Happy Easter!

What it would have said...

Good Friday

Jewish belief in life after death

In the Jewish tradition, belief in life after death was quite vague.

In the days of Abraham, Moses, David, Solomon, or Isaiah, the Jewish people did not really believe in life after death.  They thought that when people died, only their memory lived on (that, by the way, is why it was so important to have children, and why it was considered a curse to be childless).

The first Scriptural evidence of Jewish belief in life after death appears in the Book of Daniel, which was written only about 150 years before Christ.  The author is speaking about what will happen some distant day in the future - the end of time.  Here is what he wrote:

"Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake.  Some shall live forever...and shall shine brightly like the splendor of the heavens...and shall be like the stars forever."  (Daniel 12:2-3)

The description in Daniel is that after people die, they more or less sleep until the end of time.  Therefore, the Book of Daniel describes a delayed life after death.

By the time of Jesus, this belief was commonly help by the Jewish people, although some (such as the Sadducees) did not believe in any kind of afterlife.

From The Little Black Book: Six-minute meditations on the Sunday Gospels of Lent (Cycle A).

The Samaritans

When Assyria conquered the Jews of the Northern Kingdom of Israel in 721 B.C., they deported a large number of Jews to other parts of their vast empire, and brought into the area many people from other nations they had conquered.

Since many of these people intermarried with Jews who remained in Israel, the population became of mixed nationality, no longer purely Jewish.  These people also followed religious practices that were not wholly Jewish.

Because the capital city of the Kingdom of Israel was Samaria, the people came to be known as Samaritans.

When the Jews of the Southern Kingdom of Judah returned from exile in Babylon in 538 B.C., the Samaritans actively opposed their desire to rebuild the city of Jerusalem.  So, by the time of Jesus, there was lingering hostility between the Jews and Samaritans.

Since the Samaritans lived between the Jewish territories of Galilee and Judea, many Jews going to and coming from Jerusalem had to pass through their land.  Samaritans were often hostile to these travelers.

From The Little Black Book: Six-minute meditations on the Sunday Gospels of Lent (Cycle A).

The Exodus 2011 Style