29 of 33 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Rethinking Resurrection, February 17, 2007
This review is from: Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel: The Ultimate Victory of the God of Life (Hardcover)
Levenson challenges the standard opinion of scholarship, which holds that the notion of bodily resurrection is a late development within Judaism supported only briefly by the early rabbis who employed methods of biblical interpretation at odds with modern scientific criticisms. By examining concepts such as ancestral lineage, family name, Sheol, and key biblical texts, Levenson convincingly demonstrates that the concept of resurrection developed over a long course of time from Judaism's roots,and by neglecting the concept in recent centuries Judaism has missed out on one of it's own treasured tenets of hope. Rarely does a book turn scholarship on its head as this one does -- a must read for Jewish and Christian scriptural, historical, and theological scholars.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent, engaging book by a spectacular scholar..., September 21, 2009
Fair disclosure: I know Professor Levenson, i.e., as one of his students. But honestly, this is a very, very good book; if you are even remotely interested in the topic of resurrection in ancient Israelite literature and Judaism, then you should buy this volume immediately.
This book is highly readable, relatively jargon-free, and is written as much for educated non-scholarly readers as much as for the academic community. Rarely does a book serve both communities so well.
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4.0 out of 5 stars
re-viewing the development of the doctrine of the resurrection, January 9, 2012
Jon D. Levenson's book sets out to undermine an assumption in biblical studies that the doctrine of the resurrection of the dead is a late and rather awkward development in ancient Israelite belief--it is largely an imposition of foreign thought which has little connection to earlier Jewish tradition. He argues, in contrast, that the resurrection, as it appears finally and unambiguously in Daniel 12, is "both an innovation and a restatement of a tension that had pervaded the religion of Israel from the beginning" (216).
The book had, in my mind, three great strengths. First and most important was Levenson's overall success in regards to his thesis. He does an excellent job of identifying a thread that runs throughout ancient Israel's faith, from its Canaanite origins to the Second Temple period, that testifies to the power of God over death and God's commitment to deliver the covenant people from this power--to given them life. In the first half of the book, this discussion is unfolded slowly, in the detail work (e.g., meticulous discussions of Sheol in the Hebrew Bible, or the Temple as a source of protection against death, an 'intimation of immortality'). The second half seemed to focus more on larger themes such as exile and return or "The Fact of Death and the Promise of Life", or on the use of resurrection-language in the Hebrew Bible prior to the emergence of belief in an eschatological resurrection (e.g. in Isaiah and Ezekiel). This is where the study really picked up for me. He often concludes chapters with a helpful review of the path we've followed so far, always eager to keep in view the points of contact throughout the scriptures leading towards Daniel 12. This is not a straight line; you cannot move directly from the birth of Isaac and the Aqedah, or Ezekiel's valley of the dry bones to the doctrine of the resurrection of the dead, but you begin to see how "the reversal of a death-dealing nature" has been the substance of God's faithfulness to this people from the very beginning (218). In this way, the resurrection "reflects certain key features of the deep structure of theology of Israel" from long before the exile (180).
Second is his constant insistence that we consider death and afterlife in the Hebrew Bible in its own terms, not according to the Christian and modern Jewish conceptions with which we are so familiar. The Hebrew Bible is not thinking in terms of heaven and hell, nor is it thinking in terms of the individual 'self' that moderns take for granted. Such reminders at times provide a much needed reorientation.
Finally, Levenson also provides, especially in the beginning but in passing throughout, some theologically astute observations about the modern disinclination towards an eschatological saving work of God in history. There is more to the popular dismissal of the resurrection than historical-critical arguments, and the implications of this dismissal are more far-reaching than one might assume.
In short, I think Levenson's task was, in the end, a success, and along the way he provides the reader with a number of fruitful insights, however slow-going the text may be at first.
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