From the dust wast thou taken, and unto the dust shalt thou
return;" as Joel's patriotic picture of the Jews victorious in
battle, and of the vanquished heathen gathered in the valley of
Jehoshaphat to witness their installation as rulers of the earth;
and as the declaration of the God of battles: "I am he that kills
and that makes alive, that wounds and that heals." And they
maintain that the doctrine of immortality is inculcated in such
texts as these: when Moses asks to see God, and the reply is, "No
man can see me and live;" when Bathsheba bows and says, "Let my
lord King David live forever;" and when the sacred poet praises
God, saying, "Thou hast delivered my soul from death, mine eyes
from tears, and my feet from falling." Such interpretations of
Scripture are lamentable in the extreme; their context shows them
to be absurd. The meaning is forced into the words, not derived
from them.

Such as we have now seen were the ancient Hebrew ideas of the
future state. To those who received them the life to come was
cheerless, offering no attraction save that of peace to the weary
sufferer. On the other hand, it had no terror save the natural
revulsion of the human heart from everlasting darkness, silence,
and dreams. In view of deliverance from so dreary a fate, by
translation through Jesus Christ to the splendors of the world
above the firmament, there are many exultations in the Epistles of
Paul, and in other portions of the New Testament.

The Hebrew views of the soul and its destiny, as discerned through
the intimations of their Scriptures are very nearly what, from a
fair consideration of the case, we should suppose they would be,
agreeing in the main with the natural speculations of other early
nations upon the same subject. These opinions underwent but little
alteration until a century or a century and a half before the dawn
of the Christian era.

This is shown by the phraseology of the Septuagint version of
the Pentateuch, and by the allusions in the so called
Apocryphal books. In these, so far as there are any relevant
statements or implications, they are of the same character as
those which we have explained from the more ancient writings. This
is true, with the notable exceptions of the Wisdom of Solomon and
the Second Maccabees, neither of which documents can be dated
earlier than a hundred and twenty years before Christ. The former
contains the doctrine of transmigration. The author says, "Being
wise,