The Old Testament Witness to the Resurrection

It is often supposed that the people of ancient Israel had no doctrine of the resurrection. Perhaps one developed in or following the Babylonian Captivity as a result of foreign religious influence. Then perhaps the rest attached itself to the first century church as a result of the Eastern mystery religions. So the tiresome story goes to an unsuspecting new public every Easter season.

In meeting this challenge, we may break down the Old Testament witness to the resurrection into four basic categories: (1) explicit statements, (2) anticipatory actions, (3) unwitting prophecies, and (4) types and shadows interpreted as such by the New Testament.

This is important to do for the integrity of Paul’s overall argument in First Corinthians 15; for he says not merely that Christ died, but that he was raised “in accordance with the Scriptures” (v. 4). Now which Scriptures does he mean but those of the Hebrew canon? It is imperative, therefore, that our Old Testament contain at least a robust typology of this central miracle. 

Explicit Statements

First, there are at least four explicit statements about the resurrection in the Old Testament. All of them are found in the Prophets: “Your dead shall live; their bodies shall rise. You who dwell in the dust, awake and sing for joy! For your dew is a dew of light, and the earth will give birth to the dead” (Isa 26:19); “Behold, I will open your graves and raise you from your graves, O my people. And I will bring you into the land of Israel. And you shall know that I am the Lord, when I open your graves, and raise you from your graves, O my people” (Ezk 37:12-13); “And many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt” (Dan 12:2). These passages are so plain that the only recourse left for the critic is to point out that these are of a very late date. The resurrection hope in Hosea 13:14 has New Testament endorsement from Paul in 1 Corinthians 15:54-57: “O Sheol, where is your sting?” It may be argued that the vindicative expectation of Job is also explicit:

“For I know that my Redeemer lives, and at the last he will stand upon the earth. And after my skin has been thus destroyed, yet in my flesh I shall see God, whom I shall see for myself,  and my eyes shall behold, and not another. My heart faints within me!” (19:25-27)

Early references may also exist in Deuteronomy 32:39, 1 Samuel 2:6, and Psalm 49:14-15.

Anticipatory Actions

Secondly, there are anticipatory actions that suggest an expectation of resurrection. Two events in the life of Abraham, one dramatic and the other very mundane, are resurrection testimonies. About the willingness to sacrifice Isaac, we are told some of what Abraham was thinking: “He considered that God was able even to raise him from the dead, from which, figuratively speaking, he did receive him back” (Heb 11:19). In this Abraham both was and received a resurrection sign. Boice and Hughes comment on the purchase of a burial plot for Sarah that he was funding yet another act of faith, as this place was in the heart of the Promise Land, and from it he expected to see his wife again.1 

Wenkel argues that, “For the author of Hebrews, the narratives of Genesis 17-18 demonstrate that Abraham himself is the ‘first shadow’ of the resurrection from the dead.”2 How can this be maintained? The author points to Abraham’s “renewed procreative capacity”3 in God’s fulfilled promise. “Both Romans 4:19 and Hebrews 11:1 point to Abraham’s body being dead.”

Joseph also testified to his hope in the resurrection by instructing that his bones be brought back to the Promise Land in the fulness of time. What is the punchline to Hebrews 11? It is that “These all died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar, and having acknowledged that their were strangers and exiles on the earth” (v. 13). What else does this mean but that all these acts of faith were resurrection-anticipating-actions? 

Unwitting Prophecies

Thirdly, there are unwitting prophecies. That adjective, “unwitting,” is appropriate because Peter says: “Concerning this salvation, the prophets who prophesied about the grace that was to be yours searched and inquired carefully, inquiring what person or time the Spirit of Christ in them was indicating when he predicted the sufferings of Christ and the subsequent glories” (1 Pet 1:10-11). David is said to speak of the resurrection in Psalm 16:8-11 by Peter in his Pentecost sermon (Acts 2:25-28). Now did the Psalmist intend to speak of Christ’s resurrection? Divine intention supercedes, without eradicating, human intention here.

Elsewhere Job cries, “Oh that you would hide me in Sheol, that you would conceal me until your wrath be past, that you would appoint me a set time, and remember me! If a man dies, shall he live again? All the days of my service I would wait, till my renewal should come” (14:13-14). And it may have been disingenuous repentance offered by Israel, but “on the third day he will raise us up” (Hos 6:2). The prophesies of the new creation would have implied the hope of a future life for their first audience: cf. Isaiah 43:18-21, 65:17, 66:22. To these we may also add Psalm 17:15, Isaiah 25:8 and 26:19.

Types and Shadows

Fourthly, there are those types and shadows of the resurrection that the Jews would have, in time, learned to see as signposts to the life to come. Beale suggests an early, albeit obscure, double-hint in Genesis 3.4 Perhaps the constant phrase that the dying faithful one was “gathered to his people” (Gen. 25:8; cf. 49:29) was anticipatory. Jesus’ words give us more than a hint of a central type:

“For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth” (Mat 12:40).

Whether Paul knew about this saying of Jesus or not, starting from the presupposition that the whole Bible has one divine Author, this verse by itself, is sufficient to justify Paul’s claim that the resurrection was “according to the Scriptures.” Lunn argues that central to the Jonah sign is the concept of rising up out of the water.5 The sea was a place of judgment.6 

Even a “cross-cultural” concept can function as a kind of type or shadow—something like Sheol—at least in the contrasts or even dilemmas that it forms. In setting forth four views of the ancient Jewish view of Sheol, Alexander shows that differing expectations of the righteous and the wicked argue a connection between moral consequences and the quality of one’s eternal life.7 He argues from Genesis 2-3 that death is not natural, but punitive;8 and from Psalm 49 that there was reward for the righteous.9 Consequently if all must go to Sheol, but the eternal state of the righteous in markedly better, something like the resurrection must be true.

Although it does not prove the full antiquity of the Jewish view, there is a significant perspective in the Babylonian Talmud, that,

“There is not a single precept in the Torah whose reward is [stated] at its side which is not dependent on the resurrection of the dead.”10

And how else does a simple Jewish woman like Martha confess, “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day” (Jn 11:24). It may be that Paul was capitalizing on the knowledge that the Jewish Christians in Corinth could offer their brethren. 

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1. cf. James Montgomery Boice, Genesis: Volume 2, 714-15; R. Kent Hughes, Genesis, 308-13.

2.  David H. Wenkel, “Abraham’s Typological Resurrection from the Dead in Hebrews 11” Criswell Theological Review; 15 no 2 Spr 2018, 51.

3.  Wenkel, “Abraham’s Typological Resurrection from the Dead in Hebrews 11,” 52.

4.  G. K. Beale, New Testament Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), 228. 

5.  Nicholas P. Lunn, “‘Raised On the Third Day According to the Scriptures’: Resurrection Typology in the Genesis Creation Narrative” JETS 57/3 (2014), 527.

6.  The Apostles understood the salvation of Noah (1 Pet 3:20-21) and the Israelites (1 Cor 10:1-2) to be through waters that are likened to baptism, and yet are substantially a judgment. Through both waters, the saved party was spoken of as having arisen upward—cf. Rom 6:3-5.

7.  Desmond Alexander, “The Old Testament View of Life After Death,” Themelios 11 (1986), 41.

8.  Alexander, “The Old Testament View of Life After Death,” 42.

9.  Alexander, “The Old Testament View of Life After Death,” 44.

10.  Beale, New Testament Theology, 234.