The Mesopotamian (Sumerian, Babylonian, and Assyrian) attitudes to death differed widely from those of the Egyptians. They were grim and stark: sickness and death were the wages of sin. This view was to percolate, with pitiless logic and simplicity, through Judaism into Christianity. Although the dead were buried in Mesopotamia, no attempts were made to preserve their bodies.

According to Mesopotamian mythology, the gods had made humans of clay, but to the clay had been added the flesh and blood of a god specially slaughtered for the occasion. God was, therefore, present in all people. The sole purpose of humanity’s creation was to serve the gods, to carry the yoke and labour for them. Offended gods withdrew their support, thereby opening the door to demons, whose activities the malevolent could invoke.

The main strands of Sumero-Akkadian thought held no prospect of an afterlife, at any rate of a kind that anyone might look forward to. In the Gilgamesh epic, the aging folk hero, haunted by the prospect of his own death, sets off to visit Utnapishtim, who, with his wife, was the only mortal to have achieved immortality. He meets Siduri, the wine maiden, who exhorts him to make the most of the present for “the life which thou seekest thou wilt not find.” There was no judgment after death, a common fate awaiting the good and the bad alike. Death was conceived of in terms of appalling grimness, unrelieved by any hope of salvation through human effort or divine compassion. The dead were, in fact, among the most dreaded beings in early Mesopotamian demonology. In a myth called “The Descent of Ishtar to the Underworld,” the fertility goddess decides to visit kur-nu-gi-a (“the land of no return”), where the dead “live in darkness, eat clay, and are clothed like birds with wings.” She threatens the doorkeeper: “If thou openest not that I may enter I will smash the doorpost and unhinge the gate. I will lead up the dead, that they may eat the living.” Given this background, it is not surprising that offerings to the dead were made in a spirit of fear; if not propitiated they would return and cause all kinds of damage.

The Babylonians did not dissect bodies, and their approach to disease and death was spiritual rather than anatomical or physiological. They did not speculate about the functions of organs but considered them the seat of emotions and mental faculties in general. The heart was believed to be the seat of the intellect, the liver of affectivity, the stomach of cunning, the uterus of compassion, and the ears and the eyes of attention. Breathing and life were thought of in the same terms. The Akkadian word napistu was used indifferently to mean “the throat,” “to breathe,” and “life” itself.

Judaism

The canonical writings of biblical Judaism record the relations between certain outstanding individuals and their god. The events described are perceived as landmarks in the unfurling of a national destiny, designed and guided by that god. Jewish eschatology is in this sense unique: its main concern is the fate of a nation, not what happens to an individual at death or thereafter.

In classical Judaism death closes the book. As the anonymous author of Ecclesiastes bluntly put it: “For the living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing, and they have no more reward” (Eccles. 9:5). The death of human beings was like that of animals: “As one dies, so dies the other. They all have the same breath, and man has no advantage over the beasts . . . all are from the dust, and all turn to dust again” (Eccles. 3:19–20). Life alone mattered: “A living dog is better than a dead lion” (Eccles. 9:4). Even Job, whose questioning at times verges on subverting Yahwist doctrine, ends up endorsing the official creed: “Man dies, and is laid low . . . . As waters fail from a lake, and a river wastes away and dries up, So man lies down and rises not again; till the heavens are no more he will not awake, or be roused out of his sleep” (Job 14:10–12).

Yet such views were far from universal. The archaeological record suggests that the various racial elements assimilated to form the Jewish nation each had brought to the new community its own tribal customs, often based on beliefs in an afterlife. Both Moses (Deut. 14:1) and Jeremiah (Jer. 16:6) denounced mortuary practices taken to imply such beliefs. Necromancy, although officially forbidden, was widely practiced, even in high places. Saul’s request to the witch of Endor to “bring up” the dead prophet Samuel for him (I Sam. 28:3–20) implied that the dead, or at least some of them, still existed somewhere or other, probably in Sheol, “the land of gloom and deep darkness” (Job 10:21). In Sheol, the good and the wicked shared a common fate, much as they had in the Babylonian underworld. The place did not conjure up images of an afterlife, for nothing happened there. It was literally inconceivable, and this is what made it frightening: death was utterly definitive, even if rather ill-defined.

