Transcription
The Hebrew Bible, or the Old Testament in Christianity, lacks a systematic description of the afterlife and, in fact, seems to display no general concept of the afterlife. There are reflections of afterlife existence being joining your ancestors, the dead being conjured up through necromancy, people going down to Sheol. You know, all of that implies some sort of postmortem existence, but what does it look like?
What happened to you when you died in ancient Israel? Hey, I'm Jordan, and this is the Bible and Archaeology podcast from the University of Iowa. Today, I am so happy to be joined by Dr. Matt Suriano for a discussion about the process of death and dying in the Hebrew Bible because, as we're going to talk about today, it's really not an event. It is an ongoing continuum of activity between the dead and the living. What happens? How do you join the ancestors? Is there such a thing as a soul, and where does nefesh properly fit into this? What is Sheol? How do you get there? Where do you go after it? And what happens if your death goes wrong? Is there a way that you can die that doesn't allow you to participate in these processes of death that the Hebrew Bible has in mind? If you've ever had a question about what it means to die in the Hebrew Bible, this is the interview for you. Remember, for early access to ad-free podcasts and exclusive bonus content, you can join us over on Patreon. We are Bible and Arc on Patreon. But for now, settle in, and I hope you enjoy our conversation all about what it means to be dead in ancient Israel.
Dr. Suriano, thank you so much for taking the time to come and talk a little bit about death, the process of death, the afterlife, all this stuff. So happy to have you with us today.
Yeah, I'm happy to be here. I, I, I really appreciate your interest in my book. It represents several years of research, beginning with my dissertation, which was a separate book. And, uh, I have a lot of thoughts on this topic, uh, which continues to really kind of grab my attention, and and often can be more relevant than than I expect it to be.
I'm really happy to get to pick your brain about some of this because you bring up a number of topics in your book that are those you think you know this, but actually, we are misunderstanding a lot. Some of these things having to do with the nephesh or the soul, some of this with Sheol, some of this with feeding the dead, and some future work that might be coming there. But before we can get to that, can we start with the process itself? When you died, because the actual activities you say have a lot of connections with all of the ideas of what happens in death and the afterlife. So, if we begin there, when you died in ancient Israel, what actually happened to you?
Yeah, you know, so we, I think we should begin by acknowledging that our the evidence that we have, and I, and for my book, the basis for it is the archaeological evidence for death and burial, um, is largely elite. I wouldn't say it's the 2%. I think it's a little bit more than that, um, because I think the cemeteries that we have, uh, which contain rock-cut chamber tombs and cave and cave tombs, could also access other um members of society, but but to be sure, you had to be fairly wealthy to to to create a a nice rock-cut chamber tomb with benches and repositories and so on. So, that said, um, and I, and I'll throw one more, one more thing out there. You know, with that caveat, I think it's important to acknowledge that, uh, the this is the the element of culture that the biblical writers came from. Cuz remember, the biblical writers were were were trained to write. They, they, they represented a a certain class and and level of society that would most likely use the types of burial that are evidenced today in cemeteries throughout southern the southern Levant.
Okay, so the question is, what happened to you when when you die? The first thing, and it, and it, it, death was actually rather complicated in ancient Israel, or at least in the kingdom of Judah. Um, when you died, immediately your body had to be re-removed from the house or tent or location. It had to be removed from the the settlement, okay? Um, and that is apparently because of purity laws. Now, I say that um with the, I acknowledge that the purity laws that we have in the Bible, most biblical scholars see it as representing one of the latest strands of in the Hebrew Bible, and that's, and while that could be correct, I kind of oscillate back and forth between pre-exilic and post-exilic. The archaeological evidence that we have for burial practices in Judah during the Iron Age, during the period of the kingdom of Judah, um, which was the earliest and most and formative period of the the compilation of and composition of the Hebrew Bible, we don't have any tombs that are found inside a village or a town or a settlement. All of the cemeteries that we have, and we have over 50 that are scattered throughout the the area of Judah, date again, dating to the Iron Age. All of them are what we refer to as extramural. They're outside the city walls, okay? And that's this stands in contrast to practices that go back to the Amorite period in the in the Bronze Age and continued with Aramaic and Aramean and Assyrian practices where they would have house tombs or they would they would have tombs beneath their houses. So that when somebody would die, they would remove the the floor stones, and there would be a chamber beneath the house where they'd bury the dead. We see this, for example, uh, fairly extensively at Megiddo during the Middle and Late Bronze Age. Um, but that those sorts of practices don't continue in Iron Age Israel or Judah, which tells us that there was a concept of corpse impurity, and it was important to remove the body from from the village or settlement to a different location. And those locations are what archaeologists refer to as bounded cemeteries, designated places for the dead.
So, so, I've already given you a very complicated answer for what happens immediately upon death. Um, so, so you die, your body is removed, it's brought to the family tomb, which is a subterranean unit that is either an augmented natural cave with kind of divan-like benches, uh, carved out of the side, what we refer to as a loculus tomb. And this is a type of cave unit or tomb unit that, uh, originated in the Middle Bronze Age and continued through the Late Bronze and into the Iron Age.
