ABSTRACT
Archaeological, epigraphic, and biblical data all suggest diverse beliefs about death and the afterlife in ancient Israel and Judah. Israelites and Judahites feasted with and cared for the dead; sought knowledge from them; and hoped for a blessed afterlife in the presence of God. From the perspective of newer historical and comparative analyses, this is exactly what one would suspect. Orthodoxies about the powerless dead, the gloomy silence of Sheol, and the importance of familial burial in the bench tomb were promoted by prophets and by Deuteronomistic and Priestly authors, and they are still repeated by modern scholars, but it is not clear that they were as dominant as has often been supposed.
