Thursday, June 9, 2022

Marriage in the Hereafter in the Theology of Seder Eliyahu Rabbah and the Sethites

  

What will life be like in the World to Come? God will be seated in His great academy, and seated in His presence will be the righteous of the world, along with their wives, their sons, their daughters, their manservants, and their maidservants. The needs of their households will all be provided for them. There will be no hunger or thirst or sexual desire, but the righteous will feast on the splendor of the Shekhinah. (Seder Eliyahu Rabbah 4:19, in Howard Schwartz, Tree of Souls: The Mythology of Judaism [New York: Oxford University Press, 2004], 507, emphasis added)

 

2,1 For in this regard they agree with the previous sect, the sect of the Cainites: Two men were born at the very beginning, and Cain and Abel were the sons of the two. And in quarreling about them the angels went to <war with> each other, and so brought it about that Abel was killed by Cain. (2) For the angels’ quarrel was a struggle over the human stocks, since these two men, the one who had sired Cain and the one who had sired Abel, <were at odds with each other>. (3) But the power on high has won, the one they call Mother and Female. For they have the idea that there are both mothers on high, and females and males, and they all but say “kindreds and patriarchies” too. (Against Sethians, 2,1-3 in The Panarion of Epiphanius of Salamis Book 1 (Sects 1-46) [2d ed.; Nag Hammadi and Manichaean Studies 63; Leiden, Brill: 2009], 277)