Um, sometimes they reused old tombs, sometimes they just created new ones. The other type of tomb that they would use is is what what I've referred to as a rock-cut chamber tomb, which is a kind of a square, a squared unit that was carved out of bedrock with benches on three sides, uh, to hold three corpses at at at any one time. And usually, they had a repository, which is a small, uh, pit or space carved underneath the bench, which is where they would store secondarily store store bones. Okay? And so you die, you're brought out of the village to the cemetery where the family burial burial tomb is, okay? And it's in that tomb, presumably, that your past kin kinfolk and even your ancestors have been laid to rest. And so they can, their bones continue to exist inside there. So you're brought to the tomb, and you're, and, and if it's a, regardless of whether it's a loculus tomb or a bench tomb, you're laid down on a bench, okay? And this is what what archaeologists refer to as primary burial. And there your body stays for at least a year, uh, maybe even longer until that space needs to be used. Because remember, the thing with these tombs is that they're communal, okay? So whether it's a cave tomb that's been adapted as a loculus tomb, or whether it's an artificial chamber, they're built specifically and or designed in a in a way to accommodate multiple burials over time. So your body is being brought to the place where your probably your grandparents, your uncles and aunts, great-grandparents, and other people have already been buried inside the room, inside the chamber of the tomb. Eventually, your your, uh, your bones will be removed from the, uh, the bench inside the tomb and and and relocated again inside the tomb in in a repository or or in cases where they don't have repositories, such as in a loculus tomb, they'll just pile up the bones on the floor. Sometimes they'll even line the skulls along the floor along at the bench. Um, this is referred to as secondary burial. I mean, I know that sometimes archaeologists will will will will argue over is it truly secondary burial because the bones aren't being removed from the tomb and buried in another location, which also did happen in the, uh, the, the ancient Levant, but I would argue that it is because it's a, it's, it's an intentional act of, uh, disarticulating, that means disassembling the skeletal remains of the of the dead, and then storing them somewhere inside that tomb. Um, and so it is effectively a second burial even though it's in the same burial site, but I think this is really key. And so, just to kind of, um, summarize, you die, your body is brought out outside the village to a a family tomb that's located outside the village, okay, but not inside the village. You're laid down on the burial bench, and then eventually your bones are removed from the burial bench and stuffed inside an ossuary. What happens between the primary burial and the secondary burial though is is not entirely clear. We know that they would lay down, uh, grave goods. They would put cooking pots at your feet and a lamp at the head, and they would line the floor with, uh, wine jugs and sometimes storage jars, and there'd be all kinds of dishware placed in there that symbolically fed you or at least provided you with food, um, as well as other things to sustain you inside the tomb. Um, that could be done either during the primary burial, the initial act of being brought to the to the tomb, or it could be done at a different stage, but prior to the secondary burial. Because what we find with the secondary burial is that when the when the, uh, the bones are gathered, okay, from the bench and stuffed inside the repository, they they sweep off all of the grave goods that are associated with that dead body and throw them inside the repository as well, often breaking them, okay? So, it, I wouldn't say that it was careless, but they don't, there's no concern in terms of like, are we breaking the bones? Are we shattering the cooking pot? They just shove it all inside the repository. The important thing is that it's inside the tomb and not, um, and not outside the burial place where it could be destroyed by the elements and by other forces of nature. So, it was a complicated process that involved, you know, not just burial, but also reburial and some form of sustenance, okay? And obviously, there were all kinds of other things that went went along along with the process of burial. The funeral itself, people publicly lamenting you, um, we, we have a couple of stories in the Bible where dead bodies are are publicly brought outside of of a town and people, you know, go and acknowledge it as it's being brought on the funerary the buyer, or, you know, as it it's carried out. And so, you know, these were all events that were associated with it with with the funeral, but we don't have a systematic description of the actual rituals themselves that took place, um, upon death.
You've laid out a lot of activities. And something you talk about in your book, which I really like, is the framework of death as relational and transactional. And if I can come back to the idea of moving the bones in in the way that that gets treated or the objects as a way into some of this ongoing activity between the first burial and that secondary burial because that's a lot of the way into those ideas of what's actually happening in the process of death and the afterlife that has been obscured by traditions that come later or obstacles that come later. So, I don't know the best place to start there because there's almost too much to try to unpack of like what problems have been imposed on trying to understand death. But if I was to ask what problems have been imposed in trying to understand death in that process, where do you start?
