This volume considers the emerging Jewish interest in an afterlife during the second temple period in relation to developing views of the deity and the self. In some circles God is understood as increasingly distant from the human sphere, and so justice must occur in another world or after death; at the same time, more autonomous constructions of the self in response to community breakdown suggest that reward and punishment come not only collectively, but also on the individual level in a post-mortem realm. The book traces the interconnections between these themes in Job and Ecclesiastes, Ben...

Revising his 1997 doctoral dissertation for the University of Chicago, Burkes looks closely at the Hebrew book of the Bible that was translated into Greek as Ecclesiastes. He finds the problem of death to be its driving theme and main concern. Of all the obsessions in the Bible, he says, only here is it death, which is part of what makes the book distinctive and often considered bizarre.