Death, Burial, and Rebirth in the Religions of Antiquity (review)

Jon Davies. Death, Burial, and Rebirth in the Religions of Antiquity. Religion in the First Christian Centuries 4. London and New York: Routledge, 1999. Pp. xii + 246.

In this book Professor Davies studies the thanatology of the ancient Near East, Judaism, early Christianity, and Greece and Rome--the lands over which Abraham and his heirs roamed. He seeks to determine the diverse thanatological strains in early Christian belief about death; his thesis is arresting: thanatology is conditioned by cosmology.

In Egyptian cosmology, for instance, humans have been created lovingly. Although half the population died by age thirty, there were no boundaries between the world of the living and the dead. Life's end was but a stage in a continuing journey; death was followed by a series of tests and trials; judgement followed, and then salvation--becoming one with Osiris.

In Persian Zoroastrianism there are clear boundaries between life and death, established for the cosmos and the individual by the deities in pitched battle with each other, the wholly good Ahura Mazda and the wholly evil Ahriman. Created good by Ahura Mazda as free moral agents, men and women are on a journey, benefitted and battered by the forces of good and evil. Death was the decisive moment, for at the last Judgment Ahura Mazda permanently separates the evil from the good, transforming them and the world into "a new form of material existence, transcending the dualism of good/evil . . ." (45).

In Canaan and Mesopotamia the prevailing thanatology is somber. Men and women were created as an afterthought, slaves of the gods. There is neither judgment nor reward here or hereafter--at best any afterlife is a shadowy existence.

For the pre-exilic Israelites, humans and their universe are created good, but their theology of death is laced with ambivalence. The funerary archaeology raises a question, "Are the dead, dead?" (82). Because of the Israelite conviction that creation is completed and perfected by the creation of humans (the sixth day), the cults of the dead presuppose that the dead have an intercessory relationship with God. Sheol awaits most at death, but two humans, Elijah and Enoch, are taken alive into heaven, the ancestral gathering place. The biblical authors, however, are restrained about place and description, because of the ease with which their Mesopotamian and Canaanite neighbors used the cults of the dead to manipulate the gods.

Restraints loosened gradually during the Second Temple period. Epitaphs begin to evince "a blessing and the hope of life after death" (111). Resurrection begins to concretize the hope, as the author of the Book of Daniel and the increasingly numerous pseudepigrapha and their authors testify. The reason lies at hand: A series of Jewish revolts, short-lived victories like that of the Mac-cabees and the Hasmonean dynasty, and long-term defeats like those at the hands of the Romans. The old biblical reticence was unable to hold out against the heavy hands of the Greeks and Romans. Enter "the righteous men from the past, such as Noah, Daniel and those in Pseudo-Philo . . ." (119), the messiahs, and the martyr-heroes like the young men in 2 Macc (7.14-30), who are promised physical reassembly and resurrection.

The Greeks and Romans found abhorrent this apocalyptic strain in the Judaisms of the Second Temple. The Romans were simply not sure about survival after death, whereas the Greeks held to the unknowability of the divine world. As a result, both focused on the boundaries between mortality and immortality. There was "a permanent and usually futile but never abandoned 'boundary dispute'" between mortality and immortality (165). Within this boundary dispute the mystery religions flourished. All must die, of course, but it was possible to bridge the gulf between mortality and immortality. The route across the disputed boundary was ritual initiation into the life of a deity.

Christianity was imbued with both messianic/martyr-hero and mystery...