Are there examples of resurrection in the\u00a0Old Testament?<\/p>\n
No. Not really. Well, sort of. OK, yes, but it depends on how you look at it.<\/p>\n
Resurrection is pretty central to the New Testament, in case you haven\u2019t noticed. Yet searching for that kind<\/em> of resurrection in the Old Testament\u00a0will bring you up empty-handed.<\/p>\n We do have one lengthy passage, Daniel 12, which is an important text for understanding the development of Jewish faith later in the Second Temple period (specifically here, in the second century BCE) when \u201cresurrection\u201d of individuals was in the air generally within Judaism (more below).<\/p>\n 2 Maccabees is another example of a text from roughly the same period as Daniel and which mentions the future resurrection of the dead as if no one needs it explained to them (e.g., see 2 Maccabees 7:9)<\/p>\n Neither\u00a0Isaiah 25:7 (the Lord will \u201cswallow up death forever\u201d) nor 26:19 (\u201cYour dead shall live, their corpses shall rise\u201d), however, seem to me to be \u201cresurrection from the dead\u201d texts.<\/p>\n The first seems to echo Canaanite mythology about Baal who hosts a victory banquet after his defeat of\u00a0the sea god Yamm (representing chaos).<\/p>\n The second passage is a more possible candidate, but if both are read in the larger context of Isaiah, their metaphorical meaning seems clear: deliverance from the \u201csure death\u201d of foreign oppression\/threat. At any rate, even with these texts, the silence of the Old Testament on future resurrection is deafening.<\/p>\n A perspective on the Adam story that I lay out\u00a0in The Evolution of Adam<\/a> Just as Adam was created by God out of dust and placed into a garden paradise, and remaining there was contingent upon obedience (don\u2019t eat from the Tree of Knowledge), so, too, Israel was created by God from Egyptian slavery, placed into the paradise-like Canaan, and remaining there was contingent upon obedience (to the covenant, the Law of Moses).<\/p>\n This reading of the Adam story is not mutually exclusive of others, but it\u00a0has\u00a0rabbinic precedent<\/a> Remember that Adam was warned that \u201con the\u00a0day\u201d he eats of the forbidden fruit, he would die (Genesis 2:17). Now, the fact of the matter is that \u201con the\u00a0day\u201d Adam and Eve do not die so much as they are banished<\/em> from the Garden<\/em> (Genesis 3:22-24).<\/p>\n That banishment bars them from the Tree of Life, their heretofore source of immortality, which is only in the Garden. The Lord places two cherubim at the entrance, which is on the east<\/em> (hold that thought) to stand guard to make sure the doomed couple doesn\u2019t\u00a0go do back in and eat from the Tree of Life.<\/p>\n To be in the Garden means access to the Tree of Life. To be banished from the Garden to the east<\/em> (keep holding that thought) means \u201cdeath.\u201d<\/p>\n Fast forward to Deuteronomy 30. Here we are at the final stage of Israel\u2019s 40 years of\u00a0wandering in the\u00a0desert, and\u00a0Moses is giving the people his last series of pep talks before they\u00a0enter Canaan and take over the land as their own.<\/p>\n The whole chapter is worth a closer look, but we get to the main point within verses 15-18. There we see that \u201clife\u201d means being in the land, and \u201cdeath\u201d means exile\u2014the same notion we see in the\u00a0Adam story.<\/p>\n If Israel will continue to obey God\u2019s commands, the reward is life, which Deuteronomy 30 explains to be prosperity, increased population, and longevity for the people as a whole (not individuals) in the land.<\/p>\n Likewise, disobedience\u00a0<\/em>to God\u2019s commands yields \u201cdeath and adversity,\u201d i.e., \u201cyou shall perish; you shall not live long in the land that you are crossing the Jordan to enter and possess\u201d (v. 18).<\/p>\n So where does resurrection in the Old Testament come in? Give me a sec. I\u2019m getting there (or maybe you\u2019re there already).<\/p>\n Flip to the chapter in the\u00a0Old Testament that certainly is on\u00a0most people\u2019s\u00a0top 10 list of weird passages: Ezekiel 37:1-14 and the \u201cvalley of dry bones.\u201d<\/p>\n In a vision, Ezekiel sees a valley with dry bones that miraculously come back to life. Bones will be covered again with sinew and flesh, and God will \u201cput breath\u201d into those bones.<\/p>\n God brings to life through \u201cbreath.\u201d Feel free to think of the Adam story here (Genesis 2:7).