Many were unsatisfied by the idea that individual lives only had meaning inasmuch as they influenced the nation’s destiny for good or ill. There was only one life, they were told, yet their everyday experience challenged the view that it was on earth that Yahweh rewarded the pious and punished the wicked. The Book of Job offered little solace: it was irrelevant that the good suffered and that the wicked prospered. One did not pray to improve one’s prospects. The worship of God was an end in itself; it was what gave meaning to life. Against this backdrop of beliefs, the longing for personal significance was widespread.

It is difficult to determine when the notion of soul first emerged in Jewish writings. The problem is partly philological. The word nefesh originally meant “neck” or “throat,” and later came to imply the “vital spirit,” or anima in the Latin sense. The word ruach had at all times meant “wind” but later came to refer to the whole range of a person’s emotional, intellectual, and volitional life. It even designated ghosts. Both terms were widely used and conveyed a wide variety of meanings at different times, and both were often translated as “soul.”

The notion of a resurrection of the dead has a more concrete evolution. It seems to have originated during Judaism’s Hellenistic period (4th century bc–2nd century ad). Isaiah announced that the “dead shall live, their bodies shall rise,” and the “dwellers in the dust” would be enjoined to “awake and sing” (Isa. 26:19). Both the good and the wicked would be resurrected. According to their deserts, some would be granted “everlasting life,” others consigned to an existence of “shame and everlasting contempt” (Dan. 12:2). The idea that a person’s future would be determined by conduct on earth was to have profound repercussions. The first beneficiaries seem to have been those killed in battle on behalf of Israel. Judas Maccabeus, the 2nd-century-bc Jewish patriot who led a struggle against Seleucid domination and Greek cultural penetration, found that his own supporters had infringed the law. He collected money and sent it to Jerusalem to expiate their sins, acting thereby “very well and honorably, taking account of the resurrection. For if he were not expecting that those who had fallen would rise again, it would have been superfluous and foolish to pray for the dead” (II Macc. 12:43–45).

Sheol itself became departmentalized. According to the First Book of Enoch, a noncanonical work believed to have been written between the 2nd century bc and the 2nd century ad, Sheol was composed of three divisions, to which the dead would be assigned according to their moral deserts. The real Ge Hinnom (“Valley of Hinnom”), where the early Israelites were said to have sacrificed their children to Moloch (and in which later biblical generations incinerated Jerusalem’s municipal rubbish), was transmuted into the notion of Gehenna, a vast camp designed for torturing the wicked by fire. This was a clear precursor of things to come—the Christian and Islāmic versions of hell.

Orphic and Platonic ideas also came to exert a profound influence on the Judaic concept of death. These were perhaps expressed most clearly in the apocryphal text known as the Wisdom of Solomon, written during the 1st century bc and reflecting the views of a cultured Jew of the Diaspora. The author stressed that a “perishable body weighs down the soul” (Wisd. Sol. 9:15) and stated that “being good” he had “entered an undefiled body” (Wisd. Sol. 8:20), a viewpoint that was quintessentially Platonic in its vision of a soul that predated the body. Flavius Josephus, the Jewish historian of the 1st century ad, recorded in Bellum Judaicum (History of the Jewish War) how doctrinal disputes about death, the existence of an afterlife, and the “fate of the soul” were embodied in the views of various factions. The Sadducees (who spoke for a conservative, sacerdotal aristocracy) were still talking in terms of the old Yahwist doctrines, while the Pharisees (who reflected the views of a more liberal middle class) spoke of immortal souls, some doomed to eternal torment, others promised passage into another body). The Essenes held views close to those of the early Christians.

