Ritröð Guðfræðistofnunar - 01.09.1998, Qupperneq 166

Jón Ma. Asgeirsson
A good millennium and a half before this stone was raised, Moses was
laid to rest in a valley leaving behind a legacy or a variation to the theme of
the decalogue as Philo would have it.2 But lost are the tablets and his resting
place is nowhere to be located:
There in the land of Moab, Moses the servant of Yahweh died as Yahweh decreed;
he buried him in the valley, in the land of Moab, opposite Beth-peor; but to this
day no one has ever found his grave (Dt 34:5-6).3
Heritage of old or the never written story of Maria the daughter of Juda:4
she has an inscribed stone! Death offers no reason of its own. Like labour
around the harvest: it comes and it goes its way. The Ecclesiastes struggles
with the irony of life destined for toil and sweat:
I see there is no happiness for man but to be happy in his work, for this is the
lot assigned him. Who then can bring him to see what is to happen after his time?
(3:22).
A more sober account of human confinement is not to be expected to meet
the eye. Indeed, this biblical wisdom was perhaps among the few realities
acceptable to modern age empirical hunters as noted by John H. Hick.5
Beyond life there awaits the realm of Sheol if not simply the grave itself.
An unpleasant place of darkness and shadows about which Israelite religion
did not offer right many details except for it being the place of collected family
members which on occasion express themselves with a voice or through such
alleged magic as necromancy. Blessings are measured in old age and prosper-
ity— tokens of this side of the grave.6 You are thus left with little but literary
personifications of the dead at best.7 In archaic Greece the Homeric tradition
2 Cf. David Dawson, Allegorical Readers and Cultural Revision in Ancient Alexandria
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992) 111.
3 All biblical citations from The Jerusalem Bibie: Reader’s Edition, A. Jones ed. (Garden
City, NY: Doubleday, 1968) [1966]. [English transl. from the original languages and by
comparison to La Bible de Jérusalem.]
4 van der Horst, loc. cit.
5 Cf. his, Philosophy of Religion, Prentice-Hall Foundations of Philosophy Series, E. and
M. Beardsley eds., 2nd ed. (Englewoods Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1973) 99.
6 Cf. Helmer Ringgren, Israelite Religion, D. Green transl., revised ed. (London: SPCK,
1969) 239-247 [Israelitische Religion (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1963)].
7 Ringgren considers it unlikely that ceremonies connected with burial sites attest to a cult
of the dead but that they may simply describe memorial services or expressions of consola-
tions and the like, ibid., 241.
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