t was easy to imagine that the
soul had escaped and temporarily returned to God in sleep. This induced
the teachers of the Synagogue to prescribe a morning prayer of thanks
which reads, "Blessed art Thou, O God, who restorest the souls unto dead
bodies."(915) The conception underlying this prayer throws light upon the
entire belief in resurrection. Death to the pious is only a prolonged
sleep. On that account the prophet in the passage from Isaiah already
referred to, as well as the Hasidic author of the Book of Daniel,(916)
could express the hope that "those who sleep in the dust shall awake." As
at every awakening from sleep in the morning, so at the great awakening in
the future, the souls which have departed in death shall return again to
their bodies. These bodies could then hardly be conceived of as subject to
decomposition, and the picture in Ezekiel's vision of resurrection(917)
had to be accepted as fact. Still R. Simeon b. Yohai in the especially
instructive thirty-fourth chapter of Pirke de R. Eliezer assumes the
complete disintegration of the body, in order to render the miracle of
resurrection so much the greater. Later still arose the legend of an
indestructible bone of the spinal column, called _Luz_, which was to form
the nucleus for the revival of the whole body.(918) The name Luz, which
denotes an almond tree and is the name given in the Bible to a city
also,(919) seemed to point to a connection with two legends, a fabulous
city into which death could not enter,(920) and the tree of resurrection
in the Osiris cycle.(921)

4. Still, no clear, consistent view of the soul prevailed as yet in the
rabbinic age. The popular belief, influenced by Persian notions, was that
the soul lingers near the body for a certain time after it has
relinquished it, either from three to seven days or for an entire
year.(922) Furthermore it was said that after death the souls hovered
between heaven and earth in the form of ghosts, able to overhear the
secrets of the future decreed above and to betray them to human beings
below. In fact, the rabbis of the Talmud, especially the Hasidim, never
hesitated to accept these ghost stories.(923) Some sages of the Talmudic
period taught that the souls of the righteous ascend to heaven, there to
dwell under the throne of the divine majesty, awaiting the time of the
renewal of the world, while the souls of the godless hovered over the
horizon of the earth as restless demoniacal spirits, f