Following the destruction of the Temple (ad 70) and, more particularly, after the collapse of the last resistance to the Romans (c. 135), rabbinic teaching and exegesis slowly got under way. These flowered under Judah ha-Nasi (“Judah the Prince”), who, during his reign (c. 175–c. 220) as patriarch of the Jewish community in Palestine, compiled the collection of rabbinic law known as the Mishna. During the next 400 years or so, rabbinic teaching flourished, resulting in the production and repeated reelaboration first of the Palestinian (Jerusalem) and then of the Babylonian Talmuds. These codes of civil and religious practice sought to determine every aspect of life, including attitudes toward the dead. The concepts of immortality and resurrection had become so well established that in the Eighteen Benedictions (recited daily in synagogues and homes) God was repeatedly addressed as “the One who resurrects the dead.” Talmudic sources warned that “anyone who said there was no resurrection” would have no share in the world to come (tractate Sanhedrin 10:1). Over the centuries, a radical doctrinal shift had occurred. One would have to await the great political volte-faces of the 20th century to witness again such dramatic gyrations of decreed perspective.

One of the strangest notions to be advanced by rabbinic Judaism—and of relevance to the evolution of the concept of death—was that of the “bone called Luz” (or Judenknöchlein, as it was to be called by early German anatomists). In his Glossa magna in Pentateuchum (ad 210), Rabbi Oshaia had affirmed that there was a bone in the human body, just below the 18th vertebra, that never died. It could not be destroyed by fire, water, or any other element, nor could it be broken or bruised by any force. In his exceeding wisdom, God would use this bone in the act of resurrection, other bones coalescing with it to form the new body that, duly breathed upon by the divine spirit, would be raised from the dead. The name of the bone was derived from lus, an old Aramaic word meaning “almond.” The emperor Hadrian had apparently once asked Rabbi Joshua, son of Chanin, how God would resurrect people in the world to come. The rabbi had answered “from the bone Luz in the spinal column.” He had then produced a specimen of such a bone, which could not be softened in water or destroyed by fire. When struck with a hammer, the bone had remained intact while the anvil upon which it lay had been shattered. The bone had apparently been called Aldabaran by the Arabs. In some of the most interesting writings of polemical anatomy, Vesalius showed, in 1543, that the bone did not exist.

Orthodox Jewish responses to current medical controversies concerning death are based on biblical and Talmudic ethical imperatives. First, nothing must be done that might conceivably hasten death. Life being of infinite worth, a few seconds of it are likewise infinitely valuable. Causing accidental death is seen as only one step removed from murder. When a patient is in the pangs of death the bed should not be shaken, as even this might prove to be the last straw. Such invasive diagnostic procedures as four-vessel angiography (to assess cerebral blood flow) would almost certainly be frowned upon. Even a venipuncture (say, for tissue typing) could be conceived of as shpikhut damim, a spilling of blood with nefarious intent. In secular medical practice, however, problems of this sort are unlikely to arise. Much more important is the conceptual challenge presented by the beating-heart cadaver. Here it must be stressed that absence of a heartbeat was never considered a cardinal factor in the determination of death (Bab. Talmud, tractate Yoma 85A). Talmudic texts, moreover, clearly recognized that death was a process and not an event: “the death throes of a decapitated man are not signs of life any more than are the twitchings of a lizard’s amputated tail” (Bab. Talmud, tractate Chullin 21A; Mishna, Oholoth 1:6). The decapitated state itself defined death (Maimonides: Tumath Meth 1:15). Brain-stem death, which is physiological decapitation, can readily be equated with death in this particular perspective.

What mattered, in early Jewish sources, was the capacity to breathe spontaneously, which was seen as an indicator of the living state. The Babylonian Talmud (tractate Yoma 85A) explained that when a building collapsed, all lifesaving activities could legitimately cease on determination that the victim was no longer breathing. The instructions were quite explicit: “As soon as the nose is uncovered no further examination need be made, for the Tanach (Bible) refers to ‘all living things who have the breath of life in their nostrils.’ ”

Apnea alone, of course, does not constitute death; it is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for such a diagnosis. But if apnea is conjoined to all that is implied in the notion of the decapitated state (in terms of the irreversible loss of the capacity for consciousness, for instance), one finds that the concepts of death in the Talmud and in the most modern intensive care unit are virtually identical.

The issue of transplantation is more complex. The Talmud forbids the mutilation of a corpse or the deriving of any benefit from a dead body, but these considerations can be overridden by the prescriptions of pikuakh nefesh (“the preservation of life”). The Chief Rabbi of Israel has even argued that, as a successful graft ultimately becomes part of the recipient, prohibitions related to deriving benefit from the dead do not, in the long run, apply.