Resurrection in the Torah; or, On Trusting Jesus to be a Good Exegete
One of the oldest debates among the various religious groups that lay claim to Israel’s faith is whether the doctrine of the resurrection is found in Torah, the first five books of Moses. This is one of the areas where the early Christians and the Pharisees were in complete agreement, over against the Sadducees. And yet, making good on this claim is something many scholars have found difficult (as the various attempts by Rabbis over the centuries attest: one common feature of their arguments is the presence of straining natural conventions of language).
This difficulty seems to even include our Lord’s own argument for the Pharisaical tradition, where he argues from Exodus 3:6. Many have interpreted his argument as resting upon the present tense of the verb to be, such that God’s saying “I am the God of…” instead of “I was the God of…” implies the current existence of the patriarchs. But it is unlikely that Jesus was unaware of the weakness of such an argument. The correct answer lies elsewhere.
One thing recent Christian scholarship has noted with regards to Paul’s use of the OT in particular is that Paul frequently alludes not just to the verses that he quotes, but to the contexts surrounding those verses to support his arguments from the OT. We should at least consider whether Jesus might be doing the same.
There are several features within the Torah that indicate Exodus 3:6 probably would imply an eventual resurrection of the dead. Firstly, as J.G. Janzen (“Resurrection and Hermeneutics: On Exodus 3.6 In Mark 12.26,” JSNT 23 (1985): 43-58) has noted, God’s reference to the patriarchs follows an allusion to the sterility of Rachel:
But at this very point God—who earlier had ‘remembered’ Rachel and ‘heard’ her and ‘opened her womb’ (Gen. 30.22)—heard their groaning and remembered the divine covenant with the ancestors (Ex. 2.24). (55)
This story itself contains a comment by Rachel which connects sterility with death, and itself alludes back to the previous two patriarchs’ stories:
But if that is the case, then the statement in Gen. 11.30—’Now Sarai was barren; she had no child’—signifies that Sarai and Abram do not possess the saving qualification of their own forebears. They are the end of their line. They are dead while they live, like a tree which, standing among other trees, is dry and leafless. This is implicit in the case of the first ancestral couple, and it becomes explicit on the lips of Sarah’s granddaughter-in-law Rachel. As Robert Alter has observed, Rachel’s plea to Jacob should be translated, ‘Give me sons; if not, I am dead’. (52-53)
Thus, when God appears to Moses, in a context where the people of Israel are on the verge of death (as Janzen notes, killing all the male Hebrews would end the race (55)), God hears their cry and brings them out of death.
Thus, within the Torah itself, there has already been an analogous application of the divine work with the patriarchs later in history. Is there any reason to think that this might be further analogously applied to the literal death human beings suffer, within the Torah? I think there is.
First, note that from the original Genesis narrative, Adam and Eve were permitted access to the tree of life (or at least, given its mention, were seen as eventually being able to access it) (Gen. 2:16). After the fall, God removes the humans from the Garden precisely because they might have “take[n] also from the tree of life… and live[d] forever,” (Gen. 3:22). Thus we can see that originally God intended that the human race live forever. This is confirmed by the fact that the physical death of man is included in the curse given to man (Gen. 3:19). Prima facie, then, it seems God’s original intention for mankind was immortality.
Later in the Torah, within the purity laws, we find that death is considered antithetical to God’s presence. Yesterday I found a blog post that excellently summarizes this:
How did God pick these particular things and call them unclean? While scholars have proposed various theories (sin, aesthetics, fear of demons, holiness of the sanctuary, separation of Israel, health, magic, arbitrary priestly power), none of them explains all of the types of impurity so well as the theory of Jacob Milgrom, the premier scholar of Leviticus. As Milgrom says:
The bodily impurities enumerated in [Torah] . . . focus on four phenomena: death, blood, semen, and scale disease. Their common denominator is death. (p. 1002).
Loss of blood or semen is loss of life. Scale disease makes a person look like a corpse and is a form of rot or spreading death. Even the dietary restrictions of Leviticus 11 can be explained as limiting death to certain species (that is, if Israelites can only eat certain animals, they won’t kill as many animals).
The message of God’s purity laws is simple: he is the God of life, not death. This theology has its roots in Genesis, where God declares death the penalty for human sin. Sin is man’s choice, not God’s. Thus, death is not part of the perfect world God intended and will one day bring to completion.
