Composed in response to a prompt from Anantanand Rambachan.
In the Hebrew Bible, the true good for human beings is usually equated with the good life as it was cherished by Ancient Israelites and Judeans. I would wager that, comparatively, this life can be effectively described by reference to three of the four classical Hindu life goals (Skt: purusharthas), those of artha, kama, and dharma, provided one makes the appropriate cultural transitions from the world of Ancient India to that of the Ancient Near East.
Artha is the pursuit of success, wealth, social respectability, and political power that makes human flourishing possible for one’s household, clan, tribe, and nation, and corresponds broadly to the kinds of goals that Ancient Israelite and Judean men typically sought for themselves. The context and contours of such a life changed over time, of course: in the agrarian villages of Proto-Israelites in the northern Canaanite highlands in the waning centuries of the Bronze Age and the dawn of Iron Age I, huddled in community (kehillah) around their courtyards and village campfires (medurah), the life cycle of an ordinary young man was a youth spent in the drudgery of subsistence farming, probably of warfare and charismatic heroism against Philistine aggressors in their coastal towns, marriage, accession to headship of the family and perhaps of the village, clan, or tribe, and acquisition of the status of elder, preferably with some degree of agricultural surplus and social clout. In the Judean steppe, where there was as yet no Judah but merely a variety of Transjordanian and northwest Arabian nomads yet to be unified by David of Bethlehem, the differences would have been a youth of pastoral nomadism and, in some cases, whole communities of tent-dwelling bands roving across the wastes in search of fertile pastures; the virtues sought would be those of mobile husbandmen rather than of sedentary agriculturalists. As Israel and Judah both urbanized over the course of the monarchies, the vision of the good life remained the same for most people in most of Canaan, but added to it for many Israelites and (newly ethnicized) Judeans was a vision of flourishing in urban communities. In many cases it is the spatiality of a thrivent humanity that has shifted: the intimate community of the small hilltop village giving way to the more impersonal respect afforded to the competent judge, not necessarily an elder (e.g., Absalom; 2 Sam 15), or to the professional warrior processing through those gates (“Saul has killed his thousands, David his tens of thousands”; 1 Sam 18:7), or to the king in his palace (“my lord the king is like the Messenger of God”; 2 Sam 19:27). New livelihoods of a standing military, domestic administration, and foreign affairs emerged, and often competed for space with the traditional lifeways. In the exilic and postexilic periods, moreover, both the agrarian and the urban visions of the good life underwent massive challenge from the quotidian, mundane, and banal experience of life under Persian rule and the seismic dissonances of life under Greek rule, which would continue under the Hasmoneans, Herodians, and Romans. But still, most people, most of the time, were aiming for what we might call reasonable goals of financial independence and at least the requisite influence necessary to maintain the dynamics of one’s family and community. Success had a logical relationship, so ancient Judeans especially agreed with their Mediterranean and Near Eastern neighbors, to patronage: wealthy and respected members of the community should redistribute their goods in appropriate ways to meet public need, whether something as basic as opening their fields to gleaning (Lev 19:9-10) or building temples and walls.1
The Hebrew word that probably best captures this idea is kavod, which more often means “glory” or “radiance” but has the sense of “weight,” “respect,” and “honor,” at least etymologically. Modern Judaism invokes kavod as a middah, a cultural value with both literary and hard-won experiential roots in the Jewish community from antiquity to the present. Kavod, for example, is what Joseph attains in his ascension over Egypt (Gen 45:13); kavod is what we are commanded to have for father and mother, explicitly for the sake of living long upon the land (Exod 20:12). Kavod is a reward of a gracious woman, while wealth without kavod goes to the ruthless man (Prov 11:16). Like artha in the Hindu context, kavod is not just about having abundance of life, temporally or materially, but about having an abundance of honorable life.
