So, archaeological, you don't even need the Bible for this, but archaeologically,
that's evidence of a positive afterlife.
So I am in the minority, I don't think the Old Testament presents a consistently
neutral or pessimistic view of this.
Mesopotamia was really pessimistic.
Egypt was like, "Yeah, I can't wait to die!"
And then again, you mentioned it, but so my question is, where does the ruach [spirit] go?
Are you talking about like, upon death and all that?
Upon death.
Well, let me give you the, the majority view here.
And it's also the majority held by I think it's fair to say most evangelicals,
when it comes to the Old Testament.
They will say things like, well, for the Israelites, and for the Old Testament,
when someone dies, their spirit goes to Sheol.
Sheol is the biblical Hebrew term, it's fairly frequent.
That can be translated "the grave", or "the underworld."
Okay, so there's the grave, the thing you put the body in, and then
deeper within the earth is this holding tank, okay?
It's the underworld, its Sheol, it's the place where the dead go.
These are metaphors for the afterlife.
See, the afterlife doesn't have latitude, longitude, spaciality.
And so it's very natural to think that when we die, we put people in the ground.
And obviously, that's where their body stays.
So their soul must go down there somewhere, too.
And so that gave genesis to this idea of the afterlife being the underworld.
And lest we think that's odd, we still talk about that now, but we typically say;
"in the bad place, you're going to go down there as opposed to up there."
Okay, so but the dominant view is that Sheol is the answer.
And everybody went to Sheol whether they were good or bad,
righteous or wicked, in the Old Testament.
I'm not there, because that's not actually my view, I'm with the minority here,
because I think there are places in Psalms, and outside of the Psalms as well,
where the Old Testament person who was righteous at least had the hope
that when I die, the Lord will not leave me in Sheol. I will go to the realm of the dead.
But the righteous, the hope was that the Lord would remove them.
So you get a few verses in Psalms to talk about being in the presence of the Lord,
walking with the Lord, you know, all this. Well, the Lord's not living in Sheol, okay,
you know, it's somewhere else. It's where God is, and he's up they're, not down there.
He's not in the realm of the dead, he's up there.
And then you have other verses about being buried, you know,
"going to be with the God of their fathers."
And archaeologically speaking, Israelites, and other people would bury their dead
with objects they used in this life. Okay, that tells you they believed
that there was a conscious existence beyond this life.
That was, you know, it wasn't like they were giving them fire resistant suits
buried with them, okay?
That they would give them things that they enjoyed; food, pets, toys, you know,
because the assumption was, they're going to use these things in the afterlife.
So archaeological, you don't even need the Bible for this.
But archaeologically, that's evidence of a positive afterlife.
So I am in the minority. I don't think that the Old Testament presents
a consistently neutral or pessimistic view of this.
Mesopotamia was really pessimistic.
Egypt was like, "Yeah, I can't wait to die!"
Of course, with the Egyptians it started outvwith that was only Pharaoh.
And then later on in Egyptian history, the positive afterlife was democratized
to other people, but they tend to be positive.
Mesopotamians were like, this is just awful.
But I think Israel is a little bit different, but I'm in the minority there.
Now, when you get to the New Testament, Paul says things like
"to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord."
Now, New Testament scholars like to say; "Oh, he's getting that from Greek philosophy
and Plato this and you know that."
Well, okay, I'm sure Paul read that stuff.
But I'm also sure that you have passages in the Old Testament that convey the same idea.
So I'm not buying the notion that Paul got his afterlife thinking
from completely non-biblical sources.
Okay, that's the quickest way I can hit that one.