Thus, we can see within the Torah that ultimately death was considered an enemy of God’s, and God’s people. We can also note that the promise to Eve, and later to Abraham, that the enemy of God’s people would be crushed and all the families of the earth would be blessed by their seed, the blessing being the answer to the curses of Genesis 3, indicates that God did intend to ultimately reverse everything that happened because of the fall.
Finally, even within the Exodus 3 narrative itself, there are several allusions to God’s power over death. Rick E. Watts notes several of these features:
In a brilliantly conceived passage constructed of emphatic pronouns and the verb hyh (“to be”) from which the name of the self-sustaining and life giving Yahweh is derived, Moses’ complaints of “Who am I… that I…?” (3:11) are met with the divine self-predication “I AM with you (3:12a…). The point, well recognized, is not who Moses is, but rather the character of the one who is with Moses and thus the revelation of the name (3:12-22). Yahweh offers an authenticating sign: Israel as a people will encounter I AM and ender into the covenant of life with him at Sinai (3:12b). Because of I AM, Israel will come to be.
The ensuing exchange between Yahweh and the still-doubting Moses makes precisely this point (4:1-11). The serpent being a symbol of resurrection in Egypt, Moses’ serpent-staff demonstrates that he, as Yahweh’s agent, now exercises over Egypt the power of life and death, of order and chaos… . So also does the power over “leprosy,” the living death (cf. Num 12:12; 2 Kings 5:7) that Yahweh alone can cure, and the turning of water into blood, where both are essential to and representative of life. This in part explains the Lord’s anger when he finally demands, using the imagery of the opening-of-the-mouth ritual associated with the enlivening the images of the gods…, that Moses tell him who it is that gives speech and hearing and sight, which are so characteristic of humanity. Everything in this passage presupposes Yahweh’s utterly sovereign control over every aspect of human existence and even existence itself (cf. Deut. 32:39). (Commentary on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament, 215)
Thus, taking the Torah in context, Janzen summarizes the obvious conclusion:
Such a use of Ex. 3.6 at Mk 12.26, it seems to me, displays the deepest sensitivity to the context in which Ex. 3.6 originally occurs and has its meaning. The alternative is to stand before the prospect of death, not only as a power operative in one’s historical existence, but as the terminus of that existence, and from that position to call to mind the divine address in Ex. 3.6, and then to decide that, for once, this text and what it connotes has nothing hopeful to say. To decline Jesus’ interpretation is to decide there is nothing in what Ex. 3.6 connotes which could not be quenched and extinguished by the Sadducees’ counter-story. So to decide is to confess that this locus classicus of biblically-derived existence, having burned continuously through so many and various other trials, finally found a context within which it burned and was consumed. That would be the end, or at any rate that would establish the limits of the relevance, of Yahwism. It would give an altogether different, and limiting, sense to Jesus’ concluding words that the God of the burning bush ‘is not God of the dead, but of the living.’ (56)
I should note, as a post-script, that given the classic Documentary Hypothesis, there is no prima facie objection to seeing resurrection in the Torah. Most liberal critical scholars tend to see the doctrine of the resurrection coming from Babylonian (Zoroastrian) influence on Jewish belief, which would have happened as early as the sixth century (some scholars see it present in Second Isaiah). But the classic JEDP theory thinks the last redaction happened sometime around the 400s BC. So resurrection could easily have been redacted into the Torah, given the liberal view.
Hey, Andrew:
Thanks for the pingback. Nice post. Hope our paths cross again.
Derek Leman
I like R. T. France’s comment on the matter:
“The subtlety of the argument is such that it is hard to blame the Sadducees for not having drawn this inference from the Moses story. It has sometimes been understood as a simplistic argument from the tense of the verb ‘I am’ in Ex. 3:6, but there is no verb either in the Hebrew text or in Mark’s quotation (contrast Matthew, who follows the LXX), and an argument based on the tense of an •unexpressed• verb would be not subtle but simply invalid. The argument is better understood as a reflection on the character and covenant God whom Moses encountered, a God who through his new name ‘I AM’ is revealed as the living God, the ever-present helper and deliverer of his people. If such a God chooses to be identified by the names of his long-dead servants Abraham, Issac, and Jacob, with whom his covenant was made, and whom he committed himself to protect, they cannot be simply died and forgotten: He is not the God of the dead but of the living. It is a cryptic, allusive argument worthy of a rabbinic teacher, but its basis, far from being merely the tense of a verb, is in the fundamental theological understanding of Yahweh, the living God, and of the implications of his establishing an ‘everlasting covenant’ with his mortal worshippers.” R. T. France. The Gospel of Mark: a commentary on the Greek text. (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2002) 471–72.
