Judean Way of Dying

 When it was noon, darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon. At three o’clock Jesus cried out with a loud voice, “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?” which means, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” When some of the bystanders heard it, they said, “Listen, he is calling for Elijah.” And someone ran, filled a sponge with sour wine, put it on a stick, and gave it to him to drink, saying, “Wait, let us see whether Elijah will come to take him down.” Then Jesus gave a loud cry and breathed his last. And the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom. (Mark 15:33-38, NRSVUE)

Dying—Not Death

For the Jewish communities who composed the Hebrew Bible (7th-8th centuries BC), death was not a static state of being, but rather a process: dying. The body transitioned from the individual corpse to the collection bones, and in this process, was buried, then reburied with the ancestors. In the earliest Judahite communities, the cemeteries surrounded the cities of the living, creating a network of the dead all connected as a singular, ancestral collective. In the literature of the Hebrew Bible, the very place of the tomb was central to the identity of the dead.  Death was relational, and ‘Sheol’ (the afterlife described in the Hebrew Bible) was both the spiritual and physical resting place among the ancestral bones. In the period of the Second Temple (5th century BC to 1st century AD), Hellenism influenced Jewish ideas of the dying process, and this notion of the ‘afterlife’ and the process of dying changed radically and rapidly until the codification of a heaven and hell in Rabbinic Judaism.

Purity and Space

In Second Temple literature, the idea of dying and the state of death became more individualized, moving in tandem with wider religious transformation from communal identity to personal identity. Nevertheless, care for the dead was both necessary and closely regulated. Purity laws, such as those in Leviticus 21:1 and Numbers 19:11-13, negotiated the boundaries between being alive and being dead, thereby fortifying the transitional state of dying. Surviving documents from the Qumran community, located in the Judean desert, shed direct light on the treatment of the dead. Qumran community members were deeply concerned about the impurity a corpse would bring into a space. In the construction of the imagined, idyllic Temple of the Temple Scroll, the author imagined the cemeteries as being on the Temple’s periphery, delineating the sacred space by excluding impurities. In other texts found in the caves near Qumran, such as the Messianic Apocalypse and Pseudo-Ezekiel, Jewish authors, while noting the corpse as a source of impurity, nevertheless envisioned bodily resurrection of the righteous dead.

Further Readings

• Matthew J. Suriano, A History of Death in the Hebrew Bible (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).
• Mladen Popović, “Bones, Bodies and Resurrection in the Dead Sea Scrolls,” in The Human Body in Death and Resurrection (Deuterocanonical and Cognate Literature: Yearbook 2009), eds. Tobias Nicklas, Friedrich V. Reiterer, Joseph Verheyden (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2009), 221-242.
• Nóra Dávid, “Death, Burial, and Sacred Space in the Temple Scroll,” in Constructions of Space III: Biblical Spatiality and the Sacred, eds. Jorunn Økland, J. Cornelis de Vos, and Karen Wenell (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016), 123-135.
• Shannon Burkes Pinette, God, Self, and Death: the Shape of Religious Transformation in the Second Temple Period (Leiden: Brill, 2003)
  

  A purification pool (Mikveh) found in Magdala. Photo by Aviad Amitai, taken from Marek Dospěl, “Archaeology and Jewish Purity,” Biblical Archaeology Society.

Note on the music: Yamma’s ‘Bless the Lord, O My Soul’ is a modern rendition of Psalm 104 sung in the original Biblical Hebrew. Yamma Ensemble is a collective of Jewish musicians who perform traditional Jewish music from the Mediterranean, Near East, and Middle East.

Apocalypse

Jewish apocalyptic literature often envisioned revelation and the end of the world. Sometimes, the story followed a review of history; other times, it involved an otherworldly journey. The 3rd century BC Book of Enoch and 2nd century BC Book of Daniel both include allusions to great battles, which are seemingly picked up upon by the author(s) of the War Scroll from Qumran, which describes the end of the world. In this final battle between the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness, good shall prevail over evil. The boundaries of the living, the dead, the divine, and the mortal all collapse into a singular moment, leading to God’s final judgment. The notorious Book of Revelation in the New Testament canon emerged out of this tradition. Written in the 2nd century AD, the author John invoked the imagery of Jewish apocalypse to imagine the destruction of Rome’s worldwide empire. Death abounds as the final battles of time occur at Armageddon and Jerusalem—two locations with heavy Roman military presence.

When he broke the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth living creature call out, “Come!” I looked, and there was a pale green horse! Its rider’s name was Death, and Hades followed with him; they were given authority over a fourth of the earth, to kill with sword, famine, and pestilence and by the wild animals of the earth. (Revelation 6:7-8, NRSVUE)

Maccabean Revolt and Collective Loss

Death not only came for the individual, but so too the community, culture, and people. 1 Maccabees, a 2nd/1st century BC text, recounts the Maccabean revolt against Antiochus IV in 164 BC. While the Maccabean corpus (especially 2 Macc. and 4 Macc.) sets the tone for the Judean adaptation of noble death trope and martyrdom (where individuals resist the occupying Seleucid state), 1 Macc. offers a view into the grieving of the Jewish community over extensive cultural and collective loss. The author projects onto Jerusalem and Judea human qualities that reimagine the city and the land as a mother and her children. In this way, the Jewish community itself could be rendered corporeal. The city weeps for the demise of its citizens. Here, too, like in other cultures of the Mediterranean, mourning appears as women’s work, as the city’s personification is female.