I think that's a good starting point because, yes, everything that you've just said there could touch upon several different things that I've observed in my study of death and burial. I would say that the starting point though is the problem that we have in viewing death in ancient Israel in general, okay? Um, there are two, and and in fact, the problems, the problem is twofold. Of to to begin, the Hebrew Bible, or the Old Testament in Christianity, uh, lacks a systematic description of the afterlife and in fact seems to display no general concept of the afterlife. Um, there is there are reflections of afterlife existence being, uh, joining your ancestors, um, the dead being conjured up through necromancy, uh, um, people going down to Sheol, you know, all of that implies some sort of postmortem existence. But what does it look like? And as a result, one of the problems that has arisen in the study of death in in the Bible is that scholars have a tendency, or at least had a tendency, to impose upon the belief system of the ancient Israelites or the biblical writers of the Hebrew Bible, um, a a pre-Christian view of death. And so, you know, they'll speak of, for example, one notable Old Testament scholar said that there is no afterlife in the Old Testament. There's only an after death, okay? So, this is problematic because it can lead to supersessionistic readings of ancient Israel where everything prior to Christ's victory, you know, and in the Gospels and in the New Testament, over his victory over death, prior to that, there's only death and there's no hope, you know, until you get to the New Testament. And, and, and you would be surprised how often this is this comes up or is touched upon. So, that, that's the first issue right there. The second issue is that although this this belief doesn't exist in Judaism, in the Christian world, we think of death in terms of postmortem judgment, okay? So, to put it simply, the afterlife is conceived of as a dichotomy of the good place or the bad place. If you're a good person, you go to the good place. If you're a bad guy, you know, you go to hell. You're, or you're annihilated, or whatever you want to believe, okay? And this, this does not exist at all in the Hebrew Bible until you get to the Book of Daniel. And there, that book, that's probably the latest book in the Hebrew Bible, most likely dating to the Hellenistic period. In fact, I think certainly dating to the Hellenistic period. And, and, uh, and the, the time of the the Maccabean revolt. So, you know, prior to that, there, the concept of postmortem existence in what I would call afterlife was configured in ways that were completely different than how we think of postmortem existence today, okay? And even in Judaism, where there isn't that postmortem vetting process, there isn't, you know, this, a concept [clears throat] of a throne of judgment that everyone goes before. You know, you know, you'll, I'll, I'll have some of my Jewish students say, "Well, we don't, there isn't a belief in the afterlife or in that sort of afterlife in Judaism." And that's, that is correct. Um, but there is a concept of the afterlife that exists in the Hebrew Bible, and it can be, it could be seen in simple idioms, beautiful idioms that are used in Genesis and Kings and Chronicles. It's, it's one of inclusion. It's relational. It's joining your ancestors, okay? Now, how that exactly worked, how they conceived of people existing in the afterlife, joining their ancestors, I, I can't say much for much more beyond that. But I would say that your status in the afterlife in ancient Israel was more dependent on how you died and how you were buried and less dependent upon what you did in life. It wasn't a question of whether you were a good person or a bad person. It was a question of, did you lead a full life? Did you die with lots of children, or had, did you have a lasting, a positive effect, a legacy? And are you being buried, or were you buried in your family tomb? Anything that might disrupt those, those ideals could lead to a bad death. You know, you're attacked by a lion on a journey to a distant land, and your body is never recovered. Yeah, that's a pretty bad fate. You die young before you can have a family, or before you can make any sort of lasting achievement or leg, leave behind any sort of legacy. You know, that's, that's going to be very disruptive in terms of your status in death. And worst of all is not being buried with your family.
That's something you talk about, the transition in death as a status transition rather than a location transition. And I'd like to, if we can, start to unpick some of these things that maybe people think they know, or they've heard, be they terms or processes here, that need to be re-centered in trying to understand from what we have, some of this. Can we begin there in how we see death as a status transition and how that relates to some of the processes you're laying out?
So, if we recognize that the tomb, the tomb could be miserable, it could be conceived in those terms, and we see that in some of the poetic reflections of the psalmists, but the tomb was also the ideal place for the dead. And there, there are at least happy images of being reunited with dead kin. And so, in that sense, death and the concept of postmortem existence is relational, being, you know, being gathered to your peoples, uh, laying down in death with your fathers. And so, if we think of it in those terms, like you, it's like you said, it's, it, it becomes a question of status rather than, um, uh, the going to an afterlife, um, destination. And, and there's, there's where a question that's kind of remained with me since writing my dissertation comes in. And, and that question is, how do we define ancestors, okay? I remember when I was writing my dissertation, my outside reader was a classical archaeologist named Sarah Morris. Uh, and, and she said to me once, when I was meeting with her in her office, she said, you know, every time archaeologists find bones or find a burial, they say, "Oh, it's an ancestor." But what do we mean by ancestors? And, and that's a great question. And, and although I don't have a precise definition