{"id":105,"date":"2025-04-30T13:38:30","date_gmt":"2025-04-30T13:38:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/death-and-ancient-christianity\/?page_id=105"},"modified":"2025-05-08T18:15:39","modified_gmt":"2025-05-08T18:15:39","slug":"judean-way-of-dying","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/death-and-ancient-christianity\/judean-way-of-dying\/","title":{"rendered":"Judean Way of Dying"},"content":{"rendered":"
\u00a0When it was noon, darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon. At three o\u2019clock Jesus cried out with a loud voice, \u201cEloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani<\/em>?\u201d which means, \u201cMy God, my God, why have you forsaken me?\u201d When some of the bystanders heard it, they said, \u201cListen, he is calling for Elijah.\u201d And someone ran, filled a sponge with sour wine, put it on a stick, and gave it to him to drink, saying, \u201cWait, let us see whether Elijah will come to take him down.\u201d 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)<\/h5>\n
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The graveyard at Qumran, where the Jewish inhabitants of the estate were buried. Photo from P. Charlier.<\/p><\/div>\n

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Skeleton 18 from the Qumran burial site. A recent study on the bones by P. Charlier et al. has revealed that injuries to the skeleton are consistent with those consistent with a rigorous worship lifestyle (frequent submersion in mikveh, repeated genuflection). Photo from P. Charlier.<\/p><\/div>\n

Dying\u2014Not Death<\/h3>\n

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<\/em>. 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

Purity and Space<\/h3>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Further Readings<\/h3>\n
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  • Matthew J. Suriano,\u00a0A History of Death in the Hebrew Bible<\/em> (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).<\/li>\n
  • Mladen Popovi\u0107, “Bones, Bodies and Resurrection in the Dead Sea Scrolls,” in The Human Body in Death and Resurrection (Deuterocanonical and Cognate Literature: Yearbook 2009)<\/em>, eds. Tobias Nicklas, Friedrich V. Reiterer, Joseph Verheyden (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2009), 221-242.<\/li>\n
  • N\u00f3ra D\u00e1vid, “Death, Burial, and Sacred Space in the Temple Scroll,” in\u00a0Constructions of Space III: Biblical Spatiality and the Sacred<\/em>, eds. Jorunn \u00d8kland, J. Cornelis de Vos, and Karen Wenell (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016), 123-135.<\/li>\n
  • Shannon Burkes Pinette, God, Self, and Death: the Shape of Religious Transformation in the Second Temple Period\u00a0<\/em>(Leiden: Brill, 2003)\n

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    A purification pool (Mikveh) found in Magdala. Photo by Aviad Amitai, taken from Marek Dosp\u011bl, “Archaeology and Jewish Purity,” Biblical Archaeology Society.<\/p><\/div><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n