Genesis 49:29, Gathered To My People, Part II of II
And he charged them, and said unto them, I am to be gathered unto my people: bury me with my fathers in the cave that is in the field of Ephron the Hittite.
//As described a couple days ago, Abraham held no dream of a resurrection. His expectations beyond death were to be "gathered to his people." But no explanation of this phrase is given. If Abraham gives no hint about his afterlife expectations, then what about his grandson, Jacob?
Today's verse provides the answer. When Jacob dies, he doesn't look forward to living with God. Jacob is terrified of heaven. One day, in a dream, he sees angels traversing a stairway up and down to heaven, and he is afraid, having discovered the doorway to the realm of God. No, Jacob just wants to be buried with his grandfather. Until very late in the development of the Old Testament, that was the best one could hope for after death; for your bones to be reunited with the bones of your fathers. Jewish identity, then and now, is rooted in ancestry, with the desire to be remembered among your offspring.
Even in the second century, B.C., after Jews began to believe in an afterlife, resurrection didn't mean heaven. A friend asked me a few days ago when Christians began believing in heaven. Not just an afterlife, but a belief in living "up there" with God. I just don't know! Part of the problem is that the Greek word for heaven is also the Greek word for sky. Our picture of heaven is so far removed from how it was pictured in Bible days that this is a difficult question to answer. When did heaven become more than just layers of sky? Revelation, which most consider the ultimate description of life after death, was not originally about heaven at all. It was about living again on earth. Paul, who helped integrate the Greek concept of the soul into Christianity, dreamed of floating about in the sky like Jesus, but not as a bodiless spirit. I do wish we had more of Paul's letters than the few that were collected and preserved; he's an absolutely fascinating theologian, and could probably shed a lot more light on the topic.
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In a book I just read, and, which one I can't remember, the phrase "gathered to his people" was explained (rightly or wrongly" as follows:
Before the era of ossuaries, a body was taken to the family tomb, and placed on a shelf until there was no more flesh on the bones. The bones were then placed on the floor of the tomb with the bones of others who had died, so the ledge could be used for the next to die. Therefore, literally, a dead person was literally "gathered to his people."