<\/p>\n Anyway, as weird as Ezekiel is in general, and chapter 37 in particular, at least the meaning of this vision is spelled out for us:<\/p>\n Thus says the Lord: I am going to open your graves, and bring you up from your graves<\/span>, O my people; and I will bring you back to\u00a0the\u00a0land of Israel <\/span>(v. 12).<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Death isn\u2019t physical but metaphorical. The dry bones represent Israel in exile (the grave). Where is exile? In Babylon, which is in the east<\/em> (thank you for holding that thought).<\/p>\n To be in exile, in the east, outside the land of Canaan, is death. To be in the land is life. The Adam story is a 2-chapter summary of Israel\u2019s national plight.<\/p>\n So now we finally get to the\u00a0resurrection part of all this.<\/p>\n If moving from the land into exile is to move from life to death, returning to the land is (all together now) to be brought back to life, to be raised from the dead (as Ezekiel\u2019s prophecy lays out for us).<\/p>\n And that is where we find resurrection in the Old Testament:\u00a0<\/strong>returning\u00a0to the land, where God and his temple are, where there is peace and security, the land promised to Abraham (Genesis 12), the land \u201cflowing with milk and honey.\u201d<\/p>\n So what about physical resurrection in the New Testament? Where does that idea come from? At least in part from developments in Judaism after the exile, especially in the 2nd century BCE. [Quick note: Jon D. Levenson in his wonderful book Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel<\/a> Faithful Jews are being martyred by the Seleucid King Antiochus. 2 Maccabees relays a story that captures the crisis, where seven sons are executed in a gruesome fashion for remaining obedient to the law rather than eat unclean food and reject God. And earlier were several centuries of faithful Jews who might not have been martyred but who died without seeing God\u00a0fully\u00a0<\/em>restore Israel as a nation.<\/p>\n Israel\u2019s exile, though ending in 539 BCE, still continued in a manner of speaking for centuries thereafter. Ezekiel\u2019s \u201cresurrection\u201d was not complete until Israel was \u201cfully\u201d in the land, which meant restoring Jewish independence.<\/p>\n To be sure, God would one day come through for his people. And those who died waiting for the \u201cconsolation of Israel\u201d (to borrow Simeon\u2019s phrase in Luke 2:25) would not just miss out but, as an act of divine justice, would be raised to take part in the messianic age.<\/p>\n Fast forward to the Gospels. It is surely no accident that all four Gospels introduce Jesus\u2019s public ministry by citing the opening verses of Isaiah 40, one of the key texts in the Old Testament announcing that God is about to bring the captives back from Babylon\u2014back home\u2026back to the land of Canaan\u2026back to the place of life, not death.<\/p>\n Why do all four Gospels introduce Jesus\u2019s ministry by citing this major \u201cend of exile\u201d announcement? Probably because whatever Jesus is going to do probably has something to do with bringing an end to Israel\u2019s exile\/death.<\/p>\n Jesus\u2019s individual physical<\/em> resurrection fulfills Israel\u2019s corporate<\/em>\u00a0national<\/em> story by creating a new people, a new nation\u2014a new humanity\u2014where resurrection is a present spiritual reality and a future hope for each one who is \u201cin Christ\u201d (as Paul puts it).<\/p>\n So, we move from (1) resurrection as nationalistic and metaphorical in the Old Testament, to a (2) resurrection that also includes individuals physically in response to crisis by the 2nd century BCE, to (3) the New Testament, where both are realized and redefined in Jesus.<\/p>\n If anything, this should remind us how New Testament theology is more than a process of back-referencing passages from the Old Testament, but must also include postexilic developments in Jewish thought.<\/p>\n The resurrection from the\u00a0dead in the New Testament isn\u2019t \u201cin\u201d the Old. It grows out of<\/em> and transforms<\/em>\u00a0an Old Testament metaphor, with a middle stage in Second Temple Judaism.<\/p>\n The New Testament<\/a> writers do that a lot.<\/p>\n<\/div>\nBut this brings me to where I think resurrection is very much part of the story\u00a0of Israel<\/strong>, and it goes like this.<\/h2>\n
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Physical resurrection of individuals isn\u2019t the hot topic of conversation in the Old Testament. Revival of a nation is.<\/h2>\n
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The New Testament twist is that the resurrection of Jesus\u00a0draws together\u00a0both the\u00a0national and individual dimensions <\/em>while also redefining them.<\/em><\/h2>\n