of ancestor, I do view it now as a status, okay? That, that had to be achieved through some sort of process, okay? And so, if we see ancestor as, as a status that, that has to be achieved, that's not just simply conferred upon you the moment that you die, but comes about through rituals of remembrance, through processes of interment, um, through the maintenance of a family tomb, uh, through all of these things, okay? We could recognize then the the the activities that occurred inside a bench tomb, a rock-cut bench tomb, which, which includes two different spaces for the dead. And there's where the archaeological insights of, uh, of the study of what we now call Judahite mortuary culture, which has been a thing really for the last 60 years, has been one of, I believe, one of the great contributions of biblical archaeology to the study of the Bible. One of the things that archaeologists have noted is that there, there, there are multiple things going on. There's there's less of a reticence in dealing with bones inside a tomb, okay? Now, outside the tomb, from what we know from purity laws, bones, even just a small one, are defiling. They're, they're, they, they make you impure, and there's a long, week-long process, according to the Book of Numbers, that involves removing that impurity. But inside the tomb, people had no problems, you know, disassembling of skeletons and stuffing them in a repository. More than that, as I mentioned earlier, archaeologists have noted that inside the repository, sometimes they would crack bones in half to fit them in there. They would just stuff the bones inside inside that space, so there seems to be a change in status. There's less of a concern of preserving the body now that it's completely defleshed, and, and is just a heap of bones. Just stuff it in there, okay? And so, that right there indicates a change from corpse to bones, okay? And, and, and that process of of reburial, I'm going to use that term, has long been associated by archaeologists, again, with these idioms for death that we find in in Torah or in the Pentateuchal literature, to be gathered to one's peoples, as well as the the phrase cognate phrase that's found in Kings and Chronicles, which is vayishkav im avotav in Hebrew, which is to, and he lay down with his fathers. Both of those are idioms that are are built around translating an individual into a collective. And they both use terms, um, gather and lay down, that can also be used in Hebrew, in Aramaic, in Phoenician for burial, to gather up bones or bones in a gathering place, or to lay down dead bodies inside the tomb. And so these are funerary expressions that are used to describe an ideal death. And, and archaeologists have long equated just the collective sense of the peoples or the fathers, um, with the collectivity of the dead inside inside the tomb, and, and specifically the pile of bones in the repository. So, there's, there's that status change right there. And if we recognize a change in status from point A being the primary burial to point B being the the secondary burial in the repository, then that could lead us off into other directions in terms of the transition of the dead and, and rituals of transition and, and necessity of grave goods. Why were they putting stuff in inside the tomb alongside the body? Did the dead really, were they actually seen as requiring some sort of aid or sustenance? And on the other hand, it also sheds light on why the corpse or the nefesh, as it's, as it's termed in in the Pentateuch, um, why it was seen as being such a defiling, um, and a problematic, uh, uh, object. So, and both of those can lead off in different tangents, but I'm going to just kind of end with that, uh, and we can, and I'll let you choose which direction to go.
Choose your own adventure here. I think I'm going to take nefesh right now because you said nefesh and body, and some listeners might go, "Wait a minute. I thought this was a soul. I have heard, I maybe had learned that this is this term that is translated as soul, but here you're saying body and object." And this is one of those translational terms that can be misleading and needs some complicating. So, can we turn then to that and how that term fits into this process, the ideas of what they are thinking about and looking at, and I, I guess I'll return to you. Where do you want to go with nefesh then if that's our next step?
So, um, again, this is one of these issues that becomes complicated by the way that we think of soul today. We think of soul as this, for those who believe in a soul, often they're the that belief is prefaced by early Christian writings, which themselves were, um, influenced by Greek philosophy, and we tend to think of a body-soul dichotomy. That is, when the body dies, the soul is free to go off to that other place, okay? Or, or to face postmortem judgment. And so, this is a dualism, or not dualism isn't the right word, but dichotomy is. Um, a duality maybe. And the opposite of that, uh, is monism. Is the idea that the body and soul were one. And if you read old, old older treatments, older scholarship on death and ancient Israelite culture, um, you'll see biblical scholars saying there was no duality of body and soul in the Old Testament. Um, instead, there's a belief in monism where the the soul and the body were one, and the soul continued to reside inside the tomb with the deteriorating body. I don't think that that's entirely true. I think it's only partially true, but I don't think that there is a concept of monism in ancient Israel. I think the idea of the nephesh as soul is much more complicated. Um, but because of all the baggage that comes with the word soul, I have, I have colleagues who will argue that we shouldn't use soul, and I think self is a good way of translating that word. I mean, it, nephesh, um, you know, it has a common root for throat, but it, but more commonly, it's used as, um, a word for myself, you know. So the psalmist might say nafshi, myself. Um, so it has that sort of, it has that meaning. Um, but when it's used as a defiling object, a physical object that if you touch it, it makes you impure because it's a dead body, such as in Numbers chapter 19 or Leviticus chapter 21, for those listening, if you read the the major translations, whether it's the JPS Tanakh or the NRSV, they, the term that's being translated as corpse is actually nephesh, okay? And so how do you go from self or soul to corpse? And where it's this defiling object that, you know, when you, when you pick it up to carry it to the tomb, you are made impure. And, and, and the severity of that impurity in the Hebrew Bible is such that if you touch anything, you make, you transfer that that impurity. And so, you become contagious, which is why there's such a complicated process found in Numbers 19 for removing that impurity. And why later rabbinic writers refer to the impurity of death as the father of all impurities or the parent of all impurities. So, so why is that? And, and that's where I turn to transition ritual theory. Um, the idea that going from point A to point B involved, um, different activities that represented the changing status of the ritual actor. Now, in this case, I'm viewing the dead body as the ritual actor. Again, you die, your body is brought out to the family tomb. During the primary burial, you're laid out on the burial bench, and it's there that your body then begins, your corpse begins the natural process of of decay. And, and eventually, over time, it becomes reduced to a skeletal form or a pile of bones. Now, that process, I was very much influenced by, uh, in viewing that by, I was influenced by an anthropologist who wrote during the '60s and '70s, uh, named Victor Turner. And Victor Turner is famous for writing, writing, he wrote a book in which he had a chapter called "Betwixt and Between," okay? And Victor Turner himself relied upon scholars from the earlier 20th cen-, earlier part of the 20th century who wrote on transition rituals, okay? So, on the one hand, there's a guy named Robert Hertz, who was a student of Emile Durkheim, and Hertz wrote this big, long article on secondary or second burials. Unfortunately, his life was cut short by World War I. But, he had a contemporary in Paris by the name of Arnold Van Gennep, who, who made famous the concept of rites of passage. And for Van Gennep, he, he basically identified three stages in which every transition ritual took place: the rite of separation, where you begin that the transfer by leaving your former status; the rite of, um, the middle stage, the rite of liminality, which represents this period in between, um, point A and point B. And then, point, and then the, and then the third stage would be the rites of aggregation, okay? And he felt that there, there was each of these transition rituals placed this particular emphasis on one or another s-, stage. And so, you know, like, for example, the transition ritual that happened in a marriage, in a marriage ceremony, um, involved a bride being separated from her family, and then there was great emphasis on her marginality, okay? Her, the, the liminal period between her leaving her former family, and then the rites of aggregation that were celebrated post-wedding, where she joins her husband's family. But, what Victor Turner found is that in certain rituals, like rituals of adolescence and, and adulthood, um, there, there was this, that in-between period, the ritual actor was marginalized. And that's because they were betwixt and between their former identity and the new identity that they were transferring to, okay? And as a result, they were sometimes seen as dangerous, um, because they didn't have a fixed status. People would avoid them. They were, they were isolated to, you know, a different part of the village, um, until they completed all of the necessary things that needed to be done in order to become a full-fledged adult member of the village. They were no longer a child, but they were not an an adult yet, okay? Uh, another example would be, um, I sometimes use teaching at the university, um, hazing rituals that are not supposed to take place in fraternities and sororities, where somebody pledges a fraternity, and, and so they go from being unaffiliated to a pledge, and during pledge week, you know, you have to live in the frat house, and you have to clean toilets, and, um, and you have to wear, you know, dirty t-shirts or whatever, and it's because your status is marginalized. But once you complete that pet, pledge week, you are initiated into the fraternity as a full-fledged member. Sometimes they'll even give you a new name. You know, we see that in the movie Animal House, where John Belushi is going along the line saying, "Your name is, you know, whatever." Flounder. And, and that's all because of the way in which the transition rituals work there. So, how does that apply to the dead? Well, I believe that what's going on is that when the body is brought to the tomb, it's no longer a living member of society. It still bears a likeness to the person who just died. So, they, you know, a corpse might still, you can identify a corpse. You see, they still, they still look like Uncle Joe. You know, Uncle Joe dies of a heart attack, and you carry his body out to the tomb, you could identify him and say, that is, you know, that is the man that was once my uncle, okay? Because he still bears that physical similarity. But, [snorts] you know, if you go back two, three years later, it's the body's decomposed, and it's a pile of bones, okay? And so, it's lost that identity. And so, therein is the connection between selfhood and identity and the status of the corpse. But, the corpse is no longer alive. It's not yet reached that final stage, okay? It's no longer, it's, it's, it's no longer a living person, but it hasn't joined the pile of bones inside the repository as an ancestor. It's in this liminal stage, betwixt and between, where its status is marginalized. And because that status is marginalized, the biblical writers see it as, um, uh, dangerous, as defiling, as impure.
In this process, the, the event of death is really not an event, but much more of an ongoing sense. They, you don't just die, you are dying in a much longer scale than we think of. I guess biologically there is a moment of death, but this larger social idea continues on for much longer time.
