individuals, made it possible, or even natural, practically to ignore the individual side of the problem of life and death, and the distinction, natural to us, between this world and that which is to come is represented in the OT mainly by the distinction between this life ^vith God and this life without Him. Under this view of things the prevailing conception of judg- ment in OT times is that of a manifestation of Jahweh's righteousness (whether it be through His