ARTICLE III.

IDEAS OF THE FUTURE LIFE IN THE PENTA

TEUCH.

BY THE REV. THOMAS STOUGHTON POTWIN.

DR. L. H. MILLS, the learned Orientalist of Oxford, has thrown the great weight of his authority in support of the view that the early religion of Israel was "Sadducaic," and indeed hardly allows that the Hebrews before the exile had any real belief in immortality. In Sanscrit studies Dr. Mills

stands for a high antiquity of the literature and profound views in the authors; but when he turns his face toward the Hebrew, he seems to lose his happy power of insight and worthy appreciation.

It is not strange, perhaps, that the average reader of the English Bible, when he meets the words that the patriarchs were gathered unto their people" (Gen. xlix. 29, 33), gets little, if any, idea beyond that they died as their fathers had died before them. Our modern notions of the future state are so inextricably interwoven with conceptions of reward and punishment, that any language which does not make account of these seems to be almost meaningless and unimportant. Men immersed in the life of to-day are insensibly drawn to interpret all literature by current ideas. But ignorance and confusion are quite sure to result. The whole matter of making Old Testament criticism seem rational and intelligible to men and women who are not scholars strikes upon this obstacle. But learned commentators and students of the world's primitive literatures ought to be able to free themselves from such 1 Nineteenth Century, January, 1894.

limitations, and present us broad and liberal views. I hardly need say, however, that such has not always been the case.

It is conceded, of course, that the moral and religious discipline of the Hebrews was not based directly on sanctions drawn from the life after death. That was conducted theocratically in the present life under promises of present blessings or punitive judgments. This no doubt tended somewhat to limit speculation and minimize controversy regarding the future. But we shall make a great mistake if we infer from this the absence of opinions and expectations for the coming state. This is the first point to fix, the separation, in our search for beliefs in regard to future immortality, of all connection with direct promises and threatenings. What then are our sources of information as to these beliefs?

First, we have the direct sources, in what is said in the Pentateuch of the relations of God to man, what is said of the close of the lives of individuals, and what is said of Sheol as

a place of the dead. Then we get indirect but most important evidence by a comparative study of the ideas of other peoples contemporary with, or antecedent to, the Hebrews.

Interpreters of the Old Testament have not denied generally that the Pentateuch contains intimations of the immortality of man, but their conclusions have almost without exception been vitiated by their understanding of Sheol. They put everything under its shadow, and a dreadful shadow it is. Thus Lange says (Gen. xv. 15): "They must then still live upon the other side of death, in another state and life; the continued existence after death is here evident, and, indeed, as the word in peace intimates, a blessed existence for the pious"; but (under Gen. xxv. 8) he adds: The expression (gathered to his people) "designates especially the being gathered into Sheol." In fairness we must also say that he believes that it "also points without doubt, to a communion in a deeper sense with the pious fathers on the other side of death." Lange seems to have made an advance upon the

ideas of Delitzsch, Knobel, and Oehler. Oehler says of Sheol: "Man exists only as a weak shadow which wanders into the kingdom of the dead." "This kingdom is supposed to be in the depths of the earth . . . deeper even than the waters and their inhabitants"-"a region of the thickest darkness, where the light is as midnight"-" where every experience of communion with God is wanting to those resting there."—"The condition in the realm of death is supposed to be the privation of all that belongs to life in the full sense, and so the realm of death is also called simply destruction." He bases his view on such Scripture as Job x. 22; Ps. lxxxviii. 3-6; Job xxvi. 6; Prov. xv. II. But to explain the state of the dead in this way is a plain case of building dogma out of elegiac poetry.

THE INDIRECT EVIDENCE.

Let us now look, first, at the indirect evidence of ancient Hebrew opinion as derived from a comparison of the opinions of surrounding peoples.

