Judaism's earliest concepts of the afterlife were minimal and focused on this world, only later developing into beliefs in resurrection and divine judgment, according to a new Russian-language study published by the Proceedings of the Nizhny Novgorod Theological Seminary.
The authors of the paper, Israel’s Ideas of the Afterlife: Essays in Old Testament Thanatology, explain that the article “examines the biblical revelation regarding life after death” and “attempts to describe the ideas of the Israelites about Sheol, based on biblical texts.” It appears in the seminary’s scholarly proceedings.
The authors describe a shift “from the almost ‘materialistic’ idea of the early Israeli society to the belief in life beyond the grave and the resurrection of the dead… which became mainstream in Israel on the threshold of the New Testament.”
In the Hebrew Bible, the term Sheol is the shadowy abode of the dead. It is often depicted as “down below,” silent, and without active praise of God. It is closer to a great communal grave than to the moralized heaven/hell of later eras.
Reward after death
Early on, say the authors, Sheol is not heaven or hell but “a formless, hideous, shadowy place where total darkness reigns,” and they adduce Job’s lament about a land “whose light is darkness.” (Job 10:21–22).
Sheol, the paper stresses, reads less like punishment than like suspension: “a state of heavy and aimless sleep, rather than a place of concrete torments.” Job gives the idiom behind that picture: “so man lies down and does not rise; until the heavens are no more…” (Job 14:12)
Justice in the Hebrew Bible is initially framed collectively, not as personal reward after death. As the study puts it, “recompense appeared first of all as social experience in the well-being or calamities of the nation,” before individual eschatology emerges. Deuteronomy’s blessings match that emphasis: “Blessed shall you be in the city and blessed shall you be in the field” (Deut. 28:3).
Why the early reticence about the dead? The authors argue that it’s principled: in Judaism, “the natural impulses of myth-making are restrained by the bridle of the Law and the fire of prophetic speech,” a posture that also polices the border with ancestor cult and necromancy. This restraint fits psalmic lines like “For there is no praise of You among the dead; in Sheol, who can acclaim You?” (Ps. 6:6).
The explicit hope for resurrection arrives late. Summarizing the turn, the paper writes that belief in post-mortem recompense and resurrection becomes “mainstream… on the threshold of the New Testament.” The classic proof-text is Daniel: “Many of those that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life…” (Dan. 12:2–3).
On the perennial question of borrowing, the study is cautious. For the early periods, it calls accusations that Jews “borrowed the doctrine of the afterlife from surrounding nations” “unjustified.” Jews certainly lived amid Egyptian, Mesopotamian, and Greek ideas, the authors note, but they frame Israel’s development as selective uptake within strong monotheistic guardrails rather than simple import.
Who wrote it and where it ran
The paper Israel’s Ideas of the Afterlife: Essays in Old Testament Thanatology is by Yuri A. Gutorov and Priest Victor Plaksin of the Nizhny Novgorod Theological Seminary. The authors explain that the article “examines the biblical revelation regarding life after death” and “attempts to describe the ideas of the Israelites about Sheol, based on biblical texts.” It appears in the seminary’s scholarly proceedings.