Yes, you know, um, a lot of these ideas go back to my time at UCLA when I was writing my dissertation, um, which was on the phrase "lay down with fathers" found in the Book of Kings. And that's when I started really looking at transition ritual theory. But, at the time, and this was during the mid-aughts, okay? '05, '06, '07, um, one of the stories dominating the news and, um, was there was a whole question of, um, what people would call euthanasia. Uh, and there was a woman named Terri Schiavo who, or Schiavo, I don't know if I'm pronouncing her name correctly, who was on life support and was was diagnosed as being brain dead, and her husband wanted to pull life support and let her die naturally, and her family was opposed to it. And this became a big, huge national debate in our country. And it called into question how we define death, death. I mean, was she already, she was brain dead medically speaking, but she wasn't medically dead yet because through artificial means, her heart, they kept her heart pumping. And so, how do we look at death and how do we define death? And this, this is something that's rarely ever done in scholarship. When we look at antiquity, how did the ancients view death? And I started reading a book. It was actually recommended to me when I gave a paper in London. Um, it, a book by a medical sociologist named Allan Kellehear. And Kellehear looked at the social process of dying. And one of the things that he argued is that in antiquity, there was a concept of dying that began after what we would call medical death. And this is often, uh, envisioned through, for example, the great myths of descent into the netherworld. So you have, you know, Inanna's descent into the netherworld, or Ur-Nammu, the Sumerian king, descending into into death. And this kind of explains, or would mythologically explain, the transition that the dead were enduring, were undergoing as they as they as they moved from the realm of the living to whatever sort of realm of the dead existed. And, and so, you know, the conclusion that I came to was that first of all, death was not a static event in ancient Israel. It was dynamic and ongoing. And that the process of dying, the social process of dying, in which your identity in life transitioned to a new identity in death, um, it was a process that began after, uh, after you died. And so, after you died, the social process of dying began. So that dying was a postmortem thing, if you could put it that way.
Can we talk about the place where maybe things descend to, be they nephesh or otherwise, as another one of these elements? We talked about it earlier, you mentioned Sheol, and now you're just talking about some of the where these things go as a, a term that is ambiguous, but shows up, but like nephesh, maybe is harder to pin down than people think when they come to the idea of what do I know about death and dying in the Hebrew Bible or in ancient Israel. This is probably one of those terms that they have heard before as a realm of the dead, maybe. And yet it's not, as with everything that we're talking about today, it is not quite that simple. Yeah. So if we can add that now into the picture of that process, where does this fit into the process and the thought of who gets to go there, how things go there, what it even is?
Yeah, Sheol is a really fascinating term. Uh, it's, it's generally seen as being the closest equivalent to another world in the Hebrew Bible. And in fact, in the Greek versions, it's often translated as Hades. So, it has that interpretation. And I don't think that's entirely wrong. Uh, the fact of the matter is that Sheol is always the place where people go in death. Okay, so that's the first thing. The second thing is that it's a miserable place. It's never conceived of in positive terms. Nobody really wants to go there. And when they're there, they, they, they cry out to the biblical God. They don't want to be there. They describe themselves as being in misery. So, it's a bad place. And everybody goes there, whether you're a patriarch or a prophet, or, you know, it's a place where everybody goes. So, it's not like it's a purgatory or a hell. Hell is a better place that's reserved as a place for bad people. Sheol is a place that, that everybody went to eventually. The other thing about Sheol though is it, it could be described in all kinds of different ways. It could be associated with water. And there, I think it's very much influenced by netherworld motifs found in mythologies of death and cuneiform literature from ancient Mesopotamia. It could be described as, again, all kinds of different things. But in the Psalms, it often appears in in very tomb-like, in a, a very tomb-like manner. It's dark. It's dank. It's underground. It's, um, it's a place where the worm consumes dead bodies. Um, it's a place that's lonely. And so, it's, it's conceived of in tomb-like terms. We see this most, most infamously in in Psalm 88. And so, the tomb and Sheol are often equated, although not always. And so, you know, it's a question of, well, then what exactly is Sheol? And I think Sheol can mean different things for different biblical writers. But most consistently, it's a biblical scholar referred to it as a place of perpetual endangerment. And, uh, and I think that's a good way of looking at it. And, and so, if we look at it that way, and we, and we notice that there's a connection between Sheol and the tomb, then it becomes possible, at least I think it's possible, to read Sheol as being this place of imperilment that could be equated with the process of dying that occurred inside the tomb, okay? And, and that's where we get into these Psalms where where the psalmist will cry out from Sheol to be delivered by the biblical God, okay? Does that mean that they could be delivered from death and made living again? Not, not necessarily. I think it has more to do with just the, um, the precarious position of of a dead person before they join their ancestors, regardless of whether it's the space of the tomb where the dead body is placed on the on the burial bench. There's no guarantee that they're going to join the ancestors in the repository because something can happen. The tomb could be looted, you know, or, or, or destroyed, okay? Or, if you die on a long journey or away from home or in battle, and your body is never recovered, you know, your, your, your, your, you're forced to exist in Sheol, okay? And, and, and, and in the book of Genesis, when Jacob is told, is lied to by his sons and told that that Joseph has been killed by wild animals, he cries out and he says, "Now I'm going to go descend into Sheol like after my son." He's referring to just that whole bad death concept, okay? Of of of a of somebody dying and their body being consumed by wild animals and never fully recovered so that you can't even remember them and, and preserve their remains through a proper funerary ritual. And so I think that's a good example of how Sheol often worked in the minds of the, in the, in the view of the biblical writers.
In the, the process of dying related to Sheol here, you, you went back to the gathering up of the bones. In this, is that a thing that removes you out? Because if they're crying out to say, "Deliver me from this," and we're talking about dying as a status thing and not so much of a place, and yet now maybe we kind of have a place, but it's also not a place, and you're supposed to be gathering bones, but at some point does that serve a function in moving you out of Sheol? And if so, out to to where or to what?
