What do Jews believe about the afterlife?

"But, be it solemnly observed (he continues) the Jews to whom and in whose metaphorical sense the word was used by our blessed Lord, never did, either then or at any other period, normally attach to the word Gehenna that meaning of endless torment which we attach to hell.' To them, and in their style of speech — and therefore on the lips of our blessed Saviour who addressed it to them, and spake in terms which they would understand — it meant not a material and everlasting fire, but an intermediate, a remedial, a metaphorical, a terminable retribution."

To this is appended a note in which the Jews as a church are stated never to have held either (1) the finality of the doom passed, or (2) the doctrine of torment, endless, if once incurred. For this he quotes various authorities, among others as the most distinct utterance of the Talmud, one in which it is said "that the just shall rise to bliss; ordinary sinners shall be ultimately redeemed; the hopelessly bad shall be punished for a year, and then annihilated." In another place, "Gehenna is nothing but a day in which the ungodly shall be burned."

In his fifth excursus at the end of the book he adds other testimonies, among which is another from the Talmud, to the effect that "after the last judgment Gehenna exists no longer." His testimony of the Rabbins concerns us very little. He does not notice the views of either Pharisees or Essenes, who both held eternal punishment, as Josephus explicitly affirms.

To this is appended a note in which the Jews as a church are stated never to have held either (1) the finality of the doom passed, or (2) the doctrine of torment, endless, if once incurred. For this he quotes various authorities, among others as the most distinct utterance of the Talmud, one in which it is said "that the just shall rise to bliss; ordinary sinners shall be ultimately redeemed; the hopelessly bad shall be punished for a year, and then annihilated." In another place, "Gehenna is nothing but a day in which the ungodly shall be burned." In his fifth excursus at the end of the book he adds other testimonies, among which is another from the Talmud, to the effect that "after the last judgment Gehenna exists no longer." His testimony of the Rabbins concerns us very little. He does not notice the views of either Pharisees or Essenes, who both held eternal punishment, as Josephus explicitly affirms. Mr. Hudson has made a similar appeal to the Talmud, naturally laying the stress upon the annihilationism contained in it, that Dr. Farrar lays upon the restorationism. Both allow that there are some passages which may be pleaded against these, although they believe not really against them. I do not lay any stress upon it, nor propose at all to take up this line of argument. I leave it to those more competent to do so, and shall confine myself entirely to Scripture. It is of Gehenna that the Lord speaks when He asserts God's ability to "destroy both body and soul in hell." We have seen how little the text can be made to mean annihilation. It would seem to be no less decisive against Dr. Farrar's view. Indeed he gives it up explicitly, if to be taken as implying that God will put forth this power that He claims. The passage, he says,* "merely attributes to God a power which we know the Omnipotent must possess. He can destroy the soul, but it says not that He will. If any think that this is implied, it seems to me that no logical choice is open to them, but to embrace the theory of conditional immortality."

356 But there was another source historically of this doctrine (I say historically, for it was all the same reasoning of human nature that did not know the gospel of salvation) — the Jewish doctrine. The Jews' notion (and the identity of thought is here also extraordinary) was this: they say (as Cyprian, Ambrose, and hosts of others) that there is no place of repentance after death. This the Fathers repeat continually; so the Jews. It is true; but where redemption is not known the only resource is to keep people from sin by terrifying the mind always by the dread of an avenging God, falsifying His character. But then they make almost all Jews get out of the place of punishment, because God has punished the best for all faults, and, after punishing the wicked, must crown what they have done right. Even if one commandment be kept, a Jew will be blest, so that, between that and Abraham's help and Moses', every child of Israel will see the world to come. God leans to the side of mercy, and it would not be just, they say, that a man suffered eternally for crimes which have often been light ones. Hence they have a purgatory for prevaricators in Israel, those who are not entirely good nor entirely bad. They pray to get souls out of it, and God releases them, and particularly at great days of expiation. It is even said that they sell indulgences to the people to get out quicker. Their purgatory is a part of hell beneath the earth. They judge that souls who have done both evil and good works will be punished for the evil, and then be rewarded for the good. So exactly says Origen (Hom. 16) on Jeremiah 5:6, "If after you are on the foundation of Jesus Christ, you have gold, etc., and wood, etc., what would you have done to you when your soul quits your body? Would you enter into the holy place for the gold, etc., to pollute God's kingdom, or stay out for the wood, and receive no reward for the gold," etc.? Yet neither is this just. He then quotes, "our God is a consuming fire," and says, there comes always blessing after threats and sorrow. And quoting falsely, I know not how, Isaiah 40, he insists on the word first ("I will first retribute double their iniquities"); first we shall suffer the torment for our iniquities, then be crowned for our righteousness. This is exactly Jewish.

