I did in fact find the inns in Bohemia, in certain places infested, but not with bandits and cut-throats.
CHAPTER XII
ROCK SEPULCHRES
A noteworthy distinction exists between the countless rock-tombs in Palestine and those equally countless in Egypt. In the former there has not been found a single inscription to record the name of the occupant, whereas among the latter not one was unnamed.
The reason probably was that the Jew had no expectation of existing in a state after death, and those of his family he put away in their holes in the rocks had ceased to be to him anything more than a recollection. All his hopes, his ambition, were limited to this life and to the glorification of his nation. The highest blessing he could personally reckon on was that his days might be long in the land which the Lord his God would give him.
The horizon of the Egyptian, on the other hand, was full of anticipation of a life of the spirit when parted from the body. "Instead of the acres of inscriptions which cover the tombs of Egypt," says Dean Stanley, "not a single letter has been found in any ancient sepulchre of Palestine."
When the Israelites escaped from the iron furnace of Egypt, they carried with them so intense an abhorrence of all that savoured of Misraim that they put away from them polytheism and repudiated idolatry; they swept away as well the doctrine of life after death, such as dominated the Egyptian mind, that they might focus all their desires on this present life.
"Let me bury my dead out of my sight," expressed the feeling of the
Israelite before and after the Exodus.
The patriarchs had no conception of the resurrection of the body. The idea was unknown to them. Their faith did not even embrace a belief in the immortality of the soul. A passage in Job (xix. 25-27) has been adduced to prove the contrary, but it does so only because it is a mistranslation, and was manipulated by the translators according to their own preconceptions. Even the word rendered Redeemer has no such signification, it means "the Avenger of Blood." It was probably through contact with other nations that had a wider hope, that slowly and haltingly the conception of a prolonged existence after death made its way among the Jews.
Christianity invested the body with a sacredness undreamt of under the Old Covenant, and gave assurance, not of a continued existence after death alone, but of a resuscitation of the body. "If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable." "As in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive."