Among the Iranian peoples of the northwest, the Sarmatians, the. Seythians. and the Thracians, the faith in a future life was very strong. From Thrace the Orphic cult spread in the Greek world. While the 1\lyeenatan tombs, as compared with the remains of the preceding age, reveal r. gro• ing importance 'attached to the life beyond, but no conceptions differing from those generally as sociated with the ancestral cult, anti the Ho meris poems tell of Elysian fields as well as a barren and cheerless Hades, but put no emphasis upon what still is a somewhat shadowy existence beyond With no moral Grphic cult societies offered to the initiated the hope of a blessed immortality. (See ESCHATOLOGY; TEAVEN: HELL.) The arguments of Socrates and Plato are far from being the first intima tions of immortality among the Greeks. They are not endeavors to open new vistas into a life beyond. Gri the contrary. they represent a crit ical tendency seeking to establish the truth of a view held by many, and to find the rational grounds on w Welt it can be maintained, if at, all. In the following periods skepticism prevailed in some circles, ardent belief in others. If the prac tical character of the Raman caused him to cling to the ancestral cult. his hospitality to re ligious ideas opened the doors to the doctrines taught by the Orphie and Dionysiae societies. It was a real life of battle and of joy to which the Teutonic warriors looked forward in Odin's hall, Valhalla.
Among the Semitic nations the prevailing view left 'little joy in the thought of man's fate after death. The Babylonians and Assyrians seem to have believed in a semi-conscious later existence, hut with no distinctions based on character or conduct. and no feature rendering it desirable. The myth of Ishtar's descent to the nether world shows that imagination occupied itself with the abode of the dead, and the translation of some heroes to be with the gods tends to mark the contrast with the ordinary issues of human life. Substantially the same conception of the future was held by the ancient Hebrews.. (See SI1EOL; Mums.) There was no conception of an endless existence of the human soul in possession of a distinct consciousness, and no intimation of a difference based on conduct in this life. A poetic passage (Isa. xiv.) possibly shows that the kings were thought of as sitting upon thrones— consequently a social distinction. The intense religious life of the nation did not occupy itself much with the future of the individual. Neither the prophets, nor the legislators, nor the poets, nor the great wisdom-teachers, seem to have at tached much importance to it. Their opposition to the ancestral cult and to necromancy may ac count in a measure for this indifference. Only
as the sufferings of innocent individuals, par ticularly in the Exile, made the question of the divine government of the world acute, did 'the hope of man' receive attention by the thinkers of Israel. But the author of Job presents this possibility of a restoration to life only in order to reject it. He is not willing to obscure the issues by the introduction of what he considers a vain and improbable speculation. A high type of piety thus flourished without a hope of im mortality. But the growing demand for a justi fication of the ways of God was met by foreign conceptions that brought relief by a temporary postponement. of the problem. Persia contributed the thought of a resurrection, Greece that of immortality, in the stricter sense. The conception of a resurrection appears for the first time in Jewish literature in the Book of Daniel (written about B.C. 165). Here some of the dead are raised, probably the martyrs of the great persecution end their oppressors, to continue their life on earth.
There is evidence that this new life was some times regarded as of limited duration. In re gard to the new body, some maintained that it was identical with the old, or of a similar sub stance; others that it was spiritual; some that it was bestowed on men at a general resurrection in the future; others that it was given immedi ately after death. In some circles it was thought that only the Israelites or the good would be raised; in others, that all men, even the wicked, would rise. (See RESURRECTION.) The new doctrine was chiefly accepted by the Pharisees; the Sadducees strongly opposed it. Ecclesiastes rejected the idea of a survival after death in every form. Meanwhile the Greek conception of immortality based on the nature of the soul, with or without the notion of preExistence, found ac ceptance not only among the Alexandrian Jews, hut to some extent also in Palestine. A doctrine of a future life in which the resurrection had no place is found in the Slavonic Enoch, Wisdom of Solomon, Philo, among the Essenes, and else where. Jesus himself seems to have believed in a spiritual resurrection occurring immediately after death. A somewhat similar conception is found in the Pauline literature, while the Fourth Gospel presents the eternal life as a sharing in the divine nature that may begin, in time and continue through eternity, and seems to use the term 'resur rection' figuratively. The firm conviction of the early Church that Jesus had risen from the nether world and ascended to heaven, and that He would presently return in glory to raise the dead and establish Ilis kingdom on earth, tended to base the hope of survival upon His resurrection.