Because of them the residents of Jerusalem fled;
she became a dwelling of strangers;
she became strange to her offspring,
and her children forsook her.
Her sanctuary became desolate like a desert;
her feasts were turned into mourning,
her Sabbaths into a reproach,
her honor into contempt.
Her dishonor now grew as great as her glory;
her exaltation was turned into mourning. (1 Macc. 1:38-40, NRSVUE)

Further Readings

• John J. Collins, Apocalypse, Prophecy, and Pseudepigraphy: On Jewish Apocalyptic Literature (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2015).
• John J. Collins, The Apocalyptic Imagination: An Introduction to Jewish Apocalyptic Literature (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2016).
• Michael W. Duggan, “1 Maccabees: Emotions of Life and Death in Narrative and Lament,” in Ancient Jewish Prayers and Emotions: Emotions Associated with Jewish Prayer in and around the Second Temple Period, eds. Stefan C. Reif and Renate Egger-Wenzel (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015),

Note on the music: Michael Levy is a renowned lyre musician who composed songs rooted in ancient tradition. While in this particular piece, Levy operates in the Hebrew Ahava Raba Mode, he has likewise composed music based on ancient Near Eastern, Egyptian, Roman, and other traditions.

Christ’s Miracles

Rabbi Jesus’ life and miracles existed within the time of Second Temple Judaism, and thus, the Judean frameworks of death and dying. The earliest attestations of Jesus’ life, the gospels of Mark, Matthew, Luke (all 1st century) and John (2nd century), portray Jesus as a peacemaker, feeder, and importantly, healer. The earliest gospel (most likely composed around 60 AD) includes the stories of Jesus healing a paralytic man (Mark 2:1–12), banishing demons (Mark 5:1-17), and restoring the sight of a blind man (Mark 8:22-25). In these cases, Jesus prevents the living from dying, but in John, the author imagines Jesus as a life-restorer as well, raising Lazarus from the dead. Lazarus emerges from his burial site, still wrapped in his grave clothes, but no longer smelling of a corpse. The impure body of the dead has returned, and while in need of purification, nevertheless walks among the living. Because of these life-giving and life-sustaining miracles, Christians adorned their sarcophagi with the stories of Christ’s life. These narratives ensnare the bodies of the dead, cloaking them in the power and mystery of Jesus’ victory over death.

Then Jesus, again greatly disturbed, came to the tomb. It was a cave, and a stone was lying against it. Jesus said, “Take away the stone.” Martha, the sister of the dead man, said to him, “Lord, already there is a stench because he has been dead four days.” Jesus said to her, “Did I not tell you that if you believed you would see the glory of God?” So they took away the stone. And Jesus looked upward and said, “Father, I thank you for having heard me. I knew that you always hear me, but I have said this for the sake of the crowd standing here, so that they may believe that you sent me.” When he had said this, he cried with a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!” The dead man came out, his hands and feet bound with strips of cloth and his face wrapped in a cloth. Jesus said to them, “Unbind him, and let him go.” (John 11:38-44, NRSVUE)

State Violence and the Death of Christ

Before his death, Rabbi Jesus dined with his disciples, raising their voice in hymn to commemorate Passover. The next day, the Roman state murdered Jesus on the cross. While Jesus as a messianic figure held the power of life, the power of death remained squarely in the possession of the imperial state. This death-power was flaunted in the faces of the imperial subjects, as the soldiers who crucified Jesus dressed him in faux-robes, a thorn crown, and called him the ‘King of the Jews.’ Despite the blood, pain, and grief, Jesus’ resurrection can be viewed as a triumph in kind over this death-power. The very scene of the crucifixion became ornamental, as early Christians wore intaglio rings with this scene displayed. The death of Christ represents the death of death itself. Nevertheless, Jesus’ dying illustrates the role of women’s work in mourning and corpse care-tending. Women from Jerusalem and the Galilee were the ones to wait beside the cross and to carry Jesus to his tomb. Mark attests that women—namely Mary Magdalene, Mary mother of James, and Salome—were the first to find the tomb empty and to know of the resurrection. Whether Greek or Judean, women were responsible for the tending to the dead.

Further Readings

• Fernando Bermejo-Rubio, “Jesus and the Anti-Roman Resistance: A Reassessment of the Arguments,” Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus 12 (2014): 1-105.
• Jeffrey Spier (ed.), Picturing the Bible: The Earliest Christian Art (Fort Worth, TX: Kimbell Art Museum, 2007).

Note on the music: The Hallel Medley is a modern mashup of Psalms 114-118, which are sung at the close of the Passover Seder. At the Last Supper, which has been identified as the concluding meal of Passover, Christ’s hymn most likely would have been these psalms, as attested to by Joachim Jeremias, “The Last Supper,” The Journal of Theological Studies 50, no. 197/8 (1949): 1-10.