Uh, yeah, so there, there it could becomes a little bit more murky, but I would say that joining the ancestors in the repository symbolized that final stage, that right of aggregation, that ensured that you are now among the ranks of the ancestors. You were, you know, reunited with dead kin, and, and your memory would be preserved, if for nothing else, it, it, it was going to be preserved within that collective setting. What that looked like, I, I don't really know. I can't say. But I think it has something to do with generational knowledge and the limits of generational knowledge. The ideal for a person was to be remembered by future generations for three or four, uh, terms, for three or four generations, okay? And so, we see this with Jacob again on his deathbed, who sees the second, his his sons and Joseph's grandson, Joseph's sons, his grandsons. Uh, we see this at the end of the book of Job. This is found in several places in inscriptions and in cuneiform literature, the idea of your memory being preserved for three or four generations. Well, what happens after that fourth generation? Do you become forgotten? I would say no, you're, you're just simply, your memory is consigned to the ancestors, the greater ancestry, if you will, okay? And so, there was some hope, at least a sign to that eventual move from being remembered over three or four generations to just joining, to being, to transferring into a greater ancestry.
In transferring into that greater ancestry, is this the ancestor cult? Is this a worship of it? Is this a reverence? Because this is another one of those, we started off with types of terms or classifications that can make this hard. And where these rituals fall into the line of what people think of as worship or as cult ritual versus a reverence ritual, what is respect for the ancestors, what is worship of the ancestors. Feeding of the dead is something that can come into this as well with the grave goods you talked about. So, is there a way to clearly distinguish, or is that really trying to create a distinction that is impossible to identify in the text?
Well, I think that the terminology that we use in interpreting the texts, that terminology is quite important. Um, and again, you've asked me about, you know, what are some of the obstacles, at least in terms of our culture, in looking at the culture of ancient Israel. There's an additional obstacle that is very active amongst a lot of my colleagues in biblical scholarship, which is this idea that early Israelite religion, like a lot of world religions, believed that the dead became deified and, and some form of ancestor worship existed in ancient Israel, and eventually it, it faded out or was eradicated through the Josianic reform or the Deuteronomistic reform. And part of that is influenced by this passage in the book of Deuteronomy, Deuteronomy chapter 26, has this vow that people are supposed to make when they bring the first fruits to be presented before the biblical God. And among, and one of the things that they're supposed to say is, "I have not eaten from it when I'm when I'm in mourning or I'm in impure, and I have never given it to the dead." Well, that doesn't mean that you're not supposed to give food to the dead. You're just simply not supposed to repurpose it and, [clears throat] then, and then give it to the God of Israel, okay? But, that verse is often read as a prohibition against worshipping ancestors. And, um, I once had a biblical scholar say to me, "Well, you know, we have all these grave goods inside the tomb, and so that clearly these are offerings." And, and I mean, they are, but they aren't. They, they're not meant, in my, at least the way I see it, they're not meant to be offerings to appease a deified dead person who exists inside that tomb. The issue is is one of reciprocity, okay? We don't have any texts in ancient Israel or in any of the surrounding cultures in the Levant which speak of the dead as receiving offerings and then blessing the person who brought the offering to them. Okay, the idea of ancestor worship is that you worship your ancestors, and they will then look after you, and they will bless you with life and give you good crops and allow you to be fertile and multiply and all that sort of stuff. But, it lacks any sort of, it lacks any evidence, I would say. And with the exception of necromancy, which is really a separate thing, there is no evidence whatsoever for the dead being deified, nor is there any evidence that these grave goods were seen as, um, being being brought in order to reciprocate some sort of blessing. Uh, that just, that just simply never happens. And in fact, there's good textual evidence to argue against that from inscriptions, not only Phoenician inscriptions, but also Aramaic inscriptions from parts of the northern Levant. But I'll just leave it at that.
Can I bring us to an example to maybe try to pull some of these threads together because someone may be sitting here and thinking, we've looked at a lot of, you've brought up a lot of different texts, we've covered a lot of terminology, we've covered some processes and ideas of remembrance. And is there a story that can maybe help bring some of this together? And you talk about two in your book, and I want to just ask about one of them, the death and burial of Jezebel, as a situation where you've talked about good death and bad death and what needs to happen.
and how important some of that is, and why it may happen, and why it may not happen. So, when you look at what happens to her in her death, or how it is remembered, we should say, how do you see the good and the bad elements, what's supposed to fitting into that narrative, and how that serves into our ability to understand the importance of these processes?
Yes. Yeah, that's a that's a great one, and I use it as an example in my book for how not to become an ancestor. Uh, and you know, every time I look at that passage, it's just stunning, it's shocking uh in some of the graphic detail. To to go back to your earlier question, I'll use that to kind of spring into Jezebel and who represents the antithesis of what's supposed to happen to you after you die.
