4. Awakening the Sleepers

(i) Introduction

No one doubts that the Old Testament speaks of the resurrection of the dead, but there is no agreement among scholars about what this means, where the idea came from, or how it relates to everything else Scripture says about the dead. But since the Jewish world in which Jesus and Paul lived saw these texts as the primary sources of their belief in the resurrection, we must study the relevant texts and understand how they work. Is the resurrection there a novelty that has burst into the unprepared Israelite world? If so, where did the ancient Hebrews get this idea? Or did they come to it on their own, as the culmination of their hope?

It is important to clarify our main theme once more before we move on. The texts we will be considering, whatever nuances we may find in them, do not speak of a new understanding of life after death, but of what will happen after "life after death." The resurrection is not just a new word about school or about the afterlife (as in Psalm 72). It speaks of something that will happen, if at all, after that "after." Resurrection is bodily life after "life after death" or, if you like, bodily life after the state of "death". That is why it is quite wrong, and this is quite foreign to all the relevant texts, to speak, as one modern author does, of "the resurrection into heaven." The resurrection is exactly what did not happen to Enoch and Elijah. According to these texts, it is what will happen to those people who are dead at that point, not what has already happened to them. If you understand this point, much becomes clear; if you forget about it, complete confusion will inevitably reign.

For much later Jewish thought, the text of Daniel 12:2-3 was very important in this regard. While this is almost certainly the most recent of the relevant passages, there are three good reasons to start with it. First, it is the clearest: almost all scholars agree that it tells of a bodily resurrection, and in a very concrete sense. Second, it draws on some other (apparently older) relevant texts, showing us one way of interpreting them in the second century B.C.E. Third, it itself became a kind of prism through which subsequent authors perceived previous texts. When we read the Book of Daniel, we stand on a bridge between the Bible and the Judaism of Jesus' day, with ideas moving in both directions.

(ii) Daniel 12: Those who sleep will awake, the prudent will shine

Let's start with the main passage, Dan 12:2–3: