Magalhães Luís
The rewards and punishment promised in the Hebrew Scriptures as requital for man's actions, as for example in Deuteronomy 13ff. and Jeremiah 3:10ff. were, as *Saadiah Gaon already noted (Book of Beliefs and Opinions, 9:2), all of this world. It was in order to reconcile the sufferings of the righteous with divine justice that R. Jacob remarked (Kid. 39b) that "there was no reward for virtue in this world" and that R. Tarfon assured those who would occupy themselves with the study of the Torah that the (full) reward of the righteous would be meted out in the hereafter (Avot. 2:16). As for the nature of man's existence in the world to come, the Babylonian amora Rav, who lived at the beginning of the third century B.C.E., was of the opinion that it was quite unlike life in this world. "There is there," he said, "neither eating, nor drinking, nor any begetting of children, no bargaining or jealousy or hatred or strife. All that the righteous do is to sit with their crowns on their heads and enjoy the effulgence of the [divine] Presence" (Ber. 17a). However, no tannaitic parallel to Rav's conception of the world to come has been found; most of his contemporaries and followers believed in the restoration of the souls into the bodies of the resurrected and their rising from their graves fully clothed (Ket. 111b). Even so bold a thinker as Saadiah Gaon, who lived centuries after the redaction of the Talmud, accepted the dogma of physical resurrection. Moses Maimonides included the bodily revivification of the dead among the Thirteen Articles of the Faith in his commentary on the tenth chapter of Mishnah Sanhedrin, though in his Guide of the Perplexed he speaks only of the immortality of the soul, which is an incorporated state, and passes over physical resurrection in silence. The traditional Jewish book of prayers includes a praise of God as the revivifier of the dead. The Reformist prayer book omits it completely. As it is expressed in the tenth chapter of the Mishnah of Sanhedrin, all Israelites, with certain notable exceptions, had, in the view of the tannaim, a share in world to come. In the opinion of R. Joshua b. Hananiah the righteous among the gentiles were also to be included (Tos. 13:2). Moses Maimonides incorporated his pronouncement in his code, which states: "The pious of the nations of the world have a portion in the world to come" (Yad, Teshuvah 3:5). It is futile to attempt to systematize the Jewish notions of the hereafter. Since its conception belonged to the realm of aggadah, great latitude was allowed the individual imagination. It is on this account that there exists considerable ambiguity about the meaning of the phrase olam ha-ba. Did it refer to the final state of man or to the one intermediate between the life of this world and the disposition of his soul in either the *Garden of Eden, which is the eternal abode, after the last judgment, of the righteous, or the gehinnom (gehenna), the miserable dwelling place of the wicked (Ber. 28b). The question was also asked where the souls of human beings were kept between the time of their death and the resurrection, which is supposed to take place prior to the last judgment. The answer given by R. Yose ha-Gelili was that there were special store-chambers where the souls of the righteous were deposited, as it is stated (I Sam. 25:29): "The souls of the wicked, on the other hand, would, as the verse goes on to say, "be slung away in the hollow of the sling" (Shab. 152b).
