Orphic and Platonic ideas also came to exert a profound influence on the Judaic concept of death. These were perhaps expressed most clearly in the apocryphal text known as the Wisdom of Solomon, written during the 1st century bc and reflecting the views of a cultured Jew of the Diaspora. The author stressed that a “perishable body weighs down the soul” (Wisd. Sol. 9:15) and stated that “being good” he had “entered an undefiled body” (Wisd. Sol. 8:20), a viewpoint that was quintessentially Platonic in its vision of a soul that predated the body. Flavius Josephus, the Jewish historian of the 1st century ad, recorded in Bellum Judaicum (History of the Jewish War) how doctrinal disputes about death, the existence of an afterlife, and the “fate of the soul” were embodied in the views of various factions. The Sadducees (who spoke for a conservative, sacerdotal aristocracy) were still talking in terms of the old Yahwist doctrines, while the Pharisees (who reflected the views of a more liberal middle class) spoke of immortal souls, some doomed to eternal torment, others promised passage into another body). The Essenes held views close to those of the early Christians.
Following the destruction of the Temple (ad 70) and, more particularly, after the collapse of the last resistance to the Romans (c. 135), rabbinic teaching and exegesis slowly got under way. These flowered under Judah ha-Nasi (“Judah the Prince”), who, during his reign (c. 175–c. 220) as patriarch of the Jewish community in Palestine, compiled the collection of rabbinic law known as the Mishna. During the next 400 years or so, rabbinic teaching flourished, resulting in the production and repeated reelaboration first of the Palestinian (Jerusalem) and then of the Babylonian Talmuds. These codes of civil and religious practice sought to determine every aspect of life, including attitudes toward the dead. The concepts of immortality and resurrection had become so well established that in the Eighteen Benedictions (recited daily in synagogues and homes) God was repeatedly addressed as “the One who resurrects the dead.” Talmudic sources warned that “anyone who said there was no resurrection” would have no share in the world to come (tractate Sanhedrin 10:1). Over the centuries, a radical doctrinal shift had occurred. One would have to await the great political volte-faces of the 20th century to witness again such dramatic gyrations of decreed perspective.
One of the strangest notions to be advanced by rabbinic Judaism—and of relevance to the evolution of the concept of death—was that of the “bone called Luz” (or Judenknöchlein, as it was to be called by early German anatomists). In his Glossa magna in Pentateuchum (ad 210), Rabbi Oshaia had affirmed that there was a bone in the human body, just below the 18th vertebra, that never died. It could not be destroyed by fire, water, or any other element, nor could it be broken or bruised by any force. In his exceeding wisdom, God would use this bone in the act of resurrection, other bones coalescing with it to form the new body that, duly breathed upon by the divine spirit, would be raised from the dead. The name of the bone was derived from lus, an old Aramaic word meaning “almond.” The emperor Hadrian had apparently once asked Rabbi Joshua, son of Chanin, how God would resurrect people in the world to come. The rabbi had answered “from the bone Luz in the spinal column.” He had then produced a specimen of such a bone, which could not be softened in water or destroyed by fire. When struck with a hammer, the bone had remained intact while the anvil upon which it lay had been shattered. The bone had apparently been called Aldabaran by the Arabs. In some of the most interesting writings of polemical anatomy, Vesalius showed, in 1543, that the bone did not exist.
Orthodox Jewish responses to current medical controversies concerning death are based on biblical and Talmudic ethical imperatives. First, nothing must be done that might conceivably hasten death. Life being of infinite worth, a few seconds of it are likewise infinitely valuable. Causing accidental death is seen as only one step removed from murder. When a patient is in the pangs of death the bed should not be shaken, as even this might prove to be the last straw. Such invasive diagnostic procedures as four-vessel angiography (to assess cerebral blood flow) would almost certainly be frowned upon. Even a venipuncture (say, for tissue typing) could be conceived of as shpikhut damim, a spilling of blood with nefarious intent. In secular medical practice, however, problems of this sort are unlikely to arise. Much more important is the conceptual challenge presented by the beating-heart cadaver. Here it must be stressed that absence of a heartbeat was never considered a cardinal factor in the determination of death (Bab. Talmud, tractate Yoma 85A). Talmudic texts, moreover, clearly recognized that death was a process and not an event: “the death throes of a decapitated man are not signs of life any more than are the twitchings of a lizard’s amputated tail” (Bab. Talmud, tractate Chullin 21A; Mishna, Oholoth 1:6). The decapitated state itself defined death (Maimonides: Tumath Meth 1:15). Brain-stem death, which is physiological decapitation, can readily be equated with death in this particular perspective.
What mattered, in early Jewish sources, was the capacity to breathe spontaneously, which was seen as an indicator of the living state. The Babylonian Talmud (tractate Yoma 85A) explained that when a building collapsed, all lifesaving activities could legitimately cease on determination that the victim was no longer breathing. The instructions were quite explicit: “As soon as the nose is uncovered no further examination need be made, for the Tanach (Bible) refers to ‘all living things who have the breath of life in their nostrils.’ ”
Apnea alone, of course, does not constitute death; it is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for such a diagnosis. But if apnea is conjoined to all that is implied in the notion of the decapitated state (in terms of the irreversible loss of the capacity for consciousness, for instance), one finds that the concepts of death in the Talmud and in the most modern intensive care unit are virtually identical.
The issue of transplantation is more complex. The Talmud forbids the mutilation of a corpse or the deriving of any benefit from a dead body, but these considerations can be overridden by the prescriptions of pikuakh nefesh (“the preservation of life”). The Chief Rabbi of Israel has even argued that, as a successful graft ultimately becomes part of the recipient, prohibitions related to deriving benefit from the dead do not, in the long run, apply. Hinduism
Among the collected hymns of the Rigveda (which may date from 1500 bc and probably constitute the earliest known book in the world), there is a “Song of Creation.” “Death was not there,” it states, “nor was there aught immortal.” The world was a total void, except for “one thing, breathless, yet breathed by its own nature.” This is the first recorded insight into the importance of respiration to potential life.
Later, by about 600 bc, the Upaniṣads (a collection of searching, intellectually stimulating Indo-Aryan texts) record the quest for a coordinating principle that might underlie such diverse functions of the individual as speech, hearing, and intellect. An essential attribute of the living was their ability to breathe (an). Their praṇa (“breath”) was so vital that on its cessation the body and its faculties became lifeless and still. The word for “soul,” ātman, is derived from an, thus placing the concept of breath at the very core of the individual self or soul.