Peter Leithart posted on this recently (http://www.leithart.com/2009/04/17/god-of-the-living/), going over many of the same arguments, but adding another:
Jesus says that in denying the resurrection the Sadducees are misunderstanding the Scripture. How so?
He’s saying, first of all, that they don’t even understand the Scripture they’ve quoted. Matthew makes this point very subtly. The quotation from Deuteronomy 25 says that the levirate brother is supposed to “raise up seed” for his dead brother. The verb is the verbal form of “resurrection,” the very same word that the Sadducees use in verse 28 in posing their conundrum, and Jesus uses in verses 30-31. The very passage they quote hints that the Scriptures aim as “raising up” a dead man, by “raising up” seed. The implicit point is: If God gave Israel a law that gave hope to a dying, childless man that he would have sons, that his name would live on, that he would have an heir, isn’t that a hint that God is a God of resurrection? …
Andrew, you could be right.
I think the problem for me is thinking about what seems most probable here. So when Jesus says, “you error because you know neither the scriptures nor the power of God,” I tend to think he means “you know neither the scriptures (that they testify to the resurrection) nor the power of God (that he is able to raise the dead).” It is hard to say if whether or not his comment is really an attack on their limited view of what it is that consists of “the scriptures” or whether he is limiting his own purview of “the scriptures” to the Torah for the purposes of the argument with them. In other words, there is a good deal of “proof” for the resurrection if you include the writings and the prophets as well as the Torah. I am not sure that Jesus was thinking of the very thing you have included above when he spoke, though I do see it as possibility. Without any firm indication, I tend to want to be silent on the matter. However, what I do find interesting about this passage is that it sits amongst pericopes which feature criticisms about Jesus’ person and philosophy, whereas this is really a Sadduceean-Pharisee debate (in which Jesus shares the Pharisaic side). In other words, it is interesting to me that amongst the controversy that was going on over Jesus at this time (in this section of the Gospels) there was this kind of hiatus and a discussion arose, no doubt due to what Jesus and others had been discussing, about whether or not there was a resurrection at all. In other words, it wasn’t really an attack on Jesus but on Pharisaic thought, of which the Sadducees chose Jesus to represent the answer. I mean here is a situation where the Pharisees could align themselves with what Jesus was saying and that is sort of an abnormality as far as the form of the stories goes. The other aspect which this pericope entails I think by its content is that it is thereby historically realistic. We’d assume if it were merely composed that it would take up an issue about Jesus’ person in order to prove to its readers something about Jesus. But it really doesn’t. It does to some extent, but more implicitly than explicitly. I’d expect that if it were merely composed and not an authentic story that the writer would have come out with guns fully loaded trying to prove that the resurrection was and would be the case from all of scripture (for which there is plenty support and from which is the best support) as a kind of ground for the rationality of Jesus’ resurrection. But it is oddly such a weak argument in some regards, or at least from our limited perspective, and probably one that was applied by others other than Jesus that it becomes hardly worth mentioning if it were not really the case. I mean its not really a good proof of the resurrection, and that Jesus believed in the resurrection or thought that resurrection would happen seems hardly a point worth noting in light of what would happen and what is presupposed knowledge in the audience, that one wonders what the purpose of this story is if not to convey a historical event.
John,
Thanks for your extended thoughts!
I’m not convinced that the Sadducees held, at least formally, to a limited canon like the church fathers suggested. They probably held to a functionally superior Torah, but not in a sense that would deny the authority of the prophets. For that reason I’m not sure Jesus was attempting to limit himself to the Torah for ad hominem purposes, but perhaps (probably?) he was.
In any case, I think the argument is pretty good, as long as we read Jesus charitably as not arguing simply based on the tense of a verb. And I’m actually not sure a lot of the later passages in the OT that explicitly refer to a resurrection are talking about a resurrection (I think Daniel 12 and Ezekiel`s valley of dry bones are both talking about political restoration, for instance). To me the general, physical resurrection seems to be a hope assumed from the beginning and under the surface throughout the OT, giving rise to images such as Ezekiel`s. Obviously this is all highly disputed, but that`s my current thought.
And I agree that the oddness of this passage suggests its historicity (which has some interesting results for those who would deny the early Christians believed in a physical resurrection). Thanks, again, for your thoughts!