In this honorable and abundant life, Ancient Israelites and Judeans, much like Hindus, also sought kama, or pleasure, especially the pleasures of marriage, sex, children, and grandchildren in the abundance of family relationships and the material blessings of wealth. The relevant Hebrew concept here is clearly simchah, or “joy”: one is to enjoy the good things opened up by kavod in licit ways. A classic formulation of the concept is offered by the postexilic sapiential author Qoheleth:
Go, eat your bread with enjoyment and drink your wine with a merry heart, for God has long ago approved what you do. Let your garments always be white; do not let oil be lacking on your head. Enjoy life with the wife whom you love all the days of your vain life that are given you under the sun, because that is your portion in life and in your toil at which you toil under the sun. Whatever your hand finds to do, do with your might, for there is no work or thought or knowledge or wisdom in Sheol, to which you are going. (Eccl 9:7-10, NRSVue)
Eating and drinking with merriness, clean clothes, and a satisfying married life are here advocated by the author as the palliative for toil, death, and the underworld (to which we will return). Qoheleth surely represents a very traditional position on the meaning of the good life here: what really matters is being able to enjoy the basically human things while you can, not the excess acquisition of wisdom or wealth which do not fundamentally alter the human predicaments of vanity, futility, and death. Ancient Israel and Judah would have eaten bread, wine, and olive oil, the three classic staples of Mediterranean antiquity, on a daily basis, perhaps adding in water (when and where cleanly available) and dairy products like milk or cheese (when capable of being produced, stored, and consumed safely), in addition to whatever wild plants could be found that were viable food. Israelites and Judeans do not seem to have been great hunters, and characters in Judah’s Bible who are tend to be both non-Israelite and sometimes hostile (like Nimrod or Esau). Meat would have been consumed infrequently on occasions of festival—perhaps as much as once a month, during the New Moon (the original Shabbat) for wealthier families, and at least several times a year at local shrines. Meat was always sacrificial meat: it is from cultural taboos about what is licit for sacrifice that many of the Torah’s norms for kashrut first emerged. Clothes would have been difficult to produce, keep, maintain, fix, and replace, and certainly difficult to make or keep white by various available bleaching methods. While sex was certainly a source of great pleasure in the ancient world (more on this momentarily), it also should be reckoned with that the ability to have sex safely and cleanly must have been difficult for all ancient and premodern people: it is safe to assume that hygienic compromises of various kinds were common, some of them venereal, and that the brutality of childbearing—the significant possibility of death for mother and/or child—must have made it a source of fear for many, especially women. So, perhaps, did age gaps which certainly would have existed from time to time between spouses.2
Yet Israelites and Judeans were in fact very sexual peoples. Like many Near Eastern societies, polygamy was the norm for men of means, who boasted multiple wives, concubines, and sexual access to slaves as a sign of their own virility, which they likely exercised as often as possible. The first mitzvah in the Torah is, after all, “be fruitful and multiply” (Gen 1:26-28). For their part, we do get some windows into female sexuality in the Hebrew Bible, though those windows are mostly provided by men and surely reflect male biases to at least some substantial degree. Yet we see women using sexuality subversively to get desired and necessary outcomes, often for the sake of justice: sisters Leah and Rachel haggle over a night with their common husband Jacob with some aphrodisiacal mandrakes; Tamar seduces her father-in-law Judah under false pretenses because he will not give her his youngest son per the Levirate law and she requires a child who can take on the lineage of her first husband, Judah’s oldest, because two have already died (Gen 38); the Hebrew midwives Shifrah and Puah rhetorically weaponize Israelite childbirth against Pharaoh; Rahab the prostitute shelters Israelite men infiltrating Jericho; Bathsheba demands that her rapist and conqueror David make her son, Solomon, king. Women and men very well may have had different interests in sex then as now as a component not just in kama but in artha, in personal and social well-being, as well as in political power and representation. Whether it happened or not, when a Abigail goes to David in 1 Samuel 25 prior to her husband Nabal’s death (the text says by gluttony, but the reader can all but be assured that this is an apologos, an “explaining away,” rather than a strict apologia, for the hand of David), and then later ends up David’s wife, one has to wonder if Abigail is not meant to be seen as hedging her bets and doing what she can to survive. But the Hebrew Bible also provides for us an intimate look at sexual pleasure as a human experience in Song of Songs, a series of erotic love poems preserved in the canon largely on the grounds of later rabbinic and Christian arguments that they are really about God and Israel or Christ and the Church. While these more mystical readings have strong value, one is thankful for the prudishness that counterintuitively saved a text of such suggestive and intense love poetry between a young couple. Biblical literature also probably preserves at least one positive look at the pleasure of a same-sex erotic relationship, between Jonathan and David, whose love for one another is described in ways that certainly would have coded as homoerotic to ancient readers, in part because it follows a well-known trope of homoeroticism between male liminal hero companions (Enkidu and Gilgamesh, Herakles and Hylas, Achilles and Patroklos).3 This probability holds even if one also holds that the relationship described is a mere literary fiction meant again to mitigate the probability that David was a usurper: when David grieves for Jonathan and says that his love was “passing that of women” (2 Sam 1:26), given how much the biblical David loves women, one can draw some