Gehenna, says Dr. Farrar, "means primarily the valley of Hinnom outside Jerusalem, in which, after it had been polluted by Moloch-worship, corpses were flung, and fires were lit; and is used, secondarily, as a metaphor, not for fruitless and hopeless, but - for all at any rate but a small and desperate minority - of that purifying and corrective punishment, which, as all of us alike believe, does await impenitents both here and beyond the grave.

"But, be it solemnly observed (he continues) the Jews to whom and in whose metaphorical sense the word was used by our blessed Lord, never did, either then or at any other period, normally attach to the word Gehenna that meaning of endless torment which we attach to ‘hell.' To them, and in their style of speech - and therefore on the lips of our blessed Saviour who addressed it to them, and spake in terms which they would understand - it meant not a material and everlasting fire, but an intermediate, a remedial, a metaphorical, a terminable retribution."

"In the Old Testament it is merely the pleasant valley of Hinnom (Ge Hinnom), subsequently desecrated by idolatry, and specially by Moloch worship, and defiled by Josiah on this account. Used, according to Jewish tradition, as the common sewer of the city, the corpses of the worst criminals were flung into it unburied, and fires were lit to purify the contaminated air. It then became a word which secondarily implied (1.) the severest judgment which a Jewish court could pass upon a criminal — the casting forth of his unburied corpse amid the fires and worms of this polluted valley; and (2.) a punishment which — to the Jews as a body — never meant an endless punishment beyond the grave."

*Preface, xxxii. "In the Old Testament it is merely the pleasant valley of Hinnom (Ge Hinnom), subsequently desecrated by idolatry, and specially by Moloch worship, and defiled by Josiah on this account. Used, according to Jewish tradition, as the common sewer of the city, the corpses of the worst criminals were flung into it unburied, and fires were lit to purify the contaminated air. It then became a word which secondarily implied (i) the severest judgment which a Jewish court could pass upon a criminal - the casting forth of his unburied corpse amid the fires and worms of this polluted valley; and (ii) a punishment which - to the Jews as a body - never meant an endless punishment beyond the grave."

As to this we have seen, however, what the Lord affirms of it, in a threat according to Dr. Farrar never to be executed. The destruction of body and soul can hardly be this side of the grave, and cannot consist with restoration. Dr. Farrar's words, too, are contradicted explicitly by Josephus, as is well known, both with regard to the Pharisees and the Essenes: a testimony he never even alludes to, and which as strangely Mr. Hudson sets aside as unreliable. But let us see now whence the Jews drew (or might have drawn) their views of Gehenna. We have the Old Testament as they had, and from it alone all right views, such as the Lord Himself adopted, must surely be taken. Revelation alone could be a light beyond the grave. To one of these Old Testament passages (Isa. lxvi. 24) we have already referred, in which we find both the fire and the worm attributed to the valley of Hinnom, and which more certainly are the basis of the well-known warning of our Lord which we must almost immediately consider now. As millennial and not final, it may be concluded to have given risen to thoughts of the temporary nature of Gehenna, which Dr. Farrar's extracts have so much of, as well as also to have furnished argument for the annihilation doctrines of the day, in behalf of which also we find them quoting Mal. iv. 1, quite as do the present annihilationists. The main passage beside is also in Isaiah, and here Tophet, the valley of Hinnom, is expressly named as the place of judgment for the Assyrian, where the breath of the Lord like a stream of brimstone kindles the pile (xxx. 33). Here, while the literal Tophet might furnish the terms of the prophecy, the language points to something deeper, which the fuller revelation could alone perhaps make plain. We must now look at the well-known passage in the Gospel of Mark (ix. 43-50), which I quote in full:

