In this connection, the revelation made by the angel in his prophecy, recorded in the twelfth chapter of the Book of Daniel, concerning the things which should happen in the Messianic times, must not be passed without notice. It reads as follows: "And many of the sleepers of the dust of the ground shall awake, those to life everlasting, and these to shame, to contempt everlasting. And they that are wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament, and they that turn many to righteousness, as the stars for ever and ever." No one can deny that a judgment, in which reward and punishment shall be distributed according to merit, is here clearly foretold. The meaning of the text, taken with the connection, is, that when the Messiah appears and establishes his kingdom the righteous shall enjoy a bodily resurrection upon the earth to honor and happiness, but the wicked shall be left below in darkness and death.3 This seems to imply, fairly enough, that until the advent of the Messiah none of the dead existed consciously in a state of retribution. The doctrine of the passage, as is well known, was held by some of the Jews at the beginning of the Christian era, and, less distinctly, for about two centuries previous. Before that time no traces of it can be found in their history. Now, had a doctrine of such intense interest and of such vast importance as this been a matter of revelation, it seems hardly possible that it should have been confined to one brief and solitary text, that it should have flashed up for a single moment so brilliantly, and then vanished for three or four centuries in utter darkness. Furthermore, nearly one half of the Book of Daniel is written in the Chaldee tongue, and the other half in the Hebrew, indicating that it had two authors, who wrote their respective portions at different periods. Its critical and minute details of events are history rather than prophecy. The greater part of the book was undoubtedly written as late as about a hundred and sixty years before Christ, long after the awful simplicity and solitude of the original Hebrew theology had been marred and corrupted by an intermixture of the doctrines of those heathen nations with whom the Jews had been often brought in contact. Such being the facts in the case, the text is evidently without force to prove a divine revelation of the doctrine it teaches.
In the twenty second chapter of the Gospel by Matthew, Jesus says to the Sadducees, "But as touching the resurrection of the dead, have ye not read that which was spoken unto you by God, saying, I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob? God is not the God of the dead, but of the living." The passage to which reference is made is written in the third chapter of the Book of Exodus. In order to ascertain the force of the Savior's argument, the extent of meaning it had in his mind, and the amount of knowledge attributed by it to Moses, it will be necessary to determine first the definite purpose he had
3 Wood, The Last Things, p. 45.
in view in his reply to the Sadducees, and how he proposed to accomplish it. We shall find that the use he made of the text does not imply that Moses had the slightest idea of any sort of future life for man, much less of an immortal life of blessedness for the good and of suffering for the bad. We should suppose, beforehand, that such would be the case, since upon examining the declaration cited, with its context, we find it to be simply a statement made by Jehovah explaining who he was, that he was the ancient national guardian of the Jews, the Lord God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. This does not seem to contain the most distant allusion to the immortality of man, or to have suggested any such thought to the mind of Moses. It should be distinctly understood from the outset that Jesus did not quote this passage from the Pentateuch as proving any thing of itself, or as enabling him to prove any thing by it directly, but as being of acknowledged authority to the Sadducees themselves, to form the basis of a process of reasoning. The purpose he had in view, plainly, was to convince the Sadducees either of the possibility or of the actuality of the resurrection of the dead: its possibility, if we assume that by resurrection he meant the Jewish doctrine of a material restoration, the reunion of soul and body; its actuality, if we suppose he meant the conscious immortality of the soul separate from the body. If the resurrection was physical, Christ demonstrates to the Sadducees its possibility, by refuting the false notion upon which they based their denial of it. They said, The resurrection of the body is impossible, because the principle of life, the consciousness, has utterly perished, and the body cannot live alone. He replied, It is possible, because the soul has an existence separate from the body, and, consequently, may be reunited to it. You admit that Jehovah said, after they were dead, I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob: but he is the God of the living, and not of the dead, for all live unto him. You must confess this. The soul, then, survives the body, and a resurrection is possible. It will be seen that this implies nothing concerning the nature or duration of the separate existence, but merely the fact of it. But, if Christ meant by the resurrection of the dead as we think he did the introduction of the disembodied and conscious soul into a state of eternal blessedness, the Sadducees denied its reality by maintaining that no such thing as a soul existed after bodily dissolution. He then proved to them its reality in the following manner. You believe for Moses, to whose authority you implicitly bow, relates it that God said, "I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob," and this, long after they died. But evidently he cannot be said to be the God of that which does not exist: therefore their souls must have been still alive. And if Jehovah was emphatically their God, their friend, of course he will show them his loving kindness. They are, then, in a conscious state of blessedness. The Savior does not imply that God said so much in substance, nor that Moses intended to teach, or even knew, any thing like it, but that, by adding to the passage cited a premise of his own, which his hearers granted to be true, he could deduce so much from it by a train of new and unanswerable reasoning. His opponents were compelled to admit the legitimacy of his argument, and, impressed by its surpassing beauty and force, were silenced, if not convinced. The credit of this cogent proof of human immortality, namely, that God's love for man is a pledge and warrant of his eternal blessedness a proof whose originality and significance set it far beyond all parallel is due to the dim gropings of no Hebrew prophet, but to the inspired insight of the great Founder of Christianity.