I think terminology is important, and I'm fine with the term "cult of the dead." In fact, I now prefer a term that was uh defined by Carrie Sonia in her uh recent monograph, *The Cult of Dead Kin*. Uh, there is this obligation that the living had to the dead, and and specifically towards your dead aunt, your dead family, um, to care for the tomb, to properly bury the dead, to maintain the tomb, to maintain their memory, and and all of those associated things. And so, in the chapter in my book, I deal with the treatment of Joseph's bones, brought from from Egypt through the Exodus to the land um where where they're eventually buried um in his ancestral uh inheritance in the land that he had inherited.
But Jezebel represents the antithesis of that. Because I think the biblical writers are describing the worst, worst death possible in order to ensure that there is no cult of dead kin for Jezebel. And along the way, they they There are several observations that can be made. Now, you know, who is To begin, who is Jezebel? Um >> [clears throat] >> she's you know, regardless of historicity, from a purely literary standpoint, she is depicted as being a very evil and vile person. She kills prop- the prophets the God of Israel because she's a she's a Phoenician princess who married to the crown prince and eventually becomes the queen of of Israel, and she brings with her the worship of the uh the storm god, presumably, uh Baal. Probably Baal Hadad. There's some questions there. And um and then then the whole uh Naboth's or Naboth's vineyard, you know, where she frames Naboth to order to allow her husband to effectively steal the guy's vineyard. You know, she she's not a very sympathetic character. She's a person in power who who abuses that power, and the biblical writers hate her. But she also represents matriarchal power, which the biblical writers were opposed to. They uh they didn't look at it in a good way. And so, when it came to her death, she she She simply assassinated like her son, she was done so in a way that really went through a special effort to divest her of any former status she has.
So, to begin that story, Jehu, having just killed the king of Israel, um her son, comes to the win- the summer palace in Jezreel and confronts her, the queen who she's now the queen mother, okay? And he has her servants throw her body from the the upper floor, the second story of her palace, and so she's crushed to death upon in this fatal flaw. And there were horses, and remember Jehu is the was the um commander of the chariot. So, they had these big huge war horses that trampled her body. So, she she she's killed upon death, cast down into the mud, where horses trample her body. And then Jehu goes in and occupies her palace, and and he and his officers feast upon her food, and halfway through it, what does he say? You know, we should bury that woman because she is the daughter of a king. Now, this is important because he's not saying we should bury her because she was once queen of Israel. No, they they they don't they want to deny that fact, or at least not they if not deny ignore that fact. But she is the daughter of a former Phoenician king, okay? And and Jehu realizes, you know, that might have not been the best political move because we don't want to, you know, anger the this this neighboring country or city-state uh political power. So, he sends his his men out to search for her remains. And they come back and they say, "We can't find her remains." Presumably because they've been eaten by dogs, okay? "We couldn't find enough to identify her." And they describe trying to remember exactly the terms that were used exactly, but they couldn't find the smallest bone of her hand or a piece of her skull or anything. They describe quite quite literally what the bare minimum of physical remains that were required to give somebody a burial. So, that's interesting right there.
And then the biblical writer goes on to say that her body became fertilizer. And it's a term that they only use It's used there. It's used in Jeremiah. It's only used to describe basically what happens to people after they've been consumed by wild animals. Dogs eat you, your bones, and they consume you, and then they poop out your remains, and it's scattered across the the land, and that's your fate. And so, you know, it's a absolutely horrific death um that's intended to make certain that there's no cult of dead kin for Jezebel. Even if Jehu had decided that he wanted to make one as a politically expedient act and most to to to try to repair his relation with with the Phoenicians, that's not possible. And so, even though her name is remembered within the narrative of that text, it's not remembered in any sort of good way. And she's seen even sympathetically as a figure of tragedy um who endures the the worst fate you could you could imagine.
Well, on that very happy note, I think maybe we'll leave we'll leave you all to mull on concepts of death. And if you are looking for more, you are in great luck because Dr. Soriano wrote a wonderful book that you should go and pick up, *A History of Death in the Hebrew Bible* with Oxford University Press. It will answer more questions than we've talked about here. So, if you have some points that you would like clarification on, start there, and maybe we can cycle back to some more of this because you have you mentioned some interesting and upcoming work about feeding the dead which we will be able to return to at a future date. So if your feeding the dead questions it does come up some in the book but stay tuned because you'll get more answers in the future. But for today again we'll leave you in that very very happy story to go and enjoy your lives.
Dr. Siriano thank you so much for taking the time to come and talk about this topic. I really appreciate it. I appreciated this interview and you you asked some really great questions and I'm always happy to talk about the book. It's a great book. I really recommend you read it especially if you think you know something about what it means to be dead in the Hebrew Bible. You're not totally wrong but you're probably wrong so go and read it and find out what you should know and how you can impress all of your friends at your next dinner party. Wherever you find us be sure to like and subscribe. It helps us hopefully it helps you stay in touch with us. But for this week for all of us here at Bible and Archaeology until next time.