respectable conclusions about the meaning of David and Jonathan’s rather physical and intimate encounters with one another in 1 Samuel. It is also possible that biblical law is aware of other social situations in which it is licit for men to engage in same-sex activity and does not pass judgment on them (e.g., Deut 23:18).4 It is also probably intentional that the two (and only two) legislative injunctions against same-sex activity in the Torah, in Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13, are specifically against male same-sex sexual activity, for two reasons. The first is the legal and cultural ideal represented in these texts of the full equality of free Israelite men, which ancient protocols around sexual penetration complicate, as the penetrated partner was thought by the ancients to be socially demoted by that act; hence, male same-sex activity cannot happen, so the logic goes, without demeaning another man’s kavod. But these texts say nothing about homoeroticism as such. The second is that in a polygamous, patriarchal culture, as Richard Elliott Friedman and Shawna Dolansky note, the idea that men would outlaw female same-sex erotic activity is absurd: in all likelihood, such activity as spectacle and as group activity inclusive of the husband was encouraged within the social bonds of marriage and concubinage.5 In a world, moreover, where the regulation of adultery was primarily about whether men were sleeping with women that they had no legal right to when another man did have legal right to them, the moral quality of sexuality had nothing to do with some kind of modern preoccupation with when it is appropriate or pleasing to the deity to have sex (within the confines, for example, of marriage), but about whether sexuality is happening within the appropriate social boundaries of one’s status and role in a community. Finally, we might note that the Hebrew Bible preserves the cultural memory of a fairly sexual deity, even when its editors are uncomfortable with that fact: after all, the Bible speaks of YHWH with divine and human brides, as sexually fecund, and as father of many divine and human sons, even as a sexual predator in certain instances.
It is safe to say then that pleasure—especially but not exclusively sexual pleasure—was a core life goal of Ancient Israelites and Judeans alongside kavod. These ancient peoples sought a good life of social respect, reasonable power of self-determination, and material abundance of goods and family, within which to enjoy the ordinary human pleasures of a well-resourced life; they idealized these goals in a world of brutal hardship, toilsome labor, and constant vulnerability to natural and human forces stronger and more capricious than we can typically imagine. But they also pursued what in South Asian tradition is broadly called dharma—“justice” or “righteousness,” with a semantic range that includes what we think of as religion.
Religion, as a separate part of life dealing with the sacred, is not really an ancient concept: most ancient people saw the sort of life I describe above as itself a set of sacred experiences, and deities were involved in all of it, from agriculture to wilderness to warfare to marriage to adulthood to parenthood to old age to death. But Ancient Israelites and Judeans did, at some point early in their history, come to identify themselves as specifically the people(s) of YHWH, or Yahwists. Earliest Yahwism was polytheistic and Canaanite in character: YHWH was a god alongside Levantine gods popular in Syria-Palestine like El, Baal, Asherah, and Shemesh. YHWH, a marginal deity of northwest Arabia, first mentioned in Egyptian texts as the patron of the Shasu peoples, probably filtered northward into Canaan through Transjordanian trade, where his cultic officiants became resident in traditional Caananite/Proto-Israelite shrines to other deities like El and Baal. YHWH’s status as divine warrior, probably his oldest discernible quality, made him a natural other for Baal, who was also divine warrior and champion, and facilitated YHWH’s adoption of his qualities as the storm god, responsible for the life-creating power of the fecundating, seasonal rains. When the Jerusalem Temple was later built by Solomon in the tenth century BCE, this also led to the appropriation by the new YHWH cult in Jerusalem (not a traditional Yahwistic site) of the language mythically associated with Baal’s primary temple on Mt. Zaphon, modern Jebel Aqra in northern Syria. YHWH’s fusion with El is clear in the biblical text but less easily traced: it could be a symptom of the general Bronze Age Collapse cession of the elder, patriarchal, creator gods of the upper sky in various pantheons to younger, warlike gods often connected with storms, rulers of the loewr skies, mountains, and the land. Kronos and Zeus, Dyaus Pitr and Indra, Anu and Enlil (and later Marduk), El and Baal, and El and YHWH all fit this pattern. Divine conflation generally is a time-tested method of religious simplification in times of political and social complication where religious confusion is unhelpful: Pallas Athene, Apollo and Paean, and Amun-Re are all products of that sort of cultural synthesis, as are later Hellenistic deities produced by the interpretatio Graeca such as Serapis. Official cult sites like those at Bethel, Dan, and Jerusalem, patronized by royal sponsors, were relatively new for Israelites and Judeans in the tenth century; traditional sanctuaries like those at Shiloh or the infamous “high places” of the monarchic biblical narrative were more familiar, less official, and less unified. This meant that YHWH was both worshiped at multiple sites and understood to be in some sense the same deity in each of them, but was often worshiped and described according to completely different paradigms at them. The easy modern analogy would be, for example, Our Lady of Guadalupe as compared to Our Lady of Lourdes: both are theoretically one and the same Blessed Virgin Mary, but invoking Mary under these distinct cult titles at these distinct cult sites with their respective mythologies of her apparitions and boons leads to, in theory, different boons. So, too, for Israelite and Judean Yahwism: distinct priesthoods doing and saying distinct things at distinct sites, with no one in charge of regulating local and regional variation until very late if at all and never fully successfully.
