Resurrection

In 1571, a widowed woman, unable to light a fire, screams “to Satan with you” at the flint and tinder and soon finds herself possessed by an evil spirit. Notably, she also does not believe in the exodus. Only after she repents does the kabbalist Hayyim Vital exorcise the spirit through her little toe. Before doing so, Vital interrogates the spirit to learn why it has not yet entered Gehenna (hell) and how it has been wandering the earth from Hormuz to Gaza to Shechem.

Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John all include accounts of women discovering Jesus’ tomb empty three days after his crucifixion that share a common structure, but vary considerably in their details. Christians reading the story at Easter experience vicariously the women’s fear and awe, just as Jews re-experience the Exodus through the Haggadah.

Ezekiel’s vision of the dry bones did not assume personal resurrection, a belief that entered Judaism in a later period. In its original context, the imagery of bones rearticulating and coming back to life draws upon the ancient burial practices of Judahite family tombs, offering a message of hope to the exiles in Babylon that YHWH will return them to their land.

Originally an allegorical vision about the future return of Judeans to their land, Ezekiel’s vision (ch. 37) becomes one of the cornerstones for the Jewish belief in the resurrection of the dead. The early stages of this development are made clear in a little-known Qumran scroll called Pseudo-Ezekiel.

God promised Abraham that Isaac would be his heir, yet God asked Abraham to offer Isaac as a sacrifice. What did Abraham believe that allowed him to reconcile this divine contradiction?

Ancient Jewish interpreters imagined Balaam as the prototypical Gentile seducer. This trope was used by John of Patmos, the author of the book of Revelation and himself a Jew, to polemicize against his rivals among the early Christians.

A pediatric neurologist searches for the soul through the lens of current neuroscience.

2 Maccabees tells the story of a mother whose seven sons are killed before her eyes because they refuse to violate Jewish mores. The mother recalls the woman of seven sons and her bereft counterpart found in Hannah’s prayer (1 Samuel 2), and perhaps also the mother in Jerusalem described in Jeremiah 15, but offers a new theological twist on Jewish suffering: the promise of resurrection.