86 A History of Judaism
order is changed, as in the prophecies of Joel, probably occasioned by
the devastation caused by a locust swarm, about ‘the great and terrible
day of the Lord’ when ‘everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall
be saved .. .’^24
Such notions of salvation have little to say about life after death.
There are occasional hints of the concept of resurrection, as in the book
of Daniel. But, more often, humans are depicted as consisting of bodies
into which life comes for just a brief period. Death is nothingness. Some
texts refer to Sheol, the realm of death under the ground in which the
dead were thought to lead a shadowy existence, but with no indication
of the nature of this place except that no one in Sheol has access to God.
The prophet Jeremiah claimed that God had told him that ‘before I
formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I con-
secrated you.’ But a fully developed notion of a pre- existent soul which
exists separately from the body, and therefore can survive after death, is
not to be found within the Bible. Only after the completion of the bib-
lical texts in the third century bce, and under the influence of Greek,
and especially Platonic, thought, was the concept implanted into Jewish
thought of individual souls as pre- existing the physical bodies into
which they enter. Once adopted, the idea was to have a powerful influ-
ence on the development of Jewish (and Christian) teachings over more
than two millennia about the role of the individual and his or her rel-
ation to God.^25