On the concept of “death”, according to the Old Testament
On the concept of “death”, according to the Old Testament

Summary/Abstract: We all know that we have to die, but nobody can really believe it. Some still believe in the resurrection from the dead, but no one can know (cf. on the problem Jüngel 1972; see also: Lechner 2019; Ariès 2002; Béliveau/Gingras 2012; Göllner 2002). In these two statements, the aporia between belief and knowledge is expressed in a radical way, which at the same time outlines the difference between the way how death was dealt in Antiquity and how we deal with it today. For the people of Antiquity, death was part of everyday life, part of life (Wächter 1967; Kaiser/Lohse 1977; Fischer 2014). People died more often than today, but dying took place in public, in the family circle, in the social network of a community, or on the battlefields in the war for the fatherland. Unlike today, he, the death, could not be hidden behind the walls of hospitals and hospices or filtered as news through modern media such as radio and television.The Old Testament certainly shares a view that is close to our Zeitgeist, namely that death is the end of life and that nothing more comes after that, at least nothing essential. This absolute limitation of death is astonishing insofar as the idea of life after death was definitely present both in the ancient cultural power of Egypt and later in the religion of Persia. The question of why the idea of life after death only found its way into the Old Testament very late and only sparsely will occupy us at the end of the article (IV), before that an overview of the understanding of death in Israel's environment (II) and the relevant texts of the Old Testament are questioned about how death is dealt with (III).

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