What the Fathers Hoped

Between Malachi and Matthew, Jewish writers argued this exact question out loud — and the New Testament was written to people who had heard them. A reader who has never met 2 Maccabees, 1 Enoch or 2 Baruch will miss what the first readers caught.

This lesson is the world behind Luke 16 and behind “Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.”

And then the sentence this series exists for. The mother, urging her youngest and last son not to give in:

That answers our question as directly as any ancient text does: the seven brothers and their mother are together, and they are added to the company of the ancestors. The family is not merely preserved; it is enlarged into the older family it came from.

Wisdom of Solomon — anonymous, written pseudonymously as Solomon, in accomplished Greek, almost certainly Alexandria, first century BC, for diaspora Jews under pressure to assimilate. Its opening chapters answer the taunt that the righteous die like anyone else and nothing follows.

This is the text most often read at Christian funerals that is not in the Protestant Bible, and the reason is its pastoral precision: “in the eyes of the foolish they seemed to have died.” It does not deny the death. It denies the appearance of what the death meant. Note that Wisdom, like 4 Maccabees, thinks in souls rather than raised bodies.

Sirach — Jeshua ben Eleazar ben Sira, a Jerusalem scribe, writing in Hebrew about 180 BC; translated into Greek in Egypt by his grandson after 132 BC, who says so in a prologue — one of the very few ancient translator’s prefaces we possess.

Tobit — a diaspora novella, probably third or second century BC, set in the Assyrian exile, for Jews living far from Jerusalem, marrying, working and burying their dead among foreigners. Tobit’s whole crisis begins because he buries the dead when it is forbidden.

“Remember, my child, that she faced many dangers for you while you were in her womb. And when she dies, bury her beside me in one grave.”

The chapter goes on to divide the hollow places — a bright spring of water for the spirits of the righteous, and separate places of pain for sinners, each held until the great judgement.

And note Abel. The first murdered man’s spirit “makes suit” against his brother — a development of Genesis 4:10, and the nearest ancient parallel to the souls under the altar crying “how long?” in Revelation 6:10. The earliest picture of a conscious dead person in this literature is a murdered man asking about his brother.

And Baruch asks the question this series is named for — not a vague question about heaven, but a precise question about form and recognisability:

The answer comes in two stages, and the order is the whole point.

Chapter 7 first describes seven orders of torment for the ungodly and seven orders of rest and joy for the righteous after death (7:78–99). Then Ezra asks the question every grieving believer eventually asks: