Why Nobody Wants to Hear What We Believe About Death (p3)

So far in this series we've covered a lot of ground.

In Part 1, we established that the way most Adventists share the state of the dead was built for a very specific cultural moment (the 1800s spiritualism craze in America) and that this approach has largely stopped connecting with secular and post-church people today. This doesn’t mean we have to discard the classical approach (the truth about ghosts, spirits etc.), it simply means we have to expand from it so that our doctrine of death is capable of speaking meaningfully to the diverse death-anxieties people experience today, rather than just one anxiety that dominated over 100 years ago, but no longer does.

In Part 2, we looked at what that world is doing with death right now. VR headsets, chatbots, etc. We took a sneak peek at an entire industry dedicated to a technological “solution” for grief and mortality as a whole. We saw that for the first time in human history, humanity is trying to solve death without any reference to religion, spirituality, or the supernatural.

And the question we ended with was whether our doctrine of death has something beyond “anti-spiritualism” to offer this new world. Can it actually dance with the anxieties of a secular, post-religious, western society? And if so, what does that look like?

To answer that question though, we need to go way back. Not to the 1800s. Further back than that. All the way back to the world in which the Bible first emerged: the Ancient Near East (ANE).

Death and the Ancient Near East

Death in a secular, western context is painful, heavy, and tragic. However, in many ways it is also simple because it tends to carry one overwhelming variable: processing grief. And grief is understood primarily through romantic terms. Perhaps this is why the poet Suzanne Baines could say, “Grief is simply… love unfinished.”

We’ll come back to Baines and the modern western concept of death and grief in the next article. For now, what I want you to understand is this: death and grief in the secular contemporary sense is heavy, but simple. It involves the processing of, and learning to live with, grief. But in the ANE, death was anything but simple. In fact, it was the exact opposite. Not only was death heavy then as it is today; it was intensely and overwhelmingly complex. Here are 5 lenses to show what I mean:

LENS 1: In the ANE, death was not relief.

In the ANE world, the afterlife was something to dread rather than look forward to.

The Mesopotamian underworld (called Kur or Irkalla) was a place of darkness, dust, and misery. The Epic of Gilgamesh describes the dead as eating "clay and dust." Every person who died went there regardless of their wealth or status. There was no moral distinction at the gate, meaning no reward for virtue and no punishment for wickedness. The World History Encyclopedia describes what awaited as simply a grim checklist confirming you belonged there, followed by the seven gates to the realm of darkness. [1]

Even the great heroes ended up there. When Enkidu died, his ghost returned briefly to describe the underworld to Gilgamesh as a devastating place where the dead existed as weak, diminished shadows of their former selves.

This was the mainstream cosmology of the most advanced civilisations of the ancient world. Death meant the end of warmth, relationships, food, and light. What came after was cold, dark, endless, and unavoidable for everyone.

LENS 2: In the ANE, the dead were both conscious and dangerous.

In the ANE, your dead loved ones continued to exist as spirits (called etemmu in Akkadian, gidim in Sumerian), and these spirits were conscious, aware, and often hostile.

If you treated your dead well by burying them properly and pouring regular offerings of food and water into the grave, the etemmu would be settled. If you neglected them, they became dangerous. Mesopotamian medical texts from the Assyrian period document physical and psychological symptoms attributed to the influence of these spirits, often prescribing specific rituals and incantations to treat what was understood as a supernatural haunting.

The most dangerous were those who died young, died violently, or were not properly buried. These became etemmu lemnu (evil ghosts) who roamed looking for the living to afflict. This was daily, lived reality. Every household maintained rituals to keep the dead settled, which basically enslaved the living to perpetually manage the spiritual consequences of people who were no longer alive.

LENS 3: The gods were unpredictable and humans didn’t matter.

I know… angry gods isn’t exactly about death itself. But you’ll see why this matters in a moment. For now, just know this: if the dead were dangerous in the ANE, the gods were terrifying in a completely different way because you often couldn't tell what they wanted.

A Sumerian prayer known as the "Prayer to an Unknown God" captures this at its most raw. A person in desperate distress is praying but doesn't know which god they've offended or what the offense was. The prayer says: "May the god who is unknown to me be pacified! …The sin which I have committed I know not." [3]

This was the default condition of ANE spiritual life. The gods were powerful and capricious, and divine favor could be withdrawn without warning. Illness, crop failure, the death of a child, or military defeat were all potentially signs of divine anger for an offense you couldn't identify. Add to this the fact that humans didn’t matter in the ANE world (TheAtrahasis Epic literally says that humanity was made because the gods were tired of working and needed someone to take over their labor [4]), and the result was a chronic terror that at any moment you might be the target of divine displeasure.

The entire machinery of ANE religion was basically a management system for this anxiety.

LENS 4: Death made love a liability.

The ANE personified the grief of lives cut short as literal demons. The spirits of those who died before marriage or having children became hostile supernatural entities called Lilû and Lilîtu. Academic sources describe them as the anthropomorphization of unfulfilled expectations that haunted the living and cried in the night. [5]

Even the grief of parents for stillborn babies was demonised into a spirit called Kūbu, the ghost of a child who never got to taste its mother's milk.