The earliest literature of the East reveals the conception of a blessed life in the spirit world with ancestors as common to Oriental nations. The Vedas show this for the early inhabitants of India. We quote from selections given in the fifth volume of Muir's "Ancient Sanscrit Texts": "By thy guidance, O Soma, our sage ancestors have obtained riches among the gods" (page 284). "The liberal man abides placed upon the summit of the sky; he goes to the gods" (page 285). "May I with my offspring attain immortality" (page 285). "They were the gods, those ancient righteous sages" (page 286). "I have heard of two paths for mortals, that of the fathers and that of the gods" (page 287). "Yama was the first who found for us the way. This home is not to be taken from us. Those who are now born follow by their own paths to the place whither our ancient fathers have departed" (page 292). "Meet with the fathers, meet with Yama. Throwing 1 Theology of the Old Testament, Vol. i. p. 246 f.

off all imperfection again go to thy home. Become united. to a body and clothed in a shining form"; "The fathers have made for him this place. . . Approach the benevolent fathers who dwell in festivity with Yama. . . . May he grant us to live a long life among the gods" (page 293).1

There was also a Vedic doctrine of the worship of an

cestors.

Muir sums up thus the ideas of the Vedic age regarding the future life: "Yama the first of mortals, who died and discovered the way to the other world, guides other men thither and assembles them in a home which is secured to them for ever."

We find the same idea in the Zoroastrian system. Whatever dispute there may be about the date of the Avesta in its present form, there is no dispute as to the antiquity of the generic conceptions which lie at the base of it. And Darmesteter says: "Yama is replaced in the Avesta by Yima who gathers the good together in ‘Var' or paradise” (page 75). Again, “The man of Asha (or righteousness) who has lived for Ahura Mazda will have a seat near him in heaven, the same way as in India the man of Rita (the faithful) goes to the palace of Varuna, there to live with the forefathers a life. of everlasting happiness" (page 74).

In China the belief that ancestors were gathered in conscious life in the world beyond the grave is very ancient. Dr. Legge, in his "Religions of China," refers this idea to the period preceding the twenty-third century before Christ. Of this early period, he says: "Methods of worship had been instituted; a worship of God for all, but in which the ruler of the state should be the only officiator, and a worship of ancestors by all, or at least by the heads of families, for them

1 In respect to the doctrine of the resurrection in this citation, see Muir's summary after page 300; also Roth in Journal of American Oriental Society, Vol. iii. p. 343; compare also Professor Jackson in Biblical World, June, 1893.

selves and all the members in their relative circle" (page 23). All know that the Egyptians believed that their dead were gathered together in immortal life, and an eternal home. for the fathers could not fail to have been a familiar idea to the Hebrews, who had been put to school in Egypt. But the manifest connection of the early Hebrew literature with the Chaldean makes it of prime importance to learn, if possible, the ideas of the Assyro-Babylonians in this matter. Recent discoveries have opened up the subject somewhat, but the monumental literature, i. e., inscriptions on statues and clay tablets, which has been deciphered is still so fragmentary and incomplete that no one feels that we have reached anything finished and systematic. Our principal sources of information are the stories of the deluge, of Ishtar's descent into Hades, and the penitential psalms. In regard to the first two it must be ever kept in mind that they are simply poetry of the most imaginative kind, and are not to be taken as giving the dicta of calm reason in that age, any more than the poetry of Dante gives the everyday ideas of his time. The penitential psalms are, from a religious point of view, the most remarkable monuments of ancient thought that have come down to us from any people save the Hebrews.

There is one point of negative evidence of agreement between the Babylonians and the Hebrews which is of considerable importance, viz. the absence of any ancestor-worship. Dr. Sayce says: "I can find no trail of ancestor-worship in the early literature of Chaldea which has survived to us." In this the ideas of the Babylonians were more lofty and worthy than those of other Oriental peoples. They worshiped only deities. And so far as they had an influence upon the Hebrew mind it must have been in this sober and rational direction.

Their gloomy ideas of death and the grave we have fully pictured for us in the Ishtar legend. The opening lines, as Dr. Sayce gives them, are: