It is clear why the Egyptians never cremated their dead: to do so would have destroyed for the deceased all prospects of an afterlife. Fortunately, there was no question of organ transplantation; in the prevailing cultural context, it would never have been tolerated. Whether the pharaohs would have been powerful enough—or rash enough—to transgress accepted norms had transplantation been feasible is quite another matter. Mesopotamia
The Mesopotamian (Sumerian, Babylonian, and Assyrian) attitudes to death differed widely from those of the Egyptians. They were grim and stark: sickness and death were the wages of sin. This view was to percolate, with pitiless logic and simplicity, through Judaism into Christianity. Although the dead were buried in Mesopotamia, no attempts were made to preserve their bodies.
According to Mesopotamian mythology, the gods had made humans of clay, but to the clay had been added the flesh and blood of a god specially slaughtered for the occasion. God was, therefore, present in all people. The sole purpose of humanity’s creation was to serve the gods, to carry the yoke and labour for them. Offended gods withdrew their support, thereby opening the door to demons, whose activities the malevolent could invoke.
The main strands of Sumero-Akkadian thought held no prospect of an afterlife, at any rate of a kind that anyone might look forward to. In the Gilgamesh epic, the aging folk hero, haunted by the prospect of his own death, sets off to visit Utnapishtim, who, with his wife, was the only mortal to have achieved immortality. He meets Siduri, the wine maiden, who exhorts him to make the most of the present for “the life which thou seekest thou wilt not find.” There was no judgment after death, a common fate awaiting the good and the bad alike. Death was conceived of in terms of appalling grimness, unrelieved by any hope of salvation through human effort or divine compassion. The dead were, in fact, among the most dreaded beings in early Mesopotamian demonology. In a myth called “The Descent of Ishtar to the Underworld,” the fertility goddess decides to visit kur-nu-gi-a (“the land of no return”), where the dead “live in darkness, eat clay, and are clothed like birds with wings.” She threatens the doorkeeper: “If thou openest not that I may enter I will smash the doorpost and unhinge the gate. I will lead up the dead, that they may eat the living.” Given this background, it is not surprising that offerings to the dead were made in a spirit of fear; if not propitiated they would return and cause all kinds of damage.
The Babylonians did not dissect bodies, and their approach to disease and death was spiritual rather than anatomical or physiological. They did not speculate about the functions of organs but considered them the seat of emotions and mental faculties in general. The heart was believed to be the seat of the intellect, the liver of affectivity, the stomach of cunning, the uterus of compassion, and the ears and the eyes of attention. Breathing and life were thought of in the same terms. The Akkadian word napistu was used indifferently to mean “the throat,” “to breathe,” and “life” itself. Judaism
The canonical writings of biblical Judaism record the relations between certain outstanding individuals and their god. The events described are perceived as landmarks in the unfurling of a national destiny, designed and guided by that god. Jewish eschatology is in this sense unique: its main concern is the fate of a nation, not what happens to an individual at death or thereafter.
In classical Judaism death closes the book. As the anonymous author of Ecclesiastes bluntly put it: “For the living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing, and they have no more reward” (Eccles. 9:5). The death of human beings was like that of animals: “As one dies, so dies the other. They all have the same breath, and man has no advantage over the beasts . . . all are from the dust, and all turn to dust again” (Eccles. 3:19–20). Life alone mattered: “A living dog is better than a dead lion” (Eccles. 9:4). Even Job, whose questioning at times verges on subverting Yahwist doctrine, ends up endorsing the official creed: “Man dies, and is laid low . . . . As waters fail from a lake, and a river wastes away and dries up, So man lies down and rises not again; till the heavens are no more he will not awake, or be roused out of his sleep” (Job 14:10–12).
Yet such views were far from universal. The archaeological record suggests that the various racial elements assimilated to form the Jewish nation each had brought to the new community its own tribal customs, often based on beliefs in an afterlife. Both Moses (Deut. 14:1) and Jeremiah (Jer. 16:6) denounced mortuary practices taken to imply such beliefs. Necromancy, although officially forbidden, was widely practiced, even in high places. Saul’s request to the witch of Endor to “bring up” the dead prophet Samuel for him (I Sam. 28:3–20) implied that the dead, or at least some of them, still existed somewhere or other, probably in Sheol, “the land of gloom and deep darkness” (Job 10:21). In Sheol, the good and the wicked shared a common fate, much as they had in the Babylonian underworld. The place did not conjure up images of an afterlife, for nothing happened there. It was literally inconceivable, and this is what made it frightening: death was utterly definitive, even if rather ill-defined.
Many were unsatisfied by the idea that individual lives only had meaning inasmuch as they influenced the nation’s destiny for good or ill. There was only one life, they were told, yet their everyday experience challenged the view that it was on earth that Yahweh rewarded the pious and punished the wicked. The Book of Job offered little solace: it was irrelevant that the good suffered and that the wicked prospered. One did not pray to improve one’s prospects. The worship of God was an end in itself; it was what gave meaning to life. Against this backdrop of beliefs, the longing for personal significance was widespread.
It is difficult to determine when the notion of soul first emerged in Jewish writings. The problem is partly philological. The word nefesh originally meant “neck” or “throat,” and later came to imply the “vital spirit,” or anima in the Latin sense. The word ruach had at all times meant “wind” but later came to refer to the whole range of a person’s emotional, intellectual, and volitional life. It even designated ghosts. Both terms were widely used and conveyed a wide variety of meanings at different times, and both were often translated as “soul.”
The notion of a resurrection of the dead has a more concrete evolution. It seems to have originated during Judaism’s Hellenistic period (4th century bc–2nd century ad). Isaiah announced that the “dead shall live, their bodies shall rise,” and the “dwellers in the dust” would be enjoined to “awake and sing” (Isa. 26:19). Both the good and the wicked would be resurrected. According to their deserts, some would be granted “everlasting life,” others consigned to an existence of “shame and everlasting contempt” (Dan. 12:2). The idea that a person’s future would be determined by conduct on earth was to have profound repercussions. The first beneficiaries seem to have been those killed in battle on behalf of Israel. Judas Maccabeus, the 2nd-century-bc Jewish patriot who led a struggle against Seleucid domination and Greek cultural penetration, found that his own supporters had infringed the law. He collected money and sent it to Jerusalem to expiate their sins, acting thereby “very well and honorably, taking account of the resurrection. For if he were not expecting that those who had fallen would rise again, it would have been superfluous and foolish to pray for the dead” (II Macc. 12:43–45).
Sheol itself became departmentalized. According to the First Book of Enoch, a noncanonical work believed to have been written between the 2nd century bc and the 2nd century ad, Sheol was composed of three divisions, to which the dead would be assigned according to their moral deserts. The real Ge Hinnom (“Valley of Hinnom”), where the early Israelites were said to have sacrificed their children to Moloch (and in which later biblical generations incinerated Jerusalem’s municipal rubbish), was transmuted into the notion of Gehenna, a vast camp designed for torturing the wicked by fire. This was a clear precursor of things to come—the Christian and Islāmic versions of hell.