Sorry,I missed that thread, thanks for the heads up.
Yes, that seems to be another way the Bible is developing these metaphors before the New Testament, and the NT takes it further in an already established direction.
While I came across the death–exile connection through Seth Postell’s Adam as Israel, I just noticed today that @KJTurner has a 2021 book [edit: it was originally published in 2011] on this that is steeply discounted for the Kindle version until the end of April: The Death of Deaths in the Death of Israel: Deuteronomy’s Theology of Exile.
From the blurb:
In short, exile represents the death of Israel. In losing her land, Israel apparently also loses her identity, history, and covenant relationship with Yahweh. Restoration from exile, then, is a resurrection from death to life. Since exile is a recurring theme in Deuteronomy, the theology of the book must be considered in light of its vision of exile and restoration.
I’m looking forward to the read!
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Nice, thanks for the heads-up.
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Early-mid first millennium BCE Jewish allegory writers were not God.
Thanks for the plug. It’s reduced to a chapter in this book I co-edited. Might be easier and cheaper to access.
I’m afraid that link is not functioning, sorry.
The Bible speaks of two kinds of death. Jesus speaks of it in Luke 9:60 when He says, “Let the dead bury their own dead.” You also see this in the OT when Israel is described as full of dead dry bones. And even though the phrase “spiritual death” is not used in the Bible, Paul does speak of both a “physical body” and a “spiritual body.” So it is perfectly natural to give the name “spiritual death” to the other kind of death spoken of in the OT and by Jesus. That the term “spiritual death” isn’t found in the Bible is a lame excuse when it is pointed out that the most central belief of Christianity in the doctrine of the Trinity isn’t in the Bible either. The Bible does not attribute merit to simply parroting the Bible without any investment of reason and thought.
The Bible never said anything about eternal death. This is your theological construct.
Revelation does speak of the “second death”. But equating this with eternal death fails to account for the other passages above, where living people are described as being dead. Spiritual death explains both, for when the spiritually dead are also physically dead, then this fits the description of the second death. And it explains the need for resurrection without having to believe in zombies rising from graves.
Hopefully this works. It’s called For Our Good Always: Studies on the Message and Influence of Deuteronomy in Honor of Daniel I. Block
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Yep, that works, thanks. A bit pricey still, and not available in digital form.
Perhaps you can be so kind to enligthen me with clear biblical passages that talk about a living sinful people who are spiritually dead.
Already did, but ok… once again…
Genesis 2:17 but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.”
And yet they lived quite a long time after they ate, so who told the truth and who lied? God or the serpent? If God told the truth then they were dead in a different way.
Luke 9:60 But he said to him, “Leave the dead to bury their own dead; but as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.”
Obviously dead people cannot bury anyone unless they are dead in a different way.
Ezekiel 37 describes people of Israel as dead even though they are alive.
The other side of it is saying people are alive even though they known to be dead. So if they are alive then they are alive in a different way.
John 11:26 and whoever lives and believes in me shall never die.
And yet those who believe still die just as they always have.
Are there other solutions? Of course. You can call God and Jesus liars. You can always throw portions of the Bible out, call them nothing but made up stories by people who got it wrong. Or you pick and choose, believing some of these parts of the Bible and not others making up your own religion. After all there are plenty of people in the world who do not believe something just because the Bible says so.
Thank you for taking time to explain to me.
If I may say one thing about your explanation, the biblical passage that you use is not the clear teaching about spiritual death. OT is not a theological treatise, and letters from Paul are theological in nature.
When I am saying that spiritual death is a theological contruct, I am saying that I have hold to that belief from all teaching that I have heard in the church and during my seminary training. However, when I open the bible, I do not find that concept clearly taught in the bible, but have come to fruition thru implication of interpretation of biblical passages. That is fine, but it can be challenged.
What is spiritual death anyway? People who are spiritually dead are dead of the things of God (this is perhaps the most common definition). Well, in the book of Jonah, he went to the people of Ninevah who were presumebly spiritually dead and ready for destruction. Guess what? They repented
Adam and Eve were supposedly spiritually dead after sinning, and yet Cain their son was talking God.
And many other instances.
I am not against theological construct, but it might not be right even if the teaching had persisted for many long years.
NT use Koimao (asleep) to describe believers who died physically. Have we wondered why NT writers all use that same particular work which literally mean asleep to describe the physical death of believers. Perhaps they don’t see physical death as a punishment for sin, but as asleep as the door to go thru before wakefulness in glory.
Jesus died to redeem us…. From what? If from physical death, why do we still die physically anyway? If it is the effect of original sin, Then that means that we have not been redeemed from the effect of original sin. However, if we see how NT writers use Koimao (asleep), then perhaps they did not see physical death as having to do with sin, but as a natural process of life that every human being must go thru.
Nor is there anywhere in the Bible with a clear teaching of the doctrine of the Trinity.
