davidmartin wrote: ↑Tue Nov 21, 2023 1:55 pm
over in the odes they have no idea of that though cause there's not really a resurrection. instead here the cross sort of gets compared to the bond of marriage as found in the OT. i suspect they were applying the previous idea onto the cross here. a simple reading of the odes just has the messiah 'not being touched by death' and continuing to exist in heaven and on earth through the body of the church. i suppose if they were to have had a gospel it would have had the cross then no tomb but the first visionary encounter directly after. Could the tomb be something that developed a bit later?
Do you mean Jesus being buried in a tomb or the finding of his tomb empty? Maybe the idea of Jesus being buried in a tomb predates Mark. I'm not sure that Paul specifies what kind of burial Jesus had. I think the story of people finding his tomb empty is likely created/made-up by the author of Mark.
davidmartin wrote: ↑Tue Nov 21, 2023 1:55 pm
nightshade the curious idea the tomb is a type of birth seems kind of logical especially going from the epistles
interesting take!
There seems to be some evidence of viewing the tomb as a return to a mother's womb in ancient Near Eastern and Greco-Roman culture. Paul describes Jesus as the "first-born among many brothers and sisters" and in John Jesus talks about a second birth "from above" or through "spirit".
“My Beloved Son, Come and Rest in Me”: Job’s Return to His Mother’s Womb (Job 1:21a) in Light of Egyptian Mythology, Christopher B. Hays in Vetus Testamentum 62 (2012) 607-621:
“And he said, ‘Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked I shall return there.’”
Job’s return to his mother’s womb has consistently attracted special attention from interpreters of the book; it has been seen as a “bump” in the text requiring smoothing. Fifty years ago, Giuseppe Ricciotti argued with elegant brevity that the archaeological remains of ancient Near Eastern burials could shed light on this problem; the fetal positioning of many such burials could explain the image of “returning naked to [the mother’s womb].” “If this womb was not materially identical to that of the mother,” Ricciotti wrote, “it was so symbolically.”
A number of significant commentaries have followed Ricciotti in treating the imagery as a poetic reference to burial, but as far as I can see, no one has pointed out that there are very clear Egyptian precedents for such imagery, in which the sarcophagus and/or tomb are described as the womb of the goddess in which the deceased undergoes a rebirth into the blessed afterlife. The fact that Job is already acknowledged as demonstrating awareness of Egyptian beliefs about the afterlife such as the judgment of the dead supports the idea of Egyptian influence in 1:21. The recognition of the source of this imagery not only clarifies Job’s rhetoric and its roots, it also sheds light on a longstanding debate over unusually shaped headrests in certain Jerusalem tombs from First Temple period...
In Egyptian funerary texts, there is “an astonishing consistency” to the imagery of death as a return to a goddess’ womb, from the Old Kingdom through the Hellenistic period. The image of the goddess Nut as the one who gives birth to the deceased king as her son—causing him to “revive and live”— is pervasive in the Old Kingdom Pyramid Texts. A few examples will suffice. Nut calls the king her son in Teti’s Spell 5a: “Teti is my son, whom I caused to be born and who parted my belly; he is the one I have desired and with whom I have become content.” The connection between this image of birth and the restoration of the body via the resurrection to the afterlife is well expressed by Pepi I’s Spell 337, which commands: “Nut, give your arm toward Pepi with life and authority, join together his bones, assemble his limbs, join his bones to his [head] and join his head to his bones, and he will not decay, he will not rot, he will not be ended, he will have no outflow, and no scent of his will come out.”...
The idea of preservation also includes protection; this is expressed in a different way in Pepi’s I spell 41a: “Osiris Pepi, your mother Nut has spread herself over you that she may conceal you from everything bad. Nut has joined you away from everything bad: you are the eldest of her children.” The comforting aspect of these texts is quite clear in such examples; and again, the entrance into the sarcophagus (and perhaps also into the tomb itself) is viewed as an entrance into the mother goddess, who then births the deceased into the afterlife.
In the outer sarcophagus of Merneptah from the New Kingdom (13th century), one can perceive even more clearly “the constellation of coffin and corpse as the union of mother and child,”... Assmann calls this an “entirely typical” image, “that of a mother goddess who embodies the coffin and welcomes the deceased, as he enters her, as her son.” A text from nearly a thousand years later echoes some of the same images: "My beloved son, Osiris PN, come and rest in me! I am your mother who protects you daily. I protect your body from all evil, I guard your body from all evil." Thus, the endurance of the imagery through the entire period of the Hebrew Bible’s composition is well established.
In some cases, as in Louvre Papyrus 3148, the human mother who bore and the divine mother who received were differentiated, even in comparison... It would be remiss to omit mention of archaeological and iconographic data the interpretation of which may be affected by this study. Certain elite Judean bench tombs from First Temple period have stone-carved headrests... These headrests, in Cave Complex 2 on the grounds of St. Étienne’s monastery in Jerusalem, have been given two interpretations, which have been thought to be in competition with each other: Archaeologist Gabriel Barkay has interpreted them as representing the “Hathor headdress,” named for the Egyptian goddess usually associated with it (Fig. 2);37 while Othmar Keel interpreted them as symbols of the womb, since very similar shapes can be understood as womb symbols elsewhere in Levantine iconography...
In light of what has been laid out above, the interpretations of the headrests as Hathor and as a womb can be seen to be complementary rather than contradictory. Indeed, within Egyptian mythology, they are completely compatible: Hathor was associated with the night sky, and she was another of the mother goddesses. Indeed, Hathor’s name in Egyptian (Ḥwt Ḥr) meant “Temple of Horus,” but Ḥwt came to be understood metaphorically as “womb,” so that Hathor was the “womb/mother of Horus” and later Re: "It was believed that Hathor, as the night sky, received Re each night on the western horizon and protected him within her body so that he could be safely reborn each morning. Based on this divine paradigm, Hathor was seen as a source for rebirth and regeneration of all the deceased, royal and nonroyal, and they all hoped for similar protection form her."...
