Isaiah 57:1

Hebrew Bible

1 The godly perish, but no one cares. Honest people disappear, when no one minds that the godly disappear because of evil. 2 Those who live uprightly enter a place of peace; they rest on their beds. 3 “But approach, you sons of omen readers, you offspring of adulteresses and prostitutes! 4 At whom are you laughing? At whom are you opening your mouth and sticking out your tongue? You are the children of rebels, the offspring of liars, 5 you who inflame your lusts among the oaks and under every green tree, who slaughter children near the streams under the rocky overhangs.

1 Enoch 81:9

Pseudepigrapha

7 Let thy heart be strong, For the good shall announce righteousness to the good; The righteous with the righteous shall rejoice, And shall offer congratulation to one another. 8 But the sinners shall die with the sinners, And the apostate go down with the apostate. 9 And those who practice righteousness shall die on account of the deeds of men, And be taken away on account of the doings of the godless.' 10 And in those days they ceased to speak to me, and I came to my people, blessing the Lord of the world.

 Notes and References

"... Apart from explicit or implicit references to the resurrection, there are several Jewish texts which imply other forms of afterlife or prefer more general ideas and terminology instead of expressing its particular forms. This section will analyze the basic texts of this type in order to describe Jewish views on the immortality of the soul and some other similar ideas. First, this set of ideas is seen in the motif of the departure of the righteous from the world and their entry into the heavenly place of rest. This motif can be traced back to the account of the destiny of the suffering servant in the Book of Isaiah (especially Isaiah 53) as his return and restoration to life,690 and to the idea of the premature departure of the righteous ones from this world and their gathering in the heavenly place of rest in Isaiah 57:1–2. Then, this motif had been developed in the Astronomical Book and the Book of the Wisdom of Solomon. To start with the Astronomical Book, some of the Ethiopic versions of 1 Enoch 81:9 give the following reading: “those who do right shall not die on account of the (evil) deeds of the people, they will gather on account of the deeds of the evil ones,” while others read “those who do right shall die on account of the deeds of the people, they will assemble on account of the deeds of the evil ones.” Thus, either the righteous will escape the judgment and perdition (which connects with the thought of 81:4: in spite of the mass of sinful humanity there are some exceptions – the righteous who will have no record of evil deeds at the day of the judgment) or else some righteous will die unjustly at the hands of the wicked. These righteous will be “assembled” or “gathered up” on account of the wicked ..."

Somov, A. Representations of the Afterlife in Luke-Acts (pp. 180-181) Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, 2014

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