On top of this, domestic religion continued to be a normative part of Ancient Israelite and Judean experience all the way down to the Babylonian Exile in 586 BCE and probably, at least for some people in some places, well beyond it. The YHWH of domestic religion is, again, a deity continuous with and distinct from the YHWH of cult sites. For one thing, the domestic YHWH is often glimpsed in biblical texts where YHWH has a human body and appears to the patriarchs in domestic and other intimate settings, like YHWH walking about with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden (Gen 2-3), visiting Abraham and Sarah for dinner and haggling with Abraham over the fate of Sodom (Gen 18-19), and wrestling with Jacob in the night (Gen 32). The YHWH of domestic religion is the “god of the father,” the ancestral god connected to the ancestral household (where a domestic shrine could plausibly be set up to YHWH; Jdg 17:5-6) and tomb, the god of personal visionary experience, dreams, and other sorts of typical divination, the god who is involved in the day-to-day experiences of the family as it seeks to survive in the world. But the YHWH of community and royal sanctuaries is the YHWH of myth: this is the YHWH whose “supernatural” or “liturgical” body, around 70 feet in height if one calculates the measurements of his sanctuary as given in biblical literature and corroborated with other Near Eastern archaeology, has anthropomorphic and theriomorphic qualities, fights sea monsters and other gods, and takes up residence within tabernacles and temples, sending out his life-giving power in tempestuous and later solar ways reminiscent of the deities whose powers he assumes. This is the god represented in masseboth, “standing stones,” to whom belong the asherah pole trees of life that are undoubtedly, in their first iterations, representations of the goddess Asherah but which, by the Iron Age, likely devolved into mere cult symbols of YHWH’s life and wisdom (later to be reborn, however, as the literary goddess of Wisdom in the sapiential literature), to whom one builds altars for sacrifice, whose body one cannot gaze at directly with safety, whose idealized form is celebrated in the poetry of the earlier prophets and psalms, whose house in Jerusalem is next to that of his human son, the Davidic monarch, his offspring, his proxy, and to some degree his human incarnation.
Ancient Israelites and Judeans originally worshiped YHWH as part of their pantheon; like other deities, YHWH’s portrait gradually grew to incorporate the other members of that pantheon until he was the only relevant personality of cult left for some Israelites and some Judeans. Yahwism was never exclusively monolatrist, however, before the Babylonian Exile, and was not exclusively monolatrist after the Exile for some time either; at least if by “monotheistic” one means that there are no other beings who have qualities that ancient people thought of as divine, Yahwism was never monotheistic. But late Yahwism in Judah did begin to relativize the previous divine bodies of YHWH in favor of a “cosmic” or “mystical” corpus of God, one that dwelt in heaven and whose “glory” or “radiance,” in the Priestly theology, or Name, in the Deuteronomistic theology, made his presence available on earth (but left him, notably, immune to attack by foreign powers as in the Babylonian sack of Jerusalem). In the exilic and postexilic periods, this was the important body of God: enthroned in or above heaven, spilling out and over and into and filling all of heaven and earth, ubiquitous, available to the exiles even outside the land of Canaan where Israelites and Judeans in their generations had encountered YHWH in their ancestral homes and traditional shrines, the cosmic or mystical YHWH was a guarantee of the divine presence wherever Judeans might find themselves in the wake of the fall of the monarchy.
