Does the Old Testament communicate that there is an afterlife? More specifically, do the first five books of the Bible contain any mention of life after death? This is a question that author and theologian Dr. Gavin Ortlund tackled this week on his YouTube channel, Truth Unites.
“It’s very common to hear the claim in biblical scholarship that there’s no doctrine of the afterlife in the earlier portions of the Old Testament,” said Ortlund, who cited one Jewish scholar who says that “in the entire Torah there is not the slightest suggestion” of an afterlife. The Torah is the first five books of the Bible, which are also known as the Pentateuch.
Ortlund concluded that while the idea of an afterlife is neither prominent nor explicit in early books of the Bible, the idea does appear there and is consistent with Scripture’s later revelations.
It’s often claimed that there is no notion of an afterlife in the earlier parts of the Old Testament.
In this video I argue that biblical revelation about the afterlife is organic and coherent, from Genesis to Revelation.https://t.co/gjLeq3i3vQ
— Gavin Ortlund (@gavinortlund) August 5, 2024
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In a video published Aug. 5, Gavin Ortlund explained that one scholarly argument for how Israel’s conception of the afterlife developed is that it was a result of the Babylonian Exile, which occurred in late sixth century B.C. and which led to the Israelites encountering Zoroastrianism.
Some argue that before Zoroastrianism came into the picture, there was no idea of an afterlife in the Old Testament and that Zoroastrianism is responsible for references to the afterlife we see in later parts of Scripture, such as Daniel 12.
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Those who hold to this view, said Ortlund, believe that first there was no belief in an afterlife in the Old Testament, then the idea of Sheol (a “shadowy” type of existence after death) appeared, and, finally, later parts of the Bible came to depict the idea of a “bodily resurrection” and different consequences for the unrighteous and the righteous.
“How do we evaluate that claim?” Ortlund asked. He observed that one concept Christians use to interpret the Bible is “progressive revelation,” meaning that God gradually reveals truth about himself and the universe over time.
“It’s undeniable that there’s progress in the clarity of God’s revelation over time on an issue like this,” said Ortlund. However, a key aspect of progressive revelation is that it is coherent. Progressive revelation does not mean moving between two contradictory ideas “or even from ignorance to brand new information.” Rather, it means moving from “less clarity to greater clarity.”
