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people of the book
[ 41 ]
became a prominent theme in European philosophy to the end of the eighteenth
century.
Central to Judaism is the notion of a single God. The new Jewish philosophers
were intent on explaining the nature of this God, his relationship to the created
world, and his special relationship to the Hebrew people. These explanations
begin in Genesis, the first book in the Hebrew Bible, which gives two accounts
of the creation. One portrays God as an all-powerful being, who, first, created
a “basic” world from nothing and then over a period of six consecutive “days”
embellished it, adding the sun, the moon, and the different species of plants and
animals. The creation of the world culminated in the creation of man in God’s
“own image” (Gen. 1:26). The other account tells the familiar story of the first
human couple, Adam and Eve, and their ultimate expulsion from the Garden
of Eden.
Both of these stories
profoundly influenced Western conceptions of human
nature and personal identity. The first of them, by stressing the creation of man in
the image of God, encouraged philosophers to think about humans as they thought
about God, as well as the other way round. The second of them had even greater
significance. The idea that humans fell from a previous state of grace in which
they were destined for immortality encouraged the search for traces of good and
evil in human nature. It also encouraged thinkers to assume that humans are
destined to return to their original state.
In Genesis, what led to Adam and Eve’s demise was, on the one hand, their
desire for heightened knowledge, particularly of good and evil, and, on the other, their
disobedient, sinful natures. Prior to their expulsion from the Garden, they had been
immortal. The wages of their sin were death, a debt handed down from
generation to generation. What, though, is the ultimate significance of death? Is
there any way that humans can recapture the immortality that they lost? These
questions became central.
In most of the Hebrew Bible prior to the book of Daniel, there is an implicit
assumption that bodily death is the end. Individual survival, let alone immortal-
ity, is not an option. The exceptions to this rule are intimations of personal sur-
vival of bodily death in Wisdom (2:23-24), Ezekiel (e.g., 37), and Isaiah. However,
in Daniel (12:2), not only is there commitment to survival of bodily death, but a
new idea is introduced: resurrection. For instance, it is written that “many of
those that sleep in the dust of the earth will awake, some to eternal life, others to
reproaches, to everlasting abhorrence.” When Daniel asks for the meaning of
these events, he is told, “But you, go on to the end; you shall rest, and arise to
your destiny at the end of the days.” When ideas such as these appear in Daniel,
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