The evolution of these Yahwistic theologies, all of which are represented in the Hebrew Bible, from the Bronze Age to the fall of Jerusalem, spans the period in which Israelites and Judeans were also working out what they understood their relationship to YHWH to be and what they took that relationship to entail. For most of their history, one must conclude that YHWH exercised upon Israelites and Judeans no special requirements beyond those necessary for his cult and those ethnic, cultural, moral, and social traditions associated with the cult that would have been broadly agreeable to the wider culture. Dharma did not, for Ancient Israelites and Judeans, require much other than worshiping YHWH alongside their ordinary human quests for kavod and pleasure. At most, the effect of religion on the concept of the good life for Israelites and Judeans was again spatial and temporal, as cult spaces and special times of festival came to signify some of the things that these ancient peoples ideally valued as belonging to the good life. A prominent example has to do with the poetic desire to come to YHWH in his shrine, sacntuary, or temple, to “see” him there, to “dwell” with him there, and to enjoy his life-giving power as it radiates out from the holy space. In reality, most people did not have the time or the access to shrines the majority of the time; when they did, it was during specialized time and their access to the space would have been limited by official cultic personnel. But the notion that YHWH, in his supernatural or liturgical body, dwells in the shrine and that the natural and material blessings needed for the good life actually emanate from the maintenance of that divine presence there became a locus for the focused hopes of Ancient Israelites and Judeans (for the latter, especially in connection to Jerusalem) for using sacred space to talk about the desirable place to be in life and of sacred time as bringing about desirable pleasure or joy in life. Analogously, migration within or from one’s ancestral home was undesirable because it also meant departure from the family tomb and the tutelary spirits, the domestic YHWH among them, that superintended tomb and home. The tragedy of the exiles for the majority of those deported, whether by Assyria or Babylon, must surely have been the sense that they would never get to join their loved ones beyond the grave, including their familial deity or deities.
At some shrines, among some priests, and among some reformist thinkers, more specific law codes and theoretical frameworks for understanding that legislation, like the idea that Israel and Judah were in covenant (Heb: b’rit) with YHWH, began to evolve, and in the late preexilic period in Judah, this theoretical framework became a controlling narrative among a group of elite scribes for explaining the decline and fall of Israel and Judah. Those scribes would produce the Mosaic Torah or Pentateuch in the form that we have it now, and they would also curate the scrolls of the prophets into an evolving anthology of literature that articulated a particular vision of Israel and Judah’s life with YHWH that involved legal obligations to YHWH’s teaching (Heb: torah). But even this anthology and the philosophy that guided it would not become normative for most Judeans until the Hasmonean period, when the Mosaic Torah was adopted as the constitution (Grk: politeia) of the fledgling independent Judean monarchy led by the family of Judah Maccabee, leading to the invention of Judaism as a reformed concept of Judean identity.
Ancient Israel and Judah, then, cherished the goals of life that are also valued in the Hindu life cycle, and that we have here named as artha, kama, and dharma. But it must be admitted that where contemporaneously with the formation and fall of the states of Ancient Israel and Judah, Ancient India in the first millennium BCE was already critically assessing its traditional religion with philosophical and metaphysical texts that describe the ultimate human goal not merely in the attainment of wealth, pleasure, or righteousness but as moksha, liberation, from the cosmogonie cycle of samsara, the Hebrew Bible does not have an equivalent in the form of a transcendent goal to human life. It does have some philosophical interrogation of the nature of God, God’s relationship to the world, and the true character of the good life in the Wisdom text, late Persian period compositions that dispute the concept that God has made the world with Wisdom (Heb: Chokmah; Grk: Sophia). The Book of Proverbs (Mishlei), which appears to be adapted in part from a previous Near Eastern source, the Egyptian Teaching of Amenemope, YHWH has made the world with Wisdom (Prov 8:22ff), and as a result there is an almost karmic quality to the world’s moral fabric: the wise do good and receive good, and the foolish do evil and receive evil. The other two Wisdom texts of the Hebrew Bible, Job and Qohelet, are largely critiques of the crude simplicity of this worldview. In the original text of Job, Job’s suffering is explained by his friends through the lens of traditional Wisdom thinking as somehow merited by his sin, which Job systematically refutes and the reader knows to be false. Job has not merited the great evils that have befallen him: he is in fact exceedingly righteous and these evils and the corresponding alienation from YHWH’s divine presence are distressing for him precisely because they do not seem to have an underlying cause. When God shows up to answer Job in chapters 38-42, he does not exactly provide an answer so much as a challenge to Job to contemplate the complexities of the created order, which will swiftly clarify for him that he cannot indict God for the seeming injustice he has experienced. Job comes close to being a document of anti-Wisdom, rejecting the neat and tidy cosmology of Proverbs. Qohelet is similar, engaging in extensive argument that whatever Wisdom there is in the world is both inscrutable and unfolded in cycles which far dwarf the lifetime of men, such that excessive acquisition of wisdom or of righteousness is unnecessary and ill-advised. While these texts reflect on major questions of philosophical theology, none of them articulates a transcendent goal for human beings beyond managing a fulfilling life here and now.
