Death and Afterlife
Death appears in many guises within Judaism. The Hebrew Bible, which forms the basis for all subsequent thinking, treats death as a punishment for sin and source of ritual impurity. While it acknowledges the virtue of a timely death, the emphasis remains on embodied life and the present moment. Refe...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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St Andrews Encyclopaedia of Theology
2025-07-01
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| Series: | St Andrews Encyclopaedia of Theology |
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| Online Access: | https://www.saet.ac.uk/Judaism/DeathandAfterlife |
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| Summary: | Death appears in many guises within Judaism. The Hebrew Bible, which forms the basis for all subsequent thinking, treats death as a punishment for sin and source of ritual impurity. While it acknowledges the virtue of a timely death, the emphasis remains on embodied life and the present moment. References to postmortem existence and resurrection appear, especially outside the Pentateuch, but these are understated.
One reason for this may be a weak version of the self, lacking firm boundaries between the inner and outer worlds. Only in later biblical texts do we see the emergence of the idea of a distinct soul capable of surviving bodily death. A strong division between this world and the next also served to distinguish Israelite religion from other cultures that worshipped ancestors. The biblical message is that only God, as the source of life, and his prophets can be counted on to guide human beings in this life.
Rabbinic literature, especially the Talmud (c. 500 CE), continues the biblical focus on life and expresses discomfort with death. It elaborates on laws of corpse impurity, mourning practices aimed at reintegrating mourners into the community and discourages martyrdom. Yet a counter-current valorizes dying for God, either through martyrdom or ritual enactments of death, viewing it as the ultimate expression of love. This may have been influenced by Roman persecutions post-70 CE and served as a psychological defence against the fear of death.
While the rabbis maintained the biblical view of the embodied self, they also absorbed Hellenistic ideas of the soul as ethereal. Rabbinic texts oscillate between belief in bodily resurrection, where body and soul are judged together, and the notion of a soul that exists independently and survives death. Like their Greek contemporaries, the rabbis envisioned the afterlife as a realm of divine judgment.
Rabbinic views on death were not systematically organized and remained open to external influences. Central to their thought was the belief in God’s omniscience and justice, ensuring that individuals would be rewarded or punished, if not in this life, then in the next. The tension between bodily resurrection and spiritual afterlife persisted until the medieval period, when a more structured view emerged: souls of the deceased reside in the world to come before returning during the messianic era. Death also served an ethical function, reminding individuals of mortality, prompting repentance, and offering hope.
Medieval Jewish rationalists, influenced by Greek philosophy, developed more systematic, though not always consistent, views of death. They expanded on biblical and Rabbinic ideas, describing multiple levels of the soul, with neshama as the highest. Jewish mystics adopted similar frameworks but added vivid depictions of the afterlife, often drawn from meditative experiences. Both traditions upheld the virtue of cleaving to God in death and the belief that love transcends mortality.
With the Enlightenment, Jewish thinkers retained belief in the afterlife but sought to rationalize it. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, modern Jewish philosophers like Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, and Joseph B. Soloveitchik display an interest in death characteristic of the age in which they lived. Authenticity requires death to be faced, rather than avoided. Soloveitchik grounded these reflections in traditional Jewish law, emphasizing the enduring value of life and trust in divine justice.
The current entry has attempted a largely historical approach tracing Jewish conceptions of death from biblical times through Rabbinic, medieval, and modern periods. The entry also attempts to address the theological meaning of Jewish rituals surrounding death.
This approach allows the reader to gain a sense of the development of ideas, including the move from a communitarian view to one focused more on the individual, and the interplay of ideas of embodiment and belief in a soul capable of existing apart from a body. |
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| ISSN: | 2753-3492 |