The deeper you loved, the more dangerous the loss became. The parent who never saw their child grow up produced a supernatural threat that had to be ritually managed and neutralized. Grief itself was personified as a creature who attacked its victims, causing physical illness and isolation severe enough to cause death. Like the dead and the gods, grief needed appeasement.

This is why I began this section by saying that while death remains heavy in a modern, secular world, for ANE peoples it was not simply heavy—it was complicated and required an equally complex mechanism to manage it.

LENS 5: Death as part of a story

This is the lens that ties everything together. Take everything we've seen: cruel gods, humans as accidents or slave labor, an afterlife of misery awaiting everyone, the dead as dangerous spirits, and grief as a demon to be managed.

All of these examples put together don’t simply form a perspective on death. Together they tell a story about what it means to be human. In the ANE, to be human was heavy with misery: created to be a slave to capricious gods who don’t want you, cursed to survive a violent world, only to die and experience even more horrors. And those left alive? They now have to manage your death properly in order to keep your spirit from haunting them. That is on top of the angry gods they already have to manage.

Now, of course, it's easy to look at this and wonder: how did people even function in this world? The answer is that the religious machinery absorbed the terror. They functioned because the rituals—as brutal as they were—gave them the illusion of control, making the anxiety a managed background hum rather than a daily panic attack. The societies they belonged to were built on these very ideas. It's no wonder barbaric acts such as child sacrifice and temple prostitution were part of their social order. When your entire belief system is essentially “management” for angry gods and the angry dead, your social machinery will reflect that cruelty in the moments that matter.

And then… there’s Israel…

The nation of Israel lived surrounded by the same cultures we've been describing.

Yet, through YHWH's guidance, they developed a view of death that nobody anywhere else in known human history has ever held. It was a view that took each of these five lenses and turned them upside down and inside out, offering the ANE world a new way of not simply seeing death, but a new way of being human. We’ll take a look at this more in the next blog.

For now, let's fast forward to our modern secular world.

Today the five ANE anxieties we explored above have completely disappeared. Contemporary people do not live in daily terror of an unknown god who might be angry at them. The etemmu is not a cultural anxiety for a secular 25-year-old in Sydney or Boston. Death is not a place of eternal horrors, and the dead do not have to be managed via complex religious codes that are baked into the social order. While the 1800s spiritualism craze was a period where some of these ANE anxieties overlapped with western modernity, that era has also passed.

However, that doesn't make the Hebrew response to these anxieties irrelevant.

When we see exactly what the Biblical view of death was doing in its ANE context, you start to see that Israel’s doctrine of death goes far beyond a warning against being deceived by spirits. That is a part of it, yes (and thankfuly so). But beyond this, the biblical view of death is, in its fullest sense, a whole new story promising whole new way to be human. A whole new way of existing in the world. A whole new story full of meaning and hope that ANE peoples simply did not have.

And it makes me wonder: as Adventists, is this what we have to offer the contemporary secular world? A whole other way of being human? A new way of existing, of inhabiting reality? An infusion of imagination, curiosity, and profound meaning that the meta-modern age simply cannot offer?

Or is our doctrine of death stuck endlessly at “beware of ghosts”… with nothing more to say?

We’ll go deep into all this next week. This will be the article where all the pieces will finally start to click together.

Before we get there, I want to announce something:

I'm hosting a live workshop where we can explore what the Hebrew and biblical doctrine of death actually offers our secular, post-church world together. We will look at the meaning, the hope, and the practical frameworks for sharing this with people who've never heard it told this way.

Details and registration links coming next week.

But for now, a question:

Did you know death was this complicated to navigate in the ANE world? How does seeing all five of these lenses help you see that the biblical view of death is about so much more than ghosts, demons, and even death itself? That it’s actually part of a full story that offered ANE peoples a whole new way to be human? Drop your thoughts below.

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FOOTNOTES

[1] The Epic of Gilgamesh, Tablet VII. The text describes the underworld (Kur) as a "house of dust" where the inhabitants exist in darkness, "eating dust and their food clay." See also Joshua J. Mark, "Death in Ancient Mesopotamia," World History Encyclopedia (2017), for an overview of how this concept of the underworld served as a bleak equalizer for all social classes.

[2] "Haunted Soldiers in Mesopotamia" via JSTOR Daily. This article provides an academic overview of cuneiform medical texts that document how ancient Mesopotamians diagnosed and treated physical and psychological distress as the result of hauntings by the spirits of the dead.

[3] "Babylonian Penitential Psalms," Journal of the American Oriental Society (University of Chicago Press).

[4] The Atrahasis Epic (Old Babylonian period, c. 1700 BCE). The creation of humans as a labour force for the gods who were tired of working is one of the most explicit statements of cosmological hierarchy in ancient literature.

[5] Irene Sibbing-Plantholt, "Coping with time and death in the Ancient Near East", Religion Compass (2021).