Johnston,
Philip S. Shades of Sheol: Death and Afterlife
in the Old Testament.
Downers Grove
: Inter-Varsity Press, 2002. 288p, $20.00
That
the subject of death and afterlife is of perennial interest in
biblical and theological studies is nearly too obvious an observation.
The problem is that various theological traditions have come to
differing conclusions concerning the precise nature of death and the
afterlife. While both mainstream Western
Christianity and Eastern Orthodoxy have generally agreed on certain
aspects, not all theologians in either of these major divisions have
always agreed, and in modern Christendom, opinions have arisen which
do not accept the earlier consensus. More recent
cults and religious movements nearly always advance ideas of death and
afterlife which are not in accordance with that same earlier Christian
consensus. Even within conservative, evangelical
Christianity voices have arisen which question the eternity of hell
and the reality of the resurrection. Additionally,
many of the works which address this issue are written either
tendentiously from theological positions which produce a less than
adequate handling of the relevant texts, or are so technical that they
remain buried in various journals and are often accessible only to
scholars.
Philip
Johnston (currently Tutor of OT at Wycliffe Hall,
Oxford
) has produced a fine, semi-popular but still comprehensive study on
the subject of death and afterlife in the OT. In
his introduction, he states that his main concern is the difference in
the OT view of the subject and the NT. Scholars, he
suggests, have generally explained the difference by historical
development during the inter-testamental period. Traditional
Judaism and Christianity, on the other hand, have tended to read their
theological, and specifically eschatological conclusions back into the
OT texts, and so have placed undue limits on a proper understanding of
the OT texts. Having defined the problem,
Johnston
then proposes “to read and examine the Hebrew Bible in its own
cultural and religious setting, without importing later concepts”
(p. 16). As part of this, he also wishes to
demonstrate that the Israelite conceptions of death and afterlife are
significantly different from those of the rest of the ANE (thus
arguing against quite a bit of mainstream critical scholarship).
A
tall order indeed, but
Johnston
proceeds to provide a great deal of exegetical support for his
contentions. He organizes the book according to
various subjects under which he then discusses the relevant texts.
Johnston
’s topics are death in general, the realm of the dead, relations
between the living and dead, and the afterlife, and he includes both
material which he considers of “general interest” as well as more
detailed interaction with scholarship. These
sections reveal a good depth of mastery of the subject, and being well
footnoted, will be of interest to the more serious student, even
though Johnston himself admits that he has eliminated a fair amount of
technicalia in the interests of general readability. The
Hebrew is done according to standard transliteration, and the
arguments so framed that even one without a knowledge of Hebrew may
benefit from the discussion. There are also
summaries strategically placed at the end of each major section and
some chapters, and the nice thing about these summaries is that they
are concise, but truly summarize the wealth of material that Johnston
explicates (one could actually get the flow of the arguments from
these summaries, as I did, which then makes reading the chapters a
more pleasant experience). Essentially, the earlier
chapters provide the necessary background for interpreting the
clearest life after death and resurrection passages discussed in the
latter chapters.
Johnston
writes well, and I found his actual treatments of the various texts
fair and well balanced. While no author is without
bias, including
Johnston
, he is especially careful, following his stated purpose, to allow the
texts to speak for themselves. For example, on page
206-207, he argues exegetically and contextually that Psalm 17:15
almost certainly does not refer to seeing Yahweh after death, but
rather resting and awaking satisfied despite being surrounded by
enemies. In his treatment of the rather key passage
in Ezekiel 37:1-14, he correctly notes that the primary emphasis in
the passage is national restoration, not personal resurrection (though
I would perhaps have emphasized more that the idea of a personal
resurrection is certainly not inconsistent with the imagery of the
passage, and that the passage informs later reflection on the subject,
both canonical and extra-canonical).
What
he goes far in demonstrating, however, is that that although the OT
does not have a well developed theology of death and afterlife, being
primarily concerned with the relationship of the believer in this life
to Yahweh, it nevertheless, in a variety of texts, provides seeds (as
it were) which may be developed into such a theology, and particularly
the theological strains of the NT. Particularly
cogent was his discussion in chapter 9, as he examines Enoch and
Elijah, Psalms 16, 49, and 73, inter al.
Simply
put, death and afterlife were not major concerns of the OT writers.
They were concerned with the majesty and glory of Yahweh,
however, and of his covenant faithfulness to his people, and it is
this aspect of covenant faithfulness which seems to give rise to most
of the passages which hint that the afterlife is more than just a
powerless void or quasi-existence, and that the saints of God have a
future beyond simply the emptiness of Sheol.
All
in all, this book should be helpful both to the trained scholar and
the laymen seeking to have a better biblical/exegetical foundation for
understanding the nature of death. I have two
additional observations:
-
While
the nature of the work precludes extensive interaction with all
the details of higher critical work, and while
Johnston
does interact quite well with certain scholarship relevant to the
subject, I felt that several times the reader would have been
served by additional interaction with higher critical explanations
of the texts. Using Ezekiel 37 again as an example, some critics
have seen 1-14 as a post-exilic tract redacted quite late into the
text, and not contemporary with Ezekiel at all. This
issue may arguably be resolved through a literary critical and
discursive analysis of the entire restoration section (Ezek 36-39)
in the context of the whole of Ezekiel. While
certainly
Johnston
could not have done this in the present treatment, he could have
noted the issue with some reference to the literature on the
subject.
-
It
is certainly very striking, and in line with the overall Tendenz
of Johnston’s work, that when Jesus was asked about the issue of
the resurrection, he did not quote any of the OT resurrection
passages, but instead referenced the nature of God and his
covenant with his people, “Have you not heard what was said to
you by God ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the
God of Jacob’? He is not the God of the dead,
but of the living” (Matt 22:31b-32, ESV). While
this passage introduces its own interpretative difficulties, and
while exegesis should have as its starting point the local text
and context, from a total canonical, redemptive-historical
perspective, Jesus’ comments should provide the ultimate
hermeneutical reference for any work on understanding the Hebrew
Bible’s view of death and afterlife.
N.E.
Barry Hofstetter
The
Center for Urban Theological Studies