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“What do Jews believe about the afterlife?”

That’s a complicated question. At no point in Israel’s history has belief in the afterlife been ubiquitous, unanimous or easy to pin down. A survey of Old Testament history shows even genuine Israelite believers had different concepts of death. The Law of Moses, to the best of my knowledge, did not address the subject at all, and there are no OT “Thus says the Lord” passages in the prophets to explain what happens after men die. A single passage in Daniel comes closest to that.

Ecclesiastes and Hezekiah

We should probably take the verses on the subject in Ecclesiastes with a grain of salt, as the book adopts the perspective of a man operating in the absence of divine revelation, based on the evidence of his senses and his reason. These verses are difficult to reconcile even with one another. On one hand, “the dead know nothing”. On the other, “the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the spirit returns to God who gave it”, and “God will bring every deed into judgment, with every secret thing.” Jews viewed the book as scripture, of course, but may have treated such thoughts as expressions of personal opinion like those of Job’s friends.

Additionally, Isaiah gives us a prayer of thanks by Hezekiah for fifteen extra years of life granted by special request. That otherwise-godly king greeted the prospect of dying with an almost pagan level of panic. For him it was the end of everything that mattered.

Psalms and Daniel

Next, we have a few expressions of personal faith in the Psalms by men led of the Spirit. Concerning man, Psalm 146 says, “When his breath departs, he returns to the earth; on that very day his plans perish.” In Psalm 16, David writes, “You will not abandon my soul to Sheol, or let your holy one see corruption.” That is frequently taken to be Messianic, but there’s no compelling reason it may not also describe what happens to any godly person when they die. In Psalm 49, the Sons of Korah tell us, “God will ransom my soul from the power of Sheol, for he will receive me.” There are a few other verses as well.

In Daniel, an angel (likely Gabriel) tells him, “Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.” To awake from the dust of the earth suggests not just the human spirit going to God at death, but a bodily resurrection. As explicit revelation from God, this should be definitive: there is indeed physical as well as spiritual life after death.

That sums up what Jews should have believed a few hundred years before Christ. What they actually believed is another story.

The First Century and Beyond

Even well into the first century, there was no consensus among Jewish religious authorities concerning life after death. As Luke tells us in Acts, at the time of Christ, the two major religious factions interpreted the OT quite differently. He describes the distinction this way: “The Sadducees say that there is no resurrection, nor angel, nor spirit, but the Pharisees acknowledge them all.” That’s a pretty radical theological difference, and both schools had significant clout in first century Judea.

That’s all we can find in the Bible about Jewish beliefs, as every bit of revelation about the afterlife from that point in history on in the NT is distinctly Christian, not Jewish. Between the first century and today, different schools of Jewish thought held a variety of opinions about the afterlife.

Modern Jews and the Afterlife

As to the current state of Jewish belief, I will leave aside Christian Jews, who obviously believe the NT’s teaching about the resurrections and final judgment, not to mention our Lord’s own words about being the resurrection and the life and preparing a place for his disciples in his Father’s house. Let’s therefore confine ourselves strictly to the teaching, such as it is, of modern Judaism. We may best describe the average Jew today as a humanist with a religious veneer. The Interactive Bible sums it up this way:

“Modern Judaism has little place for heaven or hell, as these have become metaphors for spiritual fulfillment or the lack of it, and nobody believes in the devil or angels either. So, what’s left for a religious person to do when every inconvenient, supernatural, and other-worldly element has been removed? Plenty! ‘The major concern has always been and is still very much, the religious effort to remove hell from this world and to build a heaven on this Earth.’ What’s left are the basic ideals of humanism in a monotheistic package.”

Naturally, that is not the only view. Some Jews also teach the nebulous concept of “The World to Come”. Concerning that idea, My Jewish Learning says:

“It is not obvious what exactly the ‘World to Come’ is and when it will exist. According to Nahmanides, among others, the World to Come is the era that will be ushered in by the resurrection of the dead, the world that will be enjoyed by the righteous who have merited additional life. According to Maimonides, the World to Come refers to a time even beyond the world of the resurrected. He believed that the resurrected will eventually die a second death, at which point the souls of the righteous will enjoy a spiritual, bodiless existence in the presence of God.

Still, in other sources, the World to Come refers to the world inhabited by the righteous immediately following death — i.e. heaven, Gan Eden. In this view, the World to Come exists now, in some parallel universe.”

Their conclusion? “It would be impossible to reconcile all the Jewish texts and sources that discuss the afterlife.” That sounds about right. Once we have veered off into parallel universes, I think we’ve gone about as far as we can go.