But in neither case does it change the fact that what the Bible teaches leaves no other alternative unless it is to discard parts of the Bible. Frankly, what you call it matters no more than using the name Lucifer for the angel who became the devil, even though the Bible does not give it such a name. The point remains that the Bible describes living people as being dead. And we know from Paul that there is both a physical body and a spiritual body, with the second of these requiring a resurrection. Therefore nothing could be more natural and consistent with the Bible than calling these living people who are said to be dead by the phrase “spiritually dead.”
1 Corinthians 15:44 If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body.
Logically… just as physical death is the the death of the physical body, naturally spiritual death is the death of the spiritual body.
Your conquest and burning of strawmen does not interest me. I am not a believer in the various strawmen (such as original sin) you are targeting.
From the self-destructive habits of sin.
That certainly describes me.
That is why I don’t hold to the doctrine of trinity. Paul didn’t hold it and none of the apostles hold to that doctrine, nor did Jesus teach that. They knew there was a tension between Jesus the son of God and God the Father. They did not try to resolve that. It was a mystery and it is still a mystery. That is where I stand.
A problem with your logic there. Spiritual body is the body we will inherit. It is not perishable. It is the future. There is no such thing as spiritual death as the death of spiritual body.
- spiritual body is imperishable.
- spiritual body is the replacement of our physical body.
- spiritual body is the future, not the past.
For this perishable body must put on the imperishable, and this mortal body must put on immortality. When the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on immortality, (1 cor 15:53-54)
Correct. The life of the spiritual body is its connection to God and the loss of that life is not a matter of being perishable. Without that connection it is an endless existence without that which makes such an existence worthwhile. The death of the spiritual body is not a perishing but an existence without life.
There is no such thing in the Bible and that is not what it says in 1 Corinthians 15. What it says is the spiritual body grows from the physical like a plant from a seed. The physical body is a thing of the earth and spiritual body is of heaven, so calling it a replacement is just wrong. It is a resurrection which means bringing that which is dead back to life.
Correct.
1 Corinthians 15:46 But it is not the spiritual which is first but the physical, and then the spiritual.
The spiritual body is certainly not the captured rational soul of the Gnostics nor the reincarnating soul of the Hindus.
1 Corinthians 15:50 I tell you this, brethren: flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable.
The real flaw in the way you are trying to interpret 1 Corinthians 15 is your continuing disregard of how God in Genesis and Jesus in Luke spoke of people who were physically alive as being dead.
1 Corinthians 15:44 If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body.
With both of these, you can be both alive and dead at the same time… either way.
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I have doubts to this translation, when I look it up it shows:
Genesis 2:17 but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die."
Which is a difference from “for in the day that you eat of it you shall die” but I see that mine translation is only in New International Version and New Living Translation and a lot more translations have “day” in it, but it’s quite an important change.
I thought that when God was talking about human death he was talking about physical death that they can’t escape, and obviously if we claim your verse to be more accurate it can’t be true if it was to happen the exact day they ate the apple.
You are not looking it up in the Hebrew then, but in the NIV.
The “day” part is in the Hebrew. Of course. People would not add the word if it wasn’t there in the original text, but they might reinterpret as the NIV does if they don’t like the word “day” there.
The Hebrew is בְּי֛וֹם or bə-yō-wm which is the same word used when speaking of the Sabbath day, or the first day of the month, or in Leviticus when it say you must do something on the same day as something else, or in Numbers when speaking of something happening a number of days after something else happened, or in Kings explain how many things all happened in one day.
So there is definitely nothing wrong with the way it is translated as “day” in most translations of the Bible.
But coming from a scientific world view as I did, I would obviously never have read it that way. Physical death is a natural process without which life wouldn’t even exist. The idea that physical death is a result of sin would be completely absurd to me.
I also don’t think that death is result of sin but I thought that Adam and Eve were freed from normal cycle of life and death and as long as they are in the garden they will live forever. If they didn’t rebel would they die after some time and their kids would keep on doing things in the garden? It didn’t seem like this kind of relationship with God especially looking at how long Adam lived (even if you don’t take his age as literal it would still seem to point to increased longevity when in presence of God).
I don’t disagree that death God spoke about could be spiritual but it also seems sensible that they wouldn’t naturally die from old age in the garden so even if only coincidentally, they were also sentenced to their unavoidable natural death.
And indeed NIV doesn’t seem to be too credible, at least there is some criticism about it…
I love fantasy and science fiction. I read it a lot. But I know the difference between this and reality. I not only could classify the Bible with fantasy and science fiction but actually did so verbally in my youth. In order for me to see it as otherwise requires seeing its stories and claims as being about real life as we experience it. What you suggest would definitely put it on the other side of that line for me. Apparently this is actually what most people here do… decide that these stories in the first part of genesis are fantasy stories of myth and metaphor from which to obtain only general theological conclusions. And I admit that I also treat the first chapter of Genesis in this way myself, so it would be hypocritical for me condemn such a treatment of a few more chapters in this way. But I do defend the treatment of Genesis from chapters 2 on as historical (with the use of some symbolism) because I find more meaning in them that way.