Resurrection

Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel: The Ultimate Victory of the God of Life Excellent, engaging book by a spectacular scholar… – brian – Mass., USA
Fair disclosure: I know Professor Levenson, i.e., as one of his students. But honestly, this is a very, very good book; if you are even remotely interested in the topic of resurrection in ancient Israelite literature and Judaism, then you should buy this volume immediately.

This book is highly readable, relatively jargon-free, and is written as much for educated non-scholarly readers as much as for the academic community. Rarely does a book serve both communities so well.
A Major Disappointment – Cebes – Dracut, MA United States
Levenson is one of the top Biblical scholars today, and his previous book Death & Resurrection of the Beloved Son is simply a brilliant and innovative work, albeit demanding. So one expected further great things in Levenson’s new book. This book purports to challenge the scholarly consensus that the doctrine of resurrection of the body is a major innovation in traditional Judaism and probably the result of influence from the Persian religion of Zoroastrianism, which did include such a doctrine. But the argument falls flat. While there are a couple of mentions of the possibility of reviving the dead in the pre-apocalyptic period, even Levenson himself admits that the standard Jewish view was that bodily death was final. He also points out that what mattered for traditional Judaism was not individual survival after death, but survival of the Jewish people as a whole. However, he does not seem to realize that this last point undercuts his argument, for it suggests that the doctrine of individual bodily resurrection was indeed a dramatic innovation. His argument that bodily resurrection was continuous with traditional Judaism comes down to the extremely weak claim that God is a God of life and promised blessings to Israel. But how you can derive a very specific and alien doctrine of bodily resurrection at judgment day, from this extremely vague generality about God being a god of life, is beyond me. Wouldn’t it seem to be more likely that being directly exposed to this new specific doctrine of resurrection among the Persians would be a better explanation? Nor does Levenson explain, if the resurrection idea is continuous with the Jewish tradition, how it is that so many Jewish groups vigorously opposed this new doctrine (e.g. the Saducees). In the end, even Levenson admits that, as he puts it, the conventional view that resurrection is a major innovation “is not necessarily wrong” (Watch out for double negatives: they usually indicate when an author is making a reluctant concession), and that there is a “large measure of truth” to the conventional view. In order to defend his unlikely conclusion, Levenson is forced to insist on a more “dynamic” conception of truth. That sure sounds like relativism to me. But in any case, the argument is extremely weak and unconvincing. By all means, read Levenson’s “Death and Resurrection.” But this new book just doesn’t measure up.
Levenson challenges the standard opinion of scholarship, which holds that the notion of bodily resurrection is a late development within Judaism supported only briefly by the early rabbis who employed methods of biblical interpretation at odds with modern scientific criticisms. By examining concepts such as ancestral lineage, family name, Sheol, and key biblical texts, Levenson convincingly demonstrates that the concept of resurrection developed over a long course of time from Judaism’s roots,and by neglecting the concept in recent centuries Judaism has missed out on one of it’s own treasured tenets of hope. Rarely does a book turn scholarship on its head as this one does — a must read for Jewish and Christian scriptural, historical, and theological scholars. :

Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel: The Ultimate Victory of the God of Life

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