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)
