69).
In the Old Testament, there is barely any mention of an afterlife. The Bible at that point was given to the Israelites who came out of Egypt, and the Bible was then a counter to the entire death-centered culture of Egypt as the people of israel saw it. Much of the Egyptian religion was directed at providing for the individual in the afterlife, and the way pharaohs were buried with their possessions shows that this was the case:
The Israelites who left Egypt were appalled by all the opulence that was made only for the grave. The treasures buried with King Tut would have been more than enough to feed a whole province of Egypt for years. And this is why the Torah that was given to the people who left Egypt is so reticent about afterlife, so totally different in tone and content from the Egyptian Book of the Dead or the other sacred writings of Egyptian society (Riemer 309).
The issue is made more clear in pot-biblical Judaism as the sages expressed their faith in resurrection in clear terms. Jews must affirm it five times within the second prayer of the Amidah and in many other places in the liturgy:
They taught that there is more than just this world, that there is a world-to-come, in which God will bring justice and bliss to those who suffer in this life. And post-Talmudic Judaism continued this affirmation down through the centuries in two main streams. The rationalists, the medieval Jewish philosophers, expounded this doctrine in one way and the Kabbalists, the mystics, expounded it in a different way. But for both schools of thought it was clear that this belief was central to Jewish self-understanding (Riemer 310).
Yet, the issue is not always that clear, and indeed even the questions of who is a Jew has remained one that is continually argued. A Jew is on who accep
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