Francesca Stavrakopoulou, summarising the consensus of modern
scholarship about ancient Israelite conceptions
about the dead, wrote:
. . . biblical
polemics against the dead are themselves suggestive of the dead being perceived
(in certain circles at least) to perform powerful roles within the living community.
Given the quality and quantity of studies devoted to this particular theme,
there is no need here for a detailed rehearsal of this material; collectively,
however, these studies have made a persuasive case for the continued and active
social interrelation of the dead and the living, expressed in ritual form:
interaction with the dead extended beyond funerary practices to include the
invocation and perpetuation of their name (1 Sam. 28:15; 2 Sam. 18:18; cf.
Prov. 10:7; Ps. 49:12; Ruth 4:10), the feeding of the dead (Deut. 26:14; Isa.
57:6; 65:1-4; Ps. 16:3-4; 106:28; Tob. 4:17; Sir. 30:18; cf. Gen. 15:2) and consulting
the dead (1 Sam. 28:3-25; Isa 8:19-20; 19:3; 29:4). As the designation אלוהים in
certain texts suggests (1 Sam. 28:13; Isa. 8:19; cf. 2 Sam. 14:16; Num. 25:2;
Ps. 106:28), the dead were likely considered deified or divine, in the sense
that they were active members of the divine worlds with which ancient
Israelites and Judahites engaged, through in the seemingly tired hierarchies of
those worlds, they were unlikely to have been aligned with ‘high gods’ such as
El, Baal, and Yhwh. (Francesca Stavrakopoulou, Land of Our Fathers: The Roles of Ancestor Veneration in Biblical
Land Claims [Library of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies 473; London:
T&T Clark, 2010], 18-19)
What is important is that, for the ancient Israelites, not just those
who subscribed to the “popular” Israelite religion, but the religion endorsed
by the prophets is that the dead were not “unconscious” or “non-existent”;
instead, they still retained some conscious existence in Sheol. This flies in
the face of Christadelphians, Seventh Day Adventists, and Jehovah’s Witnesses,
among others, who hold to a form of “soul death” or its near-equivalent, “soul
sleep."