The various passages yet unnoticed which purport to have been uttered by Jehovah or at his command, and which are urged to show that the reality of a retributive life after death is a revealed doctrine of the Old Testament, will be found, upon critical examination, either to owe their entire relevant force to mistranslation, or to be fairly refuted by the reasonings already advanced. Professor Stuart admits that he finds only one consideration to show that Moses had any idea of a future retribution; and that is, that the Egyptians expressly believed it; and he is not able to comprehend how Moses, who dwelt so long among them, should be ignorant of it.4 The reasoning is obviously inconsequential. It is not certain that the Egyptians held this doctrine in the time of Moses: it may have prevailed among them before or after, and not during, that period. If they believed it at that time, it may have been an esoteric doctrine, with which he did not become acquainted. If they believed it, and he knew it, he might have classed it with other heathen doctrines, and supposed it false. And, even if he himself believed it, he might possibly not have inculcated it upon the Israelites; and the question is, what he did actually teach, not what he knew.
The opinions of the Jews at the time of the Savior have no bearing upon the point in hand, because they were acquired at a later period than that of the writing of the records we are now considering. They were formed, and gradually grew in consistency and favor, either by the natural progress of thought among the Jews themselves, or, more probably, by a blending of the intimations of the Hebrew Scriptures with Gentile speculations, the doctrines of the Egyptians, Hindus, and Persians. We leave this portion of the subject, then, with the following proposition. In the canonic books of the Old Dispensation there is not a single genuine text, claiming to come from God, which teaches explicitly any doctrine whatever of a life beyond the grave. That doctrine as it existed among the Jews was no part of their pure religion, but was a part of their philosophy. It did not, as they held it, imply any thing like our present idea of the immortality of the soul reaping in the spiritual world what it has sowed in the physical. It simply declared the existence of human ghosts amidst unbroken gloom and stillness in the cavernous depths of the earth, without reward, without punishment, without employment, scarcely with consciousness, as will immediately appear.
We proceed to the second general division of the subject. What does the Old Testament, apart from the revelation claimed to be contained in it, and regarding only those portions of it which are confessedly a collection of the poetry, history, and philosophy of the Hebrews, intimate concerning a future state of existence? Examining these writings with an unbiased mind, we discover that in different portions of them there are large variations and opposition of opinion. In some books we trace an undoubting belief in certain rude notions of the future condition of souls; in other books we encounter unqualified denials of every such thought. "Man lieth down and riseth not," sighs the despairing Job. "The dead cannot praise God, neither any that go down into darkness," wails the repining Psalmist. "All go to one place,"
4 Exegetical Essays, (Andover, 1830,) p. 108.
and "the dead know not any thing," asserts the disbelieving Preacher. These inconsistencies we shall not stop to point out and comment upon. They are immaterial to our present purpose, which is to bring together, in their general agreement, the sum and substance of the Hebrew ideas on this subject.
The separate existence of the soul is necessarily implied by the distinction the Hebrews made between the grave, or sepulchre, and the under world, or abode of shades. The Hebrew words bor and keber mean simply the narrow place in which the dead body is buried; while Sheol represents an immense cavern in the interior of the earth where the ghosts of the deceased are assembled. When the patriarch was told that his son Joseph was slain by wild beasts, he cried aloud, in bitter sorrow, "I will go down to Sheol unto my son, mourning."