Texts in Conversation
1 Enoch 58 and the Psalms of Solomon 3 both envision a future reward for the righteous of resurrection to unending life and radiant light. Each describes the righteous living in the light of the sun or eternal life, emphasizing eternal peace.
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2500 BCE
1000+ CE
1 Enoch 58:3
Pseudepigrapha, Apocalypses
1 And I began to speak the third Parable concerning the righteous and elect. 2 Blessed are you, righteous and elect, for your destiny shall be glorious. 3 The righteous will be in the light of the sun, and the elect in the light of eternal life; their days shall be endless, and the days of the holy beyond count. 4 They shall seek the light and find righteousness with the Lord of Spirits; there shall be peace for the righteous in the name of the Eternal Lord.
Date: 300 BCE – 100 CE (based on scholarly estimates)
Psalms of Solomon 3:12
Pseudepigrapha, Wisdom and Poetry
9 The sinner stumbles and curses his life, the day he was born, and his mother's labor pains. 10 He adds sin to sin while he lives (?); He falls, his fall is truly terrible, and he never rises again. 11 The destruction of the sinner is forever, and he will not be remembered when God attends to the righteous person. 12 This is the fate of sinners forever. But those who fear the Lord shall rise to eternal life, And their life (shall be) in the light of the Lord, and will never end.
Date: 65–30 BCE (based on scholarly estimates)
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Notes and References
"... The only pre-Christian “third day” association appears in the cult of Osiris, but the “third day” was a fairly regular expression for a short period of time (such as “the day after tomorrow”) in Jewish sources, a small enough figure to generate many coincidences. Palestinian Jewish Christians appealed to the “third day” (which merely meant parts of three days) before any Diaspora exposure to the cult of Osiris (the pre-Pauline formula in 1 Corinthians 15:3–4). Bodily resurrection was a common Palestinian Jewish idea. (See e.g. Psalms of Solomon 3:12; 15:12–13; 1 Enoch 22:13; 61:5; 2 Maccabees 7:9, 14, 23, 29; 14:46; 2 Baruch 30:1; 51:1–6; Liber Antiquitatum Biblicarum 3:10; 25:6–7; Mishnah Sanhedrin 10:1) If a newly Gentile church preached a dying-and-rising mystery deity, why would Palestinian Jewish Jesus monotheists adopt this concept and give it the Palestinian Jewish language of “resurrection”? It seems far more likely that Gentiles attracted to a growing Jewish movement would have adapted the Palestinian Jewish resurrection concept ..."
Craig S. Keener, “Jesus and Parallel Jewish and Greco-Roman Figures,” in Christian Origins and Greco-Roman Culture: Social and Literary Contexts for the New Testament, ed. Stanley E. Porter and Andrew W. Pitts, TENTS 9 (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 85–111.
* The use of references are not endorsements of their contents. Please read the entirety of the provided reference(s) to understand the author's full intentions regarding the use of these texts.
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