Friday, March 19, 2021

Dale C. Allison, Jr., on Isaiah 26:19 and Daniel 12:2

In his The Resurrection of Jesus (2021), Dale Allison addresses a number of texts that are used to support that the Old Testament (or at least, the NT-era interpretation of these texts) teaches an eschatological, physical resurrection. The following are two such texts followed by his comments:

 

Isa 26:19: “your dead shall live, their corpses (נבלתי; LXX: οι εν τοις μνηειοις; those in the tombs) will rise.”

 

Whatever the author intended, later interpreters found resurrection here; cf. 4Q541 frag. 2 2:12; Mt 11:5; Lk 7:22; Tg. Isa. 26:19 (“You are he who brings alive the dead, you raise the bones of their bodies); Tanḥ Buber Toledot 6:19; Acts Pil. 21:2; and Epiphanius, Pan. 4(64).70.5 ed. Dindorf, p. 683. The prophecy of resurrection in Dan. 12:1-3 draws on Isa. 26:19; cf. John Collins, Daniel: A Commentary on the Book of Daniel, Hermenia (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993), 392. Note also that 1 Clem. 50:4 conflates Isa. 26:20 with Ezek. 37:12 (“I will raise you from your graves”). Whether 1QH 19:12 (“to raise the worms of the dead from the dust”), which clearly alludes to Isa 26:19, is meant metaphorically or adverts to literal resurrection is unclear. (Dale C. Allison, Jr., The Resurrection of Jesus: Apologetics, Polemics, History [London: T&T Clark, 2021], 131 n. 86)

 

LXX Dan. 12:2: “many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth will arise.”

 

Some find a different meaning in the MT. E.g., Outi Lehtipuu, Debates over the Resurrection of the Dead: Constructing Early Christian Identity, OECS (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 33-34, argues that אדמה עפר means not “dust of the earth” but “land of dust,” that is, Sheol, so that “the Danielic passage says nothing about the resurrection of buried bodies; it is the spirits of the dead that are awakened and brought out of Sheol” . . . This is unlikely. (a) Although “dust” and “Sheol” are in synonymous parallelism in Job 17:16, nowhere else in the Hebrew Bible does אדמה עפר designate Sheol. (b) While the Hebrew Bible can speak of Sheol or the underworld as a “land,” the noun for that is ארץ, not אדמה (Ezek. 26:20; 32:18). (c) Dan. 12:3 draws on Isa. 26:19, which uses the word for “corpse” (נבלה; cf. LXX: οι εν τοις μνηειοις: “those in the wombs”) and so readily conjures the notion of physical bodies. (d) Daniel refers to neither “spirit” nor “soul.” (e) If—this is uncertain—Daniel envisages a life in the heavens (the wise “will shine like the brightness of the firmament”), this need not exclude physical resurrection. In 2 Bar. 50:2-51:10, the two prospects go together. (f) Neither the Septuagint nor Theodotion takes HEB to refer to Sheol. (Ibid., 132 n. 88)