In short, Hathor was very closely associated in Egypt with the womb and with hopes for rebirth, so the only surprise in finding the same association in First Temple Judah is for some biblical scholars and archaeologists who are accustomed to thinking that ancient Judeans had less awareness of Egyptian(izing) mythology than they probably did. Egyptian influence on First Temple tomb architecture is well established.
Maternal Grief in the Hebrew Bible (Oxford University Press, 2017), Ekaterina E. Kozlova:
The intersection of motherhood, grief, death, and afterlife is elevated to a whole new level in the cosmology of the ancient Egyptians. The tendency to encrypt death- and grief-related matters in maternal terms, already seen in other cultures, permeates Egypt’s mytho-religious consciousness in an unprecedented way... The aforementioned phenomenon of imbuing grief with maternal aspects, where normally it is not expected, can also be observed in the funerary cult of Osiris. The prominent figures of the cult are the two great wailing women, Isis and Nephthys, who offer lamentations not only for Osiris himself but for all of the dead as well.
Describing the deities involved in the cult, Assmann observes that Horus, Osiris’s son, does not participate in the mourning for his father... He states that ‘grief, and specifically female grief, was an unconditional form of handling death by bestowing life’ in the Netherworld.166 In light of such emphatic ‘gendered’ discussion of Isis and Nephthys’ mourning and their outcome—that is, Osiris’ regeneration—it is of interest that the sisters’ actions in the cult are also endowed with a maternal aspect. This can be inferred ‘from the name given them as early as the Pyramid Texts, viz. ẖnm.t.tj, the two female attendants, a term with the specific meaning of divine nurses. The deceased Osiris is in need of attendance as it is given to a baby.’ Such switch from the purely sisterly and wifely aspects in the ritual actions of the Isis–Nephthys pair to that of motherly care may echo the trend already observed in West and East Semitic mythologies and liturgies. But since the nursing and thus motherly features in the interaction of the deceased with other goddesses is a repeated motif in Egyptian coffin inscriptions, the sisters’ care for the dead Osiris cast in maternal terms may not be entirely unusual.
However, a more obvious maternal assistance to the dead in the Egyptian death cosmology was offered by the goddesses Neith and Nut, who greeted the deceased in the Netherworld. Their lengthy speeches are inscribed on a great number of Egyptian sarcophagi, which, by means of these monologues, become ‘vocal’ as well. In these inscriptions the coffin is represented as the body of the goddess that houses an entire divine realm and is prepared to welcome the dead. Assmann hypothesises that in the intimate, womb-like interior of a coffin one mother-goddess, Neith, represented ‘the outer boxshaped sarcophagus’, while another mother-goddess, Nut, ‘embodied the inner, mummiform sarcophagus’. For him, ‘the constellation of coffin and corpse [functioned] as the union of mother and child’. Nut, who is by far the most frequently featured goddess in coffin speeches, sometimes compares her Netherwordly functions to those of the biological mother offering the deceased rebirth and everlasting security in her cosmic womb...
According to the Egyptian worldview the maternal principle permeated the entirety of death geography. For the deceased the Great Mother takes on a plurality of forms. ‘She is the tomb, the necropolis, the West, and the realm of the dead; all the spaces that receive him [the dead], from the smallest to the largest, are manifestations of the womb into which the transfigured deceased enters.’ Based on the tomb scenes where divine and biological mothers coalesce, Assmann postulates that ‘the deceased’s own mother is also a manifestation of this ever maternal entity that is to receive the deceased in the form of the coffin, the tomb, and the West’. He further explains that: "Death as return to the womb was a central concept, one that extended into every area of Egyptian culture, every bit as much as that of the Judgment of the Dead, which belonged to the other image of death, that of death as enemy"...
The primal parental impulse to nurture, protect, and ensure flourishing is at the core of Egypt’s Netherworldly ontology engendered by Nut, Neith, Hathor, the goddess of the West, and other mother-goddesses. Echoing comparable ANE traditions the great wailing of the Isis–Nephthys dyad in Egypt’s principal death cult is likewise ascribed a maternal dimension.
166 Cf. Assmann’s comparison of the role of Isis in the Osiris cult with that of Mary, the mother of Jesus: ‘The scene of the Pietà, in which Mary holds the corpse of the crucified Jesus on her lap and mourns, is a comparable depiction of the body-centred intensity of female grief, in which Mary is assisted by Mary Magdalene, just as Isis is assisted by Nephthys.’ Ibid., 116. For the similarity in the iconographies of the two women, see also S. Higgins, ‘Divine Mothers: The Influence of Isis on the Virgin Mary in Lactans-Iconography’, JCSCS 3–4 (2012), 71–90. Apparently, in his treatise ‘Concerning Isis and Osiris’ Plutarch notes that ‘the all-powerful Isis allowed herself to be portrayed as a woman of sorrows to console suffering humanity’. Pinch, Handbook of Egyptian Mythology, 151. For the role of women in Egyptian mourning rites see, for example, D. Sweeney, ‘Walking Alone Forever, Following You: Gender and Mourners’ Laments from Ancient Egypt’, NIN: JGSA 2 (2002), 27–48; C. Graves-Brown, Dancing for Hathor: Women in Ancient Egypt (London: Continuum, 2010), 65–71; Wickett, For the Living, 159–163.
