For this salvation, God chose such a means that allowed Noah to stand almost in the primitive conditions of moral life. Noah was commanded to save not only his family, but also all kinds of animals, so that during the flood he was obliged to feed the animals and take care of them and then set them free (Gen. 6:19-21; 8:17), which means that in his ark Noah involuntarily repeated the story of Adam's paradisiacal life, which means that after leaving his ship, he could again begin the history of human life from that very moral moment, from which began the history of antediluvian life after God's blessing of people for the long-suffering struggle against evil. But in the new world there were the same conditions of life and the same conditions of struggle against evil in which the mankind of the antediluvian world lived. People knew the need and knew. suffering, and of necessity turned towards the physical conditions and relations of life, and of necessity found themselves in the circle of contradictions of life. In order to make it easier for people to experience these contradictions, God removed from the human conscience all those abnormalities that necessarily arise from the conditions of man's physical existence. He precisely allowed man's conquests in relation to physical nature, i.e., in addition to moral dominion over nature, He also admitted the possibility of physical domination over it. But with man's natural desire to remove from himself the very possibility of want and suffering, the real limits of necessity can easily be replaced by imaginary limits, and necessity can in fact justify man's completely free actions. From the desire to remove need naturally arises the desire for happiness, and from this desire, when it is taken as the positive goal of human life, there naturally arises the subordination of the religious-moral principle of life to the conditional interests of physical existence, i.e., there naturally arises both a complete distortion of religious truth and a decisive perversion of moral duty. It was this evil that destroyed people by the flood, and it also developed again in the modern history of mankind, and it made this history, in fact, a simple repetition of the history of a lost world. The Bible tells about the new election by God of one righteous family to preserve the truth of religious and moral covenants (Gen. 12:1-3), and about the granting by God of a special code of religious and moral laws for the people descended from the family chosen by Him, and about the embassy to this people of a whole host of chosen people for the deliberate proclamation of God's will. But all these divine interventions in the fate of human history in reality had only one meaning, that the truth of religious and moral consciousness was not extinguished in people, and even this result was achieved not so much by the moral force of the law and the convincing truth of the inspired prophetic word, as by the physical force of material rewards and material deprivations (Lev. 26:3-45; Deuteronomy 28:1-45; Judg. 2:7-15, etc.).

We already know now that such preservation of religious-moral truth was a completely natural phenomenon and, perhaps, even the only possible one, because, under the conditions of man's present situation, moral obligation in itself, i.e., pure, unconditional, had and could not have any significance for people at all. Listening to the moral requirements of the positive law, people, of course, had to judge their lives from the point of view of these requirements. But, discussing these very requirements from the point of view of their positive significance for the personal goals of human life, they saw only that "everything and everyone is the same: one fate for the righteous and the wicked, the good and the evil, the pure and the unclean, the sacrificer and the unsacrificial; both to the virtuous and to the sinner, both he who swears and he who fears an oath" (Ecclesiastes 9:2; cf. Job 21:23-26).

Therefore, any person who wished to judge his life by the judgment of God's truth could in no case free himself from the critical thought that "this is evil in everything that is done under the sun, that there is one fate for all" (Ecclesiastes 9:3); and therefore, for the sake of justifying the meaning of moral activity, he could not help thinking and could not help wishing that death should be only his natural transmigration into a new life. He could, of course, be quite at peace if he had reason to say that with the death of a person "the dust shall return to the earth, as it was, and the spirit shall return to God, Who gave it" (Ecclesiastes 12:7); for then it would have been quite clear to him that not everyone and everything has the same fate, that dead people only "in the eyes of the foolish seemed to be dead, and their departure was considered destruction, and their departure from us was destruction," but in fact "they dwell in peace" (Wisdom Solomon 3:2-3). But the teaching of the Bible is not the product of the considerations of human reason, but the true revelation of God, and it has the strongest proof of its divinity: it does not know the natural transition into a new life, it does not know immortality at all.

