Proper
burial. Death as the completion and
fulfilment of life is dependent upon decent and proper burial.. This was the
case in other lands and cultures also. The first person Odysseus spoke with in
the underworld was his comrade Elpenor, who had been left unburied as they
escaped from recent dangers: and his ghost at once beseeched Odysseus to
provide a seemly burial, which was done. In Israel this is deeply related to
kin and land. Nothing is a worse outrage, offensive to God and man, than that a
corpse should be left unburied, ‘with the burial of an ass’, as Jeremiah said
of Jehoiakim (Jeremiah 22.19; cf. 36.30, where we hear of the same king that he
will have no descendant as successor, and his dead body ‘shall be cast out to
the heat by day and the frost by night’). To die in a foreign territory,
equally, is a bad thing. Among his acts of charity Tobit gave primacy to the
burying of any Hebrews whose bodies had been thrown out and left unburied
(Tobit 1.17-19; 2.3-9). Burial in the proper place was again a sign of
completion, of satisfaction of ancient wrongs.
The
supreme example lies in the deep interest taken in the bones of Saul and
Jonathan, disgracefully treated by the Philistines, retrieved as an act of
devotion by the men of Jabesh Gilead for whom Saul had done a great act of
deliverance, and finally brought by David to rest in the family tomb, an
accomplishment of final atonement with which God was well satisfied (I Samuel
11.1-15; 31.8-13; II Samuel 21.12-14). Burial was more than a simple disposal
of the corpse: it reunited the person with kin and ancestors. Such expressions
as ‘he was gathered to his kinsfolk’ (used in Genesis 25.8, 17; 33.29; 49.33;
Deuteronomy 32.50 of Abraham, Ishmael, Isaac, Jacob, and Aaron/Moses) surely
meant more than the corpse was placed in the same grave in which ancestors had
been placed; similarly ‘he slept with his fathers’, an expression used of most
of the kings, except where they were seriously disapproved of (and sometimes
even when they were) or were killed by violence. It is reductionistic to
consider these as mere contestations of the fact of physical burial in the family
tomb. They are expressions of completion, fulfilment and satisfaction. A life
had come to its end and its achievement, good, bad, or indifferent, was
fulfilled. It was not merely that the person had joined his ancestors in total
extinction: in some sense he had gone to join them, and for God this was right
and proper. (James Barr, The Garden of Eden and the Hope of Immortality: The
Reed-Tuckwell Lectures for 1990 [London: SCM Press, 1992], 27-28)
