Did you hear the one about the rich man who dies and goes to
hell and sees his servant enjoying himself in Abraham’s bosom? Well, apparently
so did Jesus, and just as Proverbs shares a common heritage with the Egyptian
wisdom of Amenemope, it seems that Jesus was also familiar with a more ancient
story, the Tale of Khaemweset than the one he sets out in the gospels about a
certain rich man named Lazarus.
It is important to
remember that is no hell in ancient Judaism like the one we imagine in
Christianity. At best we get a spectral realm, much like in ancient Greek
thought, where people go, but do not perish under insurmountable conditions –
they kind of just linger. In Hebrew they might be called צֵל, because the word
for soul נָ֫פֶשׁ
usually refers to a living
body, not a spirit as in Christianity. And while we do have
later tales that bring out forms of punishment (Sisyphus and the rolling
boulder, for example), it seems clear to me that Jesus is not thinking in his
inveterate Jewish tradition at this point in his story. One might argue that he
was thinking like a Maccabean Jew, where the concept of afterlife revenge
becomes important just a few hundred years prior to Jesus’ life, but by this
time there was so much intermingling in Hellenistic thought that not even the
Tannaim Jews considered the story of the Maccabees a part of their heritage
(one reason it is not considered an authority book).
When we look to Egypt, however, we get an altogether
different image. Here gods like Shezmu, squeezes his victims in a wine press.
Judgment is very much a feature of the underworld as well. Mummies are
unwrapped of their wrappings and thrown into fire pits. The sun god Ra ignores
the screams and tortures of the dead, who are separated from their souls and go
hungry and thirsty for all eternity. Christianity’s vision of hell is much
closer to this than anything in Judaism.
The Tale of Khaemweset,
which was discovered on the back of a papyrus for a land registry, it is
thought, also comes under the influence of Hellenistic thought (and so probably
closer to Jesus than the more ancient tales of Egyptian hells), but what is
unique in the story is the very thing Jesus preaches in the gospels. That the
last shall be first, the first shall be last, and those who you think had
everything in this life are subject to harsh punishments in the next.
Though I’m sure I don’t speak for all, but conservative
Christians tend to like this story because it supposedly reveals Jesus’
preternatural power, his deity flashing through his humanity, as he tells his
followers about his own encounter with hell, in a story out of time. And of
course, there are modifications to this story. The afterlife is now associated
with Abraham’s bosom, though it should be noted that like the realm of the
blessed in Egypt, both the righteous and evil dead are spirited to their final
resting places through the same corridor (so to speak). In the Egyptian tales,
the righteous ones use talismans and spells to fight through demonic hordes as
they make their way to paradise. The idea that one uses the same corridor is
much more detailed in the eponymous account of hell attributed to Josephus
where a psychopomp or a guide carries the soul of the dead down one of two paths.
It is however difficult to ignore the similarities between
Jesus’ and Kaemwese’s account. Of all the possible visions of hell available to
the Son of God, one wonders why he chooses the one that already had great
traction in his world. Could he have been testifying to the universal nature of
the religious vision? Was he simply sharing something, to call to mind, a
reality that his listeners may have been familiar with through folktales to
inspire in them right conduct? At any rate, there is good evidence that the
Egyptians exerted a significant influence on other stories in Jewish scripture,
so why not here as well?
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