Of course, biblical teaching recognizes the soul as indestructible. While man's body turns to dust, his spirit, according to the biblical expression (Gen. 37:35), goes to hell, i.e. it does not cease to exist, but only leaves the sphere of living relations of existence; for in the grave there is neither work, nor meditation, nor knowledge, nor wisdom (Ecclesiastes 9:10). The souls of dead people have nothing to do with the life from which they emerged, and they have no other conditions of life at all. Therefore, together with the loss of their earthly existence, they lose the opportunity not only to take part in what is happening under the sun, but even to have a vital relationship to the living sphere of purely spiritual existence, and even to have a religious relationship to the omnipresent God: "It is not the grave that glorifies Thee," says the book of the prophet Isaiah, "it is not death that praises Thee, nor those who have descended into the grave trust in Thy mercy" (38:38). 18; cf. Ps. 87, 11-13). It goes without saying that the soul cannot lose its consciousness, and the soul of a dead person undoubtedly has it, but with the deprivation of active life, consciousness no longer creates thoughts, feelings, or aspirations, and therefore it no longer illuminates the soul, and therefore its only content under such circumstances can obviously be the very fact of the impossibility of living. the fact of death. In view of this, the afterlife of the human spirit is presented in the Bible as its removal "into the land of darkness, such as is the darkness of the shadow of death, where there is no order, where it is dark as darkness itself" (Job 10:22).

This Biblical teaching about the posthumous fate of the human spirit, in view of the absolutely correct view of religion as the positive and, in fact, the only basis of moral activity, has long caused great confusion among the apologists of the Old Testament revelation. They fully agreed that the doctrine of immortality, "so useful to every religion, and therefore contained in all systems of paganism, had been utterly discarded in the Hebrew religion," but, fearing the possible conclusion that the Jewish religion should therefore be regarded as the crudest and most base of all the religions of the ancient world, they constantly tried to invent every excuse for this alleged deficiency in divine revelation. Some, for example, believed that at the time of the appearance of the most ancient sacred books, "the human mind had not yet had time to mature for the concept of life after death"; others allowed themselves to guess that the communication of the doctrine of immortality to such a coarse people as the Jewish people "could give them a pretext for superstition"; still others, finally, simply turned to the denial of the fact, and, by all sorts of stretches, tried to prove that the Jewish religion had always preached the doctrine of the afterlife of men, and that, therefore, it was in no way inferior to all pagan religions.33 In fact, however, with the exception of the non-canonical books of the Wisdom of Solomon and the third Ezra, all the Old Testament sacred books unconditionally deny the life of man after death; And therefore it was the Jewish religion that was not only not inferior to all the other religions of the ancient world, but it was the only religion of all religions that was really the true religion, because it alone strictly and unswervingly proclaimed the perfect truth to people. It is true, of course, that with the denial of man's life after death, his moral activity loses all real value for him, but if man does not actually live after death, it would obviously be extremely absurd to demand that the Bible should maintain moral energy in men by means of the false creation of human superstition. Consequently, before making various considerations about why the biblical teaching does not speak of the posthumous life of man, it is necessary to first pose the question: is it true that man lives after death?

Both from the point of view of the biblical teaching about man and from the point of view of modern scientific knowledge about the psychophysical life of man, we can only answer this question in the negative. Both science and the Bible know about man alike – not as a spirit only temporarily settled in the temple of the material body, but as a spirit from the beginning realized in the conditions of material existence. Hence, with the abolition of these conditions, i.e., with the onset of death, it is not only the human body that undergoes decomposition, but first the man himself is dissolved into his constituent elements, and it is not the body or spirit of man that dies, but man. Consequently, he ceases to exist as a man, and consequently to speak of his life after death is the same as to speak of the life of a non-existent. In view of this, it is quite understandable that the biblical writers, being completely free from the pagan errors of human thought, in reality never thought and could not think of death as a kind of natural change in the conditions of life. In fact, they both thought and desired for themselves only salvation from death, and therefore they lived not with the hope of immortality, but only with the hope of this salvation from death: "Thou wilt not leave my soul in hell, neither will Thy holy one see corruption" (Psalm 15:10) – this conviction of the Old Testament righteous man then served as the only justification for faith in the real rationality of life.

However, this suspicion is completely unfounded. If we are to really define the cultural-historical genesis of the idea of the resurrection, then we must also ask about Parseeism where this great idea could have arisen in it. And if such a question is posed, by a comparative study of different religions and cultures, it can be quite convincingly proved that the idea of resurrection is not really the product of the speculative work of cultured minds, but the oldest remnant of the one primitive religion of men. The fact is that, in spite of the universal predominance in mankind of the natural belief in life after death, there is, however, among all cultured and uncultured peoples of the earth a conception of death according to which it is not at all the transition of man into a new life, but, on the contrary, a temporary cessation or temporary cessation of human life. Thus, for example, in the languages of all European peoples, one and the same general view of death is conveyed quite consistently, that it is precisely only dormition = sleep, and that the dead man, in fact, is only the departed. Where could this amazing view have arisen, when in fact the same European peoples also profess a common human belief in the reality of the afterlife of people after death?

