James Kugel on the 23rd Psalm [from discontinued AOL Journal Shubuta Street]

The 23rd Psalm famously concludes with these words (King James translation):

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life,
and I will dwell in the house of the LORD forever.

Jewish biblical scholar James Kugel devotes a chapter of his The Great Poems of the Bible (1999) to Psalm 23. I'm going to include a long quotation from that chapter here, longer than I would probably use in a public Weblog without the permission of the publisher. this Weblog is a "private" one, with limited access.

I'm not quoting this passage in a devotional sense. It's because I find the Jewish method of explicating the Bible by drawing out the different possibilities and nuances of the stories and the ways in which they have been understood a good way to think about the concepts.

In discussing the last part of the Psalm, Kugel talks at some length of the concepts of death, resurrection and the afterlife in the Hebrew Bible. I'm putting the quotations in italics:

The idea that the souls of the righteous will go to a place called Paradise is not found as such in the Hebrew bible. This idea is actually a development of an early interpretive tradition surrounding the story of the Garden of Eden in Genesis 2 and 3. In that story, God puts Adam and Eve in a special garden with fruit-bearing trees. From the biblical text itself, the garden appears to be an altogether physical, earthly place located somewhere in the ancient Near East. four rivers are said to issue from it, of which two, at any rate, are identified as the Tigris and the Euphrates (Gen. 2:14), located today in Iraq. Certainly the presence of these rivers, as well as that of fruit-bearing trees, would seem to indicate that Eden was a magnificent garden somewhere on earth; how can a river flow, or a tree grow, in the sky? When the Hebrew bible was first translated into Greek translators referred to the Garden as a "paradise" because that was the common Greek word for a luxurious enclosed orchard, the sort that nobles in those days planed on their vast estates. Thus, neither the Hebrew Bible nor its ancient Greek translation contained any indication that the Garden/Paradise was anything other than an earthly orchard.

But certain elements of the story made ancient biblical interpreters wonder. After Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden, God did not destroy it. Instead, He placed cherubim and a flaming sword at its entrance "to guard the way to the tree of life" (Gen. 3:24). If the Garden
was being guarded and preserved, presumably God intended to keep it for some future use; and what was the "tree of life" in its midst meant for if not to feed (and perhaps thus keep alive) those righteous souls who had been granted life after death? So it was that the age-old teachings about the soul's return to God after death and the reward of the righteous came now to focus on this Garden. "Paradise" became the place where the blessed would go after their earthly passing.

Even as the place of repose of righteous souls after their death, Paradise certainly could be located on earth, and many ancient writers from the early postbiblical period maintained that it was.

And both [Adam and Eve] were buried according to the commandment of God in the regions of Paradise, in the place from which God had found the dust [from which Adam was formed, Gen. 2:7] APOCALYPSE OF MOSES, 40:6

[An angel tells Baruch:] "When God cause the flood over the earth ... and the water rose over the heights of fifteen cubits, the water entered Paradise and killed every flower. 3BARUCH, 4:10

But there were some indications in the Bible itself that this final resting place was not on earth but in heaven. After all, heaven - though in Hebrew there is no separate term for "heaven," texts simply use the common word for "sky" - has always had a special significance in human
thought. It is higher than earth, up there," hence a superior, presumably dominant station vis-à-vis earth. From heaven one can look down on all that happens on earth (and, so it was supposed, also hear everything that is said down there). Its great, open expanse has always suggested that which is beyond, free of, the bonds of earthly existence and the laws that govern ordinary life. So it was that the righteous Enoch and Elijah were understood tohave ascended into heaven and to live there still (Gen. 5:24, 2 Kings 2:11); presumably, the proper place for immortality was far above the changeable things of this world. Similarly, the Book of Isaiah refers
to the reward of the righteous in these terms:

He who walks righteously and speaks uprightly, who despises the gain of oppression, who shakes his hands lest they hold a bribe, who stops his ears from hearing of bloodshed and shuts his eyes from looking upon evil - he will dwell on high, his refuge will be craggy fortresses; his
food will be given him, his water will be sure. Your eyes will behold the King in his spendor, they will see the earth from afar. ISA. 34:15-17

The highlighted words suggested that the reward of the righteous was not be be found on earth but in heaven. In this passage, and in others, only the very literal-minded will confuse the metaphysical heaven with the actual stratosphere. But this metaphysical sense was nonetheless tied to the physical "sky," and Paradise was spoken of in the Bible as if an actual garden. So it was that the reward of the righteous came to be thought of, especially by the literalists, as an orchard above the clouds.

And those men took me from there, and they brought me up to the third heaven. And they placed me in the midst of Paradise. ... And I said, "How pleasant is this place!" The men answered me, "This place has been prepared for the righteous." 2 ENOCH, 8:1, 9:1