Immortality—Belief of the Ancient Hebrews.
By J. H. Pettingell
We find among the early Hebrews no trace whatever of the doctrine of the natural immortality of man, for the good reason, that they were more directly under the teaching of divine inspiration than any other people. They did have notions, more or less distinct, of a future life—not on the ground of the natural immortality of the soul, but through the redemption of the soul and body together. It was the object of their divinely ordained sacrificial system to foreshadow this great truth, that man needs to be redeemed from the death to which all are subject on account of sin. Their hope of living again, so far as they laid hold of it, was in a resurrection from the dead by Divine Power, and not, according to the heathen ideas, on account of the living nature of the human soul. As they came under the demoralizing influences of the nations with which they had intercourse, they imbibed many of their false and superstitious notions concerning the dead. It was expressly to keep them from the corrupting power of these false notions, that they were segregated, and cut off as much as possible from intercommunication and association with them. They were forbidden to practice their rites, and, especially, under pain of death, to practice those delusions of the devil—necromancy, witchcraft, and the like—which so commonly prevailed throughout the Gentile world. And to the very last, though they became sadly corrupted in their latter days, they were kept more free from the ghostly superstitions of the heathen than any other people on the face of the earth. They regarded the sheol into which all men, whatever their character, descended at death, as a region, or rather a state of silence, darkness, and utter unconsciousness, until God shall awaken them by his almighty power to live again. While, by the rites of their religion, and by divine communications through their prophets, they were taught to look beyond the present life, and by faith to lay hold of that mysterious, undefined, future good in reserve for them, and yet to be more fully revealed; and while they believed that the wicked should tremble in view of a future judgment and of remediless destruction; yet their ideas of anything beyond this life, even in the case of the most advanced, were exceedingly vague, and the great mass appear to have been hardly at all influenced by them. The motives and sanctions of their divine law and system of religion were pre-eminently earthly and temporal. The rewards of virtue and obedience were health, abundant harvests, numerous progeny, length of days, and general prosperity; and the penalty of sin and disobedience was just the reverse of these—drought, famine, disease, pain, sorrow, and death. No doubt, there was involved in these promised blessings, and especially in the promise so oft repeated that the righteous should prolong his days, possess the earth, etc., a deeper meaning than at first appeared. Here was the germ of that gospel truth yet to be revealed through Christ, of everlasting life in the kingdom of God, yet to be established on this renewed earth; and in the threatening of evil, and of death itself, there were doubtless intimations of that second death which follows the future judgment of the wicked, and from which there is no possible recall. But these higher truths were not distinctly apprehended till they were brought fully to light in the gospel. Warburton, in his "Divine Legation," says: "The doctrine of a future state of rewards and punishments is not to be found in, nor did it make a part of, the divine legation of Moses." Bishop Lowth, in his Lectures, says that "no explicit mention of immortal spirits" is to be found in the Hebrew poets. Dr. Harmer says: "Many of the Jews understood the life of the world to come in a literal sense;" that is, they believed in a literal resurrection from the dead, and in a real substantial life, and not in any such ghostly life of the spirit only, as was commonly imagined by the heathen. It does, indeed, seem strange to those who are thoroughly possessed by the Platonic idea of the immortality of the soul as distinct from the body, and who try to find some support for it in the Bible, that the Jews, who of all others might be supposed to be well instructed in this "fundamental truth of religion," as it is called, should be so unsophisticated and innocent of any such idea. It puzzles them. It ought to lead them to inquire whether the idea—so far from being fundamental—ought to have any place whatever in any system of religion, as it certainly did not in that which was divinely given by Moses. Professor Ernst Stahelin, in "The Foundation of our Faith," says: "Moses and Confucius did not expressly teach the immortality of the soul; nay, they seemed purposely to avoid entering upon the subject. They simply took it for granted." How does he know they took it for granted? He would better have said, As for Moses, he did not teach it simply because, as God's servant, he had no such doctrine to teach. It was Satan's doctrine, not God's truth; therefore he "purposely avoided" it. The author of "Ecce Homo," himself a believer in his heathen dogma, on pp. 35 and 36, says: "It is surprising that the early Jews, to whom the sense of God was so strong, and who were familiar with the conception of an eternal being, should yet have been behind, rather than before other nations, in suspecting the immortality of the soul. The Greek did not even in the earliest times believe death to be annihilation, though he thought it fatal to all joy and vigor; but the early Jews, the legislator himself, and most of the psalmists, limit their hopes and fears to the present life, and compare man to the 'beasts that perish.'" The suspicion of immortality appears in the later prophets—that suspicion which Christ himself was to develop into a glorious confidence. A glorious confidence in what? Not in the immortality of the soul of man. That doctrine is not found in the later prophets, nor in the gospel of Christ; but in the Christian doctrine of the immortality of the whole man through a resurrection from the dead, by the almighty power of God, and by virtue of the death and resurrection of Christ the Saviour. It was not the ghostly immortality of disembodied spirits, but a living again of resurrected saints to possess this renewed earth and to hold it forever. Dr. G. D. Boardman, in his "Creative Week," page 215, makes the following admission, though he seems reluctant to do it: "And yet—for I would be candid—I must add that not a single passage, from Genesis to Revelation, teaches, so far as I am aware, the doctrine of man's natural immortality. On the other hand, holy writ emphatically declares that God only hath immortality; that is to say, God alone is naturally, inherently, in his own essence and nature, immortal. He alone is the I AM, having this as his name forever, his memorial to all generations. If then man is immortal, it is because immortality has been bestowed on him. He is immortal, not because he was created so, but because he has become so, deriving his deathlessness from him who alone hath immortality;" and—he should have added—only by the regenerating power of the Holy Spirit and a new birth and a resurrection from the dead through the Saviour, as revealed in the gospel. It was not till after the return of the Jews from their long captivity, where they imbibed many heathen notions, and after the close of the sacred canon, which had hitherto been the foundation of their religious faith, that they began to think of the soul as a separate essence, and to entertain the fables of the pagan world respecting its separate existence after death. Hence in the Apocrypha, and in the Mishna and Gemara of the Talmud, and in the writings of Josephus, who was a Pharisee and a Platonist, as the Pharisees generally were, we find here and there traces of such notions. But there is no uniformity nor consistency of teaching in these writings, nor in the later writings of their Rabbins. By careful scrutiny one may find, mixed with much that is true and in accord with the Old Testament doctrine, many passages, here and there, which favor the Grecian philosophy, as well as vague hints that he may construe either way as he may himself be inclined. Dr. Pusey, in his "Analysis of the Book of Enoch," maintains that it is made up of contributions from several authors, and can be quoted on either side of this question, because it expresses both the belief of the Pharisees in the endless suffering of the wicked, and of the orthodox Jewish church in the everlasting life of the righteous only, and the destruction of the wicked.—The Life Everlasting, by Rev. J. H. Pettingell.