In answer to this question, we can first of all assert with complete certainty that the mysterious convergence of death and sleep undoubtedly arose independently of the cultural influence of Christian ideas, because this convergence also exists among peoples of completely different races and cultures, and even among completely savage peoples. Thus, for example, the African tribe of Bushmen, for all the poverty of their naïve worldview, has, however, in its language a profound proverb of an undoubted philosophical character: "Death is only a dream"; and the same view of death is held by the savage Australian tribe of the Tasmanians; and, finally, the same view of death is found among the savage Indian tribes of North America.

In fact, only the first man on earth, and only in the first case of death, could through ignorance confuse it with a deep, prolonged sleep. Any further possibility of this confusion, even in the first man, although he had not yet been taught by the bitter experience of life, was bound to disappear before the ominous fact of the posthumous decomposition of the body. but the final interpretation of the meaning of this fact. That is, this definition, in fact, does not mean that death can sometimes be mistaken for sleep, but that there was a time when people, well aware of the posthumous destruction of man, nevertheless were unshakably convinced that this destruction was only temporary, and that the dead man would return again to his interrupted life, just as a man who has now fallen asleep awakens from sleep to his interrupted activity.

There really was such a time. From the monuments of Ancient Egypt we know about the touching care with which the ancient Egyptians treated the mortal remains of their dead.

This tender solicitude for the posthumous preservation of the body was determined by the Egyptians' religious belief in the future resurrection of men. They saw the mortal destruction of man, but because of their faith in salvation, they did not see in this destruction his final destruction, and they thought that the dead man, although he had ceased to live for the time being, would nevertheless return to life later on and would again be the same living man. And in order to give their dead the opportunity of this return, they took special care to preserve their mortal remains, since, in the event of the destruction of their bodies, there would be nothing to revive afterwards, and therefore the dead would not return to life.

In the course of time, this ancient faith of the Egyptians was obscured in a mass of various eschatological and cosmological fabrications, and finally it was even completely lost. But it was certainly not the product of the independent religious creativity of the Egyptians, because we find it as a fundamental religious dogma among peoples who, by reason of geography and racial characteristics, stood outside the cultural influences of our Old World. With the discovery of America, it became known that the belief in the future resurrection of people was widespread among the inhabitants of the New World and that it was expressed here not only in a certain cycle of special funeral customs, but also in a fully developed circle of theological and eschatological ideas. For example, the Mexicans were sure that the dead would have to rise again, and therefore, "when the bones of their dead were dry enough, they put them in a special basket and hung this basket from the branch of some tree, so that the dead would not have to look for their bones later on the next day of resurrection." In the spirit of the same faith, the Peruvians, explaining some of the naïve customs of their everyday life, naively said to their Spanish interlocutors: "In order that we may not have to search everywhere for our nails and hair at a time when there will be no fuss and turmoil, we put them in one place beforehand, so that they can be collected without trouble, in the most convenient way; For the same purpose, we even try to spit in one place whenever it turns out to be possible"[297].

And into this same unknown depth of centuries the thought of resurrection goes within the boundaries of the Old World. After all, in fact, in the history of Ancient Egypt we can approximate only the time of the distortion of this thought, and not the time of its appearance. We can only say that the idea of resurrection is undoubtedly older than the well-known speculative teachings of the Egyptians about the mysteries of the afterlife and about the circular revolution of world life in the transmigrations of souls, but when and how this idea appeared in them is unknown to us. However, bearing in mind its undoubted antiquity and taking into account the universal human elements in various teachings about death and the posthumous fate of man, we can attribute the time of the appearance of the idea of resurrection to the very beginning of primitive mankind without much risk of error; – to that prehistoric epoch when, contrary to the fatal law of death, all mankind was convinced that "death is only a dream."

In this case, the idea of the resurrection is obviously not only the oldest but also the very first expression of man's faith in the truth of the biblical message of God's promise of salvation. For if men really knew the fatal truth about death, that is, they knew that the dead man did not sleep in his grave at all, and yet they were convinced to assert the contrary to what they knew for certain, then it goes without saying that the logical possibility of such an assertion could not rest with them on any knowledge, but only on their deep faith. that death would probably be destroyed, and that the dead would return to life again; And yet, within the natural boundaries of human thought, there are in reality no grounds for the formation of this deep faith, and there cannot be. If, therefore, in spite of their knowledge of the fatal truth about death, people nevertheless believed that it was only a dream, then in this case they undoubtedly stood in the very factual conditions reported by the Biblical news, i.e. in this case they could rely not on any happy conjectures of even highly respected authorities, but only on their unconditional trust in the miraculous report of the first people about the promise of God they had received; for without such assurance of divine authority, it would never have occurred to them to consider death as a dream.