Apart and distinct from every adaptive application of the word, stands out clearly enough throughout Scripture its true and proper sense, as the seat not only of personality in man, but, of the affections, emotions, desires, will, and conscience. Its immortality or imperishable existence, though, like the existence of God Himself, nowhere expressly affirmed in so many words, is assumed throughout, and interwoven into the very texture of the word. Witness Job 19:25-27, where not only immortality is counted on, but resurrection is anticipated; the story of Saul and Samuel at En-dor (1 Sam. 28), where not only is the prophet found as a living being, long after his departure from this life, but where also he announces to wicked Saul that to-morrow he and his sons should be with him, and such announcements as that Abraham, Ishmael, Isaac, Jacob, Aaron, Moses, were gathered to their people (Gen. 25:8, 17; 35:29; 49:29, 33; Num. 20:24, 26; 27:13; 31:2; Deut. 32:50), or that Josiah was gathered to his fathers, beside being gathered to his grave (2 Kings 22:20); or that the entire generation of Israelites which entered Canaan were "gathered to their fathers." (Judges 2:10.) The interpretation given by our blessed Lord to the phrase "God of Abraham," &c., that "God is not the God of the dead, but of the living: for all live unto him" (Luke 20:38), lends equally its full weight to such expressions as the above, especially when it is borne in mind that "life and incorruptibility are brought to light" through the gospel, but not before. True it is that in the absence of revelation as to the nature of eternal life, as a distinct and new thing introduced into the soul, the only sense attached to a future existence, as steadily held by the Pharisees in common with the mass of the Jewish people, and contested only by the Sadducees, must have been that of an everlasting existence in a resurrection state of blessedness, in contrast with a resurrection state of "shame and everlasting contempt," as expressed by Daniel (Dan. 12:1); for, though in the mind of the Spirit who inspired the prophet, the expression "eternal life" had of course its full import, it may not have been so to the penman more than to those by whom it was read, before the doctrine had been brought to light. Even throughout the pages of the first three Evangelists, a definition of life as "a condition of existence," would apply; but the moment we open John, whose special line of truth "life" is, it ceases to suffice: hitherto there has been only a state of existence in which the person is or may be; now there is the revelation of the springs of life in the person, and that, at the very outset, as in its fountain-head, the Word Himself: "In Him was life."

We have yet a particular point to enquire into historically (for the doctrine of eternal life is clear) — how far the Jews thought of this, and how far Christ met their thoughts. The doctrine of eternal life or any life after this world was not necessary to be a good Jew. The priests and high priests were Sadducees, who believed nothing of it. It is said that Sadoc's teaching originally was only urging that rewards after this life ought not to be our motive for goodness, but the blessedness of what was good. However that may be, it ended in his followers denying resurrection, angel, and spirit, and taking this world for their portion. But, while the Pentateuch is silent as to eternal life, saying only, "The man that doeth these things shall live in them," the subsequent teaching of the Jews had brought the nation, with the exception of the Sadducees, to expect eternal life, with the grossest corruption of principles as to merit, balancing accounts of merit and demerit, and even positive superstitions.

In the second place, as the law dealt with man here and now, and did not relegate the issue of its own trial to another time and place, where its verdict could not be known by men in this life; the earth is that upon which man's attention is fixed, and that whether for judgment or reward. There are hints here also of the fuller truths which the New Testament unfolds; but manifestly there is no promise of heaven to the keeper of the law, nor even threat of hell — that is, of the lake of fire — to the transgressors of it. Judgment there is, and eternal judgment, but death is rather the stroke of it — the horror of this shadowing the eternity beyond. Job speaks of resurrection, and the prophets also, though in them it is only applied figuratively to national restoration; yet this shows they held it as admitted truth. Outside of the Old Testament we learn, from the epistle to the Hebrews, that the patriarchs expected "a better country — that is, a heavenly;" but we should not know it from Genesis. Faith penetrated, in some measure, it is clear, the "dark sayings," and found all not dark. A recognized body of truth was received by the Pharisees, which embraced, not only resurrection for the just, but of the unjust also, and spoke, not merely of hades, but of gehenna also — the true "hell." This only makes the more remarkable the constant style even of the prophets. The confounding of judgments upon the living, by which the earth will be rid of its destroyers and prepared for blessing, with the judgment of the dead at the "great white throne," is one of the errors under which annihilationism shelters itself most securely.

27 The whole question of the soul's relationship to God and a judgment after death is untouched here, though, as a spiritual person, I may see separation from God to be eternal ruin. Gradually the instinct of man's soul was lit up by the declarations of the Spirit in the Old Testament, particularly the Psalms, but there was no revelation of life and incorruptibility till the Gospel; they were not brought to light. The Pharisees were right - they had concluded it from the Old Testament, and the Sadducees did not know the Scriptures and the power of God. But the Lord Himself draws it from "I am the God of Abraham," etc., and it is added, "for all live unto him"; death is only death as to this world and man's place there. This revelation has so much the more clearness that the original sentence was limited to that; all still lived to God. So of eternal judgment, it was part of Jewish faith, as in Hebrews 6, but formed no part of the original revelation. Wrath of God from heaven on men was revealed when the Gospel came in, for it met it.