The closest the Hebrew Bible comes to something like moksha in its anthology are in the exilic and postexilic prophets’ promises of Judah’s restoration sometimes but not always inclusive of Israel) as a cultic and national polity. These promises become a major source both of Jewish apocalyptic literature as a genre as well as of several of the specific hopes for transcendent human liberation or becoming that will populate apocalyptic and other kinds of Early Jewish texts in the Hellenistic period. Judah’s restoration will involve a miraculous return of exiles to Zion brought en masse by the gentile nations themselves, their kings and queens serving as wet nurses to the exiles’ children in Deutero-Isaiah (Isa 40-55); Israel’s restoration will be like a valley of dry bones being reconstituted with flesh into a standing army in Ezekiel; in Ezekiel and Deutero-Zechariah (Zech 9-14), Mt. Zion will be exalted as the highest mountain in the world, the new cosmic axis mundi, and rivers of life will flow out from the new Temple of the restored Jerusalem (or from the city itself) and will flow out to the Dead Sea, bringing it to life as a new oasis. This will follow, for both prophets, on an eschatological war with the nations, and for Zechariah, the humbled nations will have to come to Jerusalem every year to celebrate Sukkot and acknowledge YHWH’s kingship ritually. In an earlier passage in the scroll of Isaiah, but perhaps interpolated around this time, YHWH will in the future defeat Death—the chaos monster Mot, one of his mythical enemies—that will cause the dead to rise, and then he will create a feast on Mt. Zion for all (Isa 25).
These texts do not on their own promise that everyone will partake of the restoration or that those who do will live forever; even our one text in Isaiah that seems to explicitly promise resurrection does not say that it will be to immortality. If there’s any resurrection here, it is back to ordinary life where kavod, plenty, pleasure, and good cult are the good life. The first and only time this changes in the whole Hebrew Bible is in Daniel 12:1-3, where the author promises resurrection and astral deification to the “wise” who have been cut down during the Antiochene Persecution of 167-164 BCE. This is not a universal, general resurrection of the dead, but a specialized resurrection for the martyrs as a reward for their having lost their lives in obedience to God’s wisdom and laws. A similarly targeted resurrection is on offer in 2 Maccabees 7, which details the martyrdom of seven brothers who are promised resurrection, but whose restoration to live is explicitly a return to the ordinary, fleshly life that they lose by way of martyrdom.
While Ancient Israelites and Judeans clearly practiced cult to the dead, offering sacrifices to ancestors and hoping at the conclusion of the good life to have their remains gathered to them and to be with them in the underworld, connected to their living descendants, the redactors of the Hebrew Bible are on the whole uncomfortable with this aspect of Israelite and Judean religion and object to it as idolatrous and immoral. As a result, while our texts admit that there is an underworld and that people go there, they instead emphasize the ancient sense of life in the underworld as no life at all. Similarly, Ancient Israelites and Judeans clearly participated in cult to the heavenly bodies like their ancestors and neighbors did, at various point associating the Sun, Moon, and Stars with gods and goddesses in service to YHWH and at times perhaps avatars or proxies of YHWH himself (as the solar disc probably registered in later, southern Yahwism). And at least some individuals are remembered by the Hebrew Bible as making their way to heaven and, by implication, undergoing translation to divine status there: Enoch and Elijah, principally, but also, in many Early Jewish texts, Moses, which may suggest that his biography originally ended not with death on Mt. Nebo and secret burial by God but with deification. But the redactors of the text are also uncomfortable with this kind of postmortem fate for humans, and these individuals become instead the exceptions that prove the rule that human fate is death and gloomy existence in the underworld. In keeping with the distaste for divine humans, our editors have sought to avoid not only stories of divine ascent but also of divine birth in general: YHWH fathered Cain (Gen 4:1) and Samson (Jdg 13), in the most ancient layers of their mythography, but the editors of the text have sought to mute the former hero’s status and have rendered ambiguous the circumstances of the latter’s conception after a visit not of YHWH but of YHWH’s “Messenger.” While the Hebrew Bible would not become regulatory for normative Judean practice and belief for many centuries, it shows an attempt already by Judean elites in the exilic period to focus Judean attention on questions of this life as the one that can be the good life.
