lobe. All
this difficulty disappears, we think, and the true metaphorical
force often intended in the word "death" comes to view, through
the following conception, occupying the minds of a portion of the
Jewish Rabbins, as we are led to believe by the clews furnished in
the close connection between the Pharisaic and the Zoroastrian
eschatology, by similar hints in various parts of the New
Testament, and by some quite explicit declarations in the Talmud
itself, which we shall soon cite in a different connection. God at
first intended that man should live for a time in pure blessedness
on the earth, and then without pain should undergo a glorious
change making him a perfect peer of the angels, and be translated
to their lofty abode in his own presence; but, when he sinned, God
gave him over to manifold suffering, and on the destruction of his
body adjudged his naked soul to descend to a doleful imprisonment
below the grave. The immortality meant for man was a timely ascent
to heaven in a paradisal clothing, without dying. The doom brought
on him by sin was the alteration of that desirable change of
bodies and ascension to the supernal splendors, for a permanent
disembodiment and a dreaded descent to the subterranean glooms. It
is a Talmudical as much as it is a Pauline idea, that the
triumphant power of the Messiah would restore what the unfortunate
fall of Adam forfeited. Now, if we can show as we think we can,
and as we shall try to do in a later part of this article that the
later Jews expected the Messianic resurrection to be the prelude
to an ascent into heaven, and not the beginning of a gross earthly
immortality, it will powerfully confirm the theory which we have
just indicated. "When," says one of the old Rabbins, "the dead in
Israelitish earth are restored alive," their bodies will be "as
the body of the first Adam before he sinned, and they shall all
fly into the air like birds."4

At all events, whether the general Rabbinical belief was in the
primitive destination of man to a heavenly or to an earthly
immortality, whether the "death" decreed upon him in consequence
of sin was the dissolution of the body or the wretchedness of the
soul, they all agree that the banishment of souls into the realm
of blackness under the grave was a part of the penalty of sin.
Some of them maintained, as we think, that, had there been no sin,
souls would have passed to heaven in glorified bodies; others of
them maintained, as w