Shannon Burkes

God, Self, and Death: the Shape of Religious Transformation in the Second Temple Period (Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism) Shannon Burkes 1st edition

This volume considers the emerging Jewish interest in an afterlife during the Second Temple period in relation to developing views of the deity and the self. In some circles God is understood as increasingly distant from the human sphere, and so justice must occur in another world or after death. At the same time, more autonomous constructions of the self in response to community breakdown suggest that reward and punishment come not only collectively but also on the individual level in a post-mortem realm. This text traces the interconnections between these themes in Job and Ecclesiastes, Ben Sira and Daniel, then Wisdom of Solomon and 4 Ezra, crossing genre boundaries in an attempt to offer a more encompassing historical investigation.