Early Jewish literature composed in the Second Temple period would variously confirm or challenge this picture or life’s significance. In some texts, like Tobit, this life is the important one: Tobit’s healed blindness and Sarah’s liberation from the demon Asmodeus who keeps killing her husbands is God’s salvation, his liberating power to free us to live well now. In other texts, like the various apocalypses that constitute 1 Enoch, divine salvation is reserved for life after death or for the future eschaton, and looks not like the good life one can have here and now but like transformation into an angelic existence. This is also what’s on offer in texts like the Testament of Abraham or the Apocalypse of Zephaniah: postmortem reward and punishment for righteousness and wickedness in this life, especially those left unanswered by the chaos and inscrutable providential organization of this life. Again, context matters: in the far more urbanized and imperialized life of Hellenistic and Roman Judea, classic hopes for an agrarian vision of the good life was unattainable for brutally poor and overtaxed peasants or for vulnerable city-folk. Apocalypticists saw the only possibility of the good life in the spatial or temporal horizon of the eschaton: in an earthly paradise tended by angels or in heaven where YHWH sat enthroned, in a restored Judah and Jerusalem on the far side of a cataclysmic transition of ages where Israel would at last be vindicated by God against the nations. But frequently common to their convictions is the impossibility of living the good life in toto here and now.
The Temple’s symbolic power here also shifted radically in Early Jewish literature, as Early Jews imagined, already in the exilic period, the earthly Temple as a copy of cosmic or heavenly Temples. When Enoch ascends to heaven in the Book of the Watchers, it is a celestial temple he progresses through; when Philo of Alexandria comments allegorically on the Temple cult as it is described in the Septuagint version of Leviticus, it is the universe he thinks the Temple represents. The preexilic associations of the Temple as the center of life-giving power in which one desires to dwell near the deity become translated into these different visions as distinct eschatologies. For the apocalypticists, transformation into an angel to serve in the liturgy of the cosmic and/or celestial temples is the quintessential reward after this life. For someone like Philo, angelic transformation is itself a step on the path to total deification by metamorphosis into pure nous or mind, God’s own substance, just like Moses underwent. Indeed, Early Jewish literature keeps alive the possibility of human transformation to high metaphysical status, perhaps to the chagrin of the editors of the Hebrew Bible who sought to downplay such ideas. In Ezekiel’s Exagoge, God gives Moses his crown and scepter and exits the stage, leaving Moses to take his place on the cosmic throne. In Daniel 7:9-14, an old myth from the Baal Cycle of Baal’s return from his theomachy with Yamm, which Ancient Israelites and Judeans likely applied to YHWH himself in the person of the “one like a son of man” in the preexilic period, is now reinterpreted to be the ascent of Israel’s angelic champion, probably Michael, to the enthroned YHWH in the role of El as “Ancient of Days.” The “one like a son of man” receives an everlasting and universal kingdom in heaven that is the cosmic grounds for Israel’s exaltation on earth. In Parables of Enoch, chapters 37-71 of 1 Enoch, Enoch sees this figure as a preexistent messiah who comes to be before the rest of creation and is hidden by God, only to be eschatologically revealed, until Enoch himself is transformed into an angel and told that he is that Son of Man. To say that becoming an angel or a deity constituted a normative goal of Early Judaism would be misrepresentative, and in any event, becoming a god is explicitly one of the afterlives that, in the Hindu context, moksha is meant to relativize and surpass. The closest one comes to that sort of “liberation” would be Philo’s form of ultimate deification in which one is assimilated to the divine nous. But it is only in these texts that anything beyond the good life of reasonable, righteous kavod and wealth is valued in biblical and related literature.
It is from these texts that the New Testament eschatologies of national restoration for Israel, postmortem resurrection, metamorphosis into pneuma, cosmic rule, rest, and reward in paradise and New Jerusalem, etc. are sourced. More so than by the Hebrew Bible itself, the New Testament’s vision of the good life is influenced primarily by the aspirations for human transcendence one finds in Early Jewish literature. Indeed, at least explicitly, the New Testament contradicts the Hebrew Bible on many of the things it values as essential to the good life. The lifestyles of John the Baptist, Jesus, Paul, and many of the early members of the community, involved celibacy and asceticism in view of the imminent Kingdom and advocated such lifestyles to others (Matt 19:1-10; 1 Cor 7). The New Testament has almost nothing positive to say about wealth: not just “unjust wealth,” not just “excessive wealth,” nor about the possibility of wealth functioning as an “idol” that “distracts us from God,” but wealth, full stop.
