Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel: The Ultimate Victory of the God of Life (review)

Anyone familiar with Levenson’s previous works will discover that yet again he throws new light on regnant scholarly views and offers fresh insight into widely read biblical stories, and yet again his tour de force is elegant and accessible to specialists in all areas of religious studies. Engaging and shot through with a steadfast commitment to serious, critical theological thinking, his latest work demonstrates that the classical rabbinic expectation of resurrection is more continuous with the Bible than previously thought. Challenging the consensus that the resurrection of the dead has no early roots or sources in the Hebrew Bible, he argues that the origins of resurrection are by and large found therein and are not a foreign import. In other words, Zoroastrianism is not a major source of the Jewish belief in resurrection, and furthermore, despite the contention of many, it did not develop because of the theological crisis martyrdom posed. Resurrection of the dead, Levenson maintains, was not “a total novum” (218), born out of crisis or out of a burning need to address a specific matter. Rather, it emerged “out of a convergence of a number of biblical themes” and the coalescence of several traditions over “a centuries-long process.” It drew most centrally, but not exclusively, “on the long-standing conviction that God would yet again prove faithful to his promises of life for his people and that he had the stupendous might it would take to do so” (xiii).

To be sure, Levenson notes that the indirect influence of Zoroastrianism, “which affirmed a future resurrection of the dead, and the immediate trauma of persecution in the days of the Maccabees, when the faithful were put to death precisely for their faithfulness” (218), were the two factors that may have contributed to the development of the expectation of the resurrection of the dead in Second Temple Judaism. “To concentrate on them alone,” however, “is to miss both the rich praeparatio of antecedent tradition and the complex trajectory that resulted in a belief in resurrection among many Jews of the Second Temple era” (218).

The first chapter considers the theological role resurrection played in classical Judaism, a role that is not as dispensable as often imagined. Turning to the traditional prayer book, Levenson illustrates the distinction between the classical Jewish doctrine of resurrection that avows faith in the God who will maintain his covenant with his people, and thus restore “the flesh-and-blood people Israel to their land and station,” who will reverse “the very real tragedy of death” and usher in “a better world without it” (22), and modernist Jewish reformulations— perhaps distortions—of it. The Reform Movement’s effort to divest the tradition of the hope of resurrection is adduced in its Union Prayerbook. The focus of the early Reform thinkers’ replacement of the resurrection of the dead with the immortality of the soul—two different doctrines that are both found in classical Judaism—well suits, according to Levenson, the reformers’ rejection of “the national dimension of Jewish identity” and their embrace of a more individualistic worldview. He writes: “With this, the focus shifts dramatically from God’s covenantal faithfulness to his people Israel in history and onto the moral strivings of the deracinated, supposedly universal individual” (22).

The discussion of contemporary Jewish belief as reflected in the changes in the Union Prayerbook demonstrates how “powerful currents in the modern world undercut the Jewish belief in resurrection” (21), a belief that emerges out of an intimate engagement with Scripture. The discussion also underscores the modernist Jewish attempts to de-theologize the tradition and sets the stage for detecting the antecedents of the belief in resurrection in several biblical narratives.

Before delving into a detailed reading of specific scriptural passages, chapter 2, “Resurrection in the Torah?,” deals with rabbinic interpretations of verses of Torah to bolster belief in the expectation of an eschatological resurrection. Rabbinic...