In brief, biblical literature does not offer a singular concept of the good life. Ancient Israel and Judah, and Judah in its postexilic aftermath, held to a fairly traditional image of what human fulfillment meant; Early Jewish texts, including the New Testament, increasingly looked for human fulfillment in postmortem reward in heaven, angelification, and/or resurrection. In every temporal phase of their history, Ancient Jews were challenged, just like other ancient peoples, to revise traditional lifeways and assumptions about the world in response to new phenomena. The adaptations and mutations between them and us remain myriad. It is not, then, wise to look to biblical literature alone for a vision of what flourishing in modern life ought to look like. As a guide, the Bible does a good job of getting us to think about what matters and why; as a legislator, the Bible does a poor job of speaking to our circumstances because it was not written with us in mind. Consider, for example, legislation in the Torah accepting slavery or various forms of misogyny. In the Ancient Near Eastern context, the Torah’s attitudes about these things were unexceptional; but in our day, it ought to be absolutely foundational that the human dignity of all people rules out the concept of owning another human being or unequal treatment on the basis of biological sex or, we might add, sexual orientation or gender. Wisdom literature will not offer a single understanding of the relationship between moral goodness and life experience—nor, for that matter, will the artha, kama, and dharmasastras—and for every moment of Proverbs-like sensibility to worldly vicissitudes there is plenty of Jobean suffering and Ecclesiastical melancholy to be had, for every Ramayana a Mahabharata to counter it with the insight of dharma’s subtlety. Jesus’s teachings in the Sermon on the Mount of radical communistic sharing of goods and forfeiture of anxiety about daily needs is positively revolutionary—and impossible for any married person with children living in a capitalist world, no matter how much one privately agrees with Jesus’s teaching or tries to put them into partial practice. Paul’s suggestions about celibacy and keeping to one’s station in worldly life is all well and good if the world is getting ready to end; it’s a recipe for complicity with oppression otherwise, which is why Pauline literature has sometimes been the summons to liberation and rebellion against the system here and now, in the absence of the parousia.
So, how ought we to live?
I’m hardly one to pontificate on such things, but I would offer the following principle, on which I may eventually write at further length: the real circumstances one lives within should always have priority over the idealized circumstances one thinks one ought to have. That is to say, the indicative mood prevails over the subjunctive: one does better to avoid the imperative when possible. I do not mean to sound slippery; rather, life is slippery, and the good life elusive by nature. Anecdotally, I have seen plenty of people shatter on the rocks of their uncompromised ideals, reduced to broken shards of people by their own rigidity and refusal to reconcile with reality. Sure, there are also hollow men and women, those so empty of substantial content that their wind-tossed diplomacy is effectively meaningless. But between these there is the real exercise of wisdom in discerning what the good life really is and can be in any particular context—what is realistic to hope for, what is realistic to have, to do.
One example, and I will conclude. As a younger man, single and unaffiliated, I was largely free in my religious life to do what pleased me ritually and in the rest of life to do what pleased me, period; as a husband and a father, I am lucky when I make it through a liturgy of any kind uninterrupted by my active toddler (infrequent) and blessed when I can eke out a quick and dirty Vespers. Hell, basic kama that I once took for granted—the chance to shower on a schedule, to eat at a human pace, to take my time in exercise, in reading, in writing this blog, and the like—is now an occasional enjoyment. Does God judge me for falling short of some standard of living “the good life” because I have, for the most part, put the good of my family above the claims religious institutions want to make on my time, my attention, and my priorities?
I should certainly hope not—after all, one could argue I am simply aligned to the domestic religious vibes of my ancestors in faith—but I also could not rationally see how God qua God could fail to acquit such contours to my life. God surely asks of us what we can do, in accordance with what we can reasonably know we can do, and not what is not possible for us. Modern Judaism recognizes this, ignoring or reinterpreting those mitzvoth which cannot now be performed absent, say, a Temple or a monarchy; Modern Christianity rarely admits it, but it, too, has largely accepted that much of what the Bible prescribes as the good life is not fully possible today. But that is not why God has given us the Bible anyway; we have it not for prescriptions but for witness, to what the good life has meant before, how that has changed in the past, and how it might do so again.
See the work of my teacher Victor H. Matthews, The History of Bronze and Iron Age Israel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).
See Matthews, The Cultural World of the Bible: An Illustrated Guide to Manners and Customs, 4th ed. (Grand Rapids: BakerAcademic, 2015).
Here I admit that scholars are of two minds on the subject, but I cannot, for the life of me, see how the conservative reading is anything but a case of special pleading because David and Jonathan are biblical heroes. Of course, even some classicists have until relatively recently in the field’s history been uncomfortable about Achilles and Patroklos.
See Richard Elliott Friedman and Shawna Dolansky, The Bible Now: Homosexuality, Abortion, Women, Death Penalty, Earth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).