Spiritual Death is Not Biblical

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Show me that any of the plain text readings of the prophets or the Torah writers speak of spiritual death or future ethereal punishment without invoking later concepts or adding to the text.

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What about Daniel 12:2? The NET Bible study note for this verse says:

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The book of Daniel in Judaism is classified with the writings not the prophets.

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True. I didn't know how restrictive you were trying to be with your terms. Daniel was a Jewish prophet, and in Christianity the book is grouped with the Major Prophets.

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This reads as a physical resurrection, not something in heaven.

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Agreed.

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What in the text makes this ethereal (unrelated to the real world)?

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This seems to be describing a punishment which is everlasting, not temporal. I would associate this with spiritual death.

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I guess I was thinking of a harsher punishment than shame and contempt. Most people bring out the lake of fire.

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From the OT? There may be a suggestion of this in Isaiah 66:24, but this is probably not speaking of an everlasting punishment.Edited by kbertsche, : typo

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The word translated as die, means to kill.

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Why do you say it means "kill" instead of "die?" The Hebrew is mut in the Qal imperfect. I can find no translation that renders this "kill," and no grammatical reason to render it so.Edited by kbertsche, : No reason given.

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There really isn't any separation of the soul and body in this passage though. What are you seeing as spiritual death?

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The term, spiritual death, itself is confusing since the definition doesn't include death; just falling out of favor.

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Perhaps you and I are defining "spiritual death" differently? NET Bible has this study note for Gen 2:17: Edited by kbertsche, : No reason given.

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In the story God says that if they eat of the tree they will die. So death is the penalty for eating from the tree. If we were hearing the story for the first time, we might think the tree is poisonous, but once they eat of the tree we know that the tree isn't poisonous. So for Adam and Eve to die the day they eat, they would have to be killed. I think we have become so accustomed to the story that the drama is lost.

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OK, I see your point. The author uses the Qal stem, not one of the others, so the best definition is probably your a2. My version of BDB expands a bit more on this:

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That sounds like dualism which is a later concept.

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Yes, I agree that this sounds like dualism. I believe the ancient Hebrews were dualistic in this sense. I don't know where the author of your quote gets his claim that it was a later concept; this sounds like some sort of modern revisionism.The OT has the concept of She‘l, where one's soul goes after death. This seems to assume "dualism." According to ISBE: Here's the BDB definition of She‘l:

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The question would be when dualism came into the culture or was it always there? It is difficult sometimes to weed out later influences.

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Agreed. The word Sheol is throughout the Hebrew Bible, even in the oldest books (Job, Pentateuch). But it is hard to tell what the conception of it was or how it changed with time.

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The book of Daniel is dated at 167-164 B.C which is after the Greek influence from what I can tell.

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Its date is disputed. There are good arguments for a much earlier, traditional date. Arguments for late dates of Daniel seem largely circular (they assume that the earlier Hebrews did not have many of the concepts in Daniel, so these must have come from the later Persians or the Greeks).

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I did find some other articles dealing with Sheol as your quote described. But even in those articles the separation is only after death and the "shadow" remained there. There was no concept of individual resurrection or separation from God.

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Perhaps one could make a case that the early Hebrews had a monistic view of man while he was alive, and saw his body and soul splitting after death?Dan 12:2 is probably the clearest OT reference to the resurrection, but there are some with other passages that hint at it:

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The current Christian concept of spiritual death is alienation of the soul from God, whether the person is dead or alive.

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How is a soul alienated from God while the person is alive?

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The concept of separation/alienation from God while alive does appear in the OT. Perhaps the best explanation is here: If we understand death=separation, then this passage is speaking of spiritual death. It correlates well with NT descriptions of spiritual death.Edited by kbertsche, : typo

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OK so in the term spiritual death, death creatively means separation and not extinction. As an adjective of death does spiritual refer to the soul or to religious values?

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I don't like the word "creatively." I would simply say: "death in the Bible means separation and not extinction." As I quoted earlier:

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I agree that the verse actually speaks of alienating God's affections. It was a recurring theme for the Israelites. When all was well, God was happy and they were under God's protection. When things went bad, God was displeased and they weren't under his protection. I seriously doubt the every individual was corrupt or alienated God. People were supposedly still praying but God wasn't listening.

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Good point. Is 59:2 seems to be speaking of the nation as a collective; they are collectively separated from God (spiritually dead). But this does not necessarily mean that every individual in the nation is spiritually dead.

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There isn't anything that speaks of the soul as opposed to the whole person. God was still watching over the Israelites even though he was annoyed with them.

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Yes. As you have claimed, "soul" is essentially identical to "whole person" in the OT. I don't see that this causes a problem for the concept of spiritual death; the people have become separated from God (spiritually dead) because of their sins.

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As I showed in the OP, the uses for spiritual death have been used to create a dual meaning in conflicting verses concerning physical death. See this article http://www.thesecondchanceministries.org/Three Deaths

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The view that there are three different kinds of death mentioned in the Bible is a fairly standard, orthodox Christian understanding, so far as I know. Here are some quotes from The Death of Death | Bible.org:

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Death just isn't what it used to be. I think spiritual death is another catch phrase that really doesn't mean anything, but can be molded to fit many situations.

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I would agree that "death" in modern culture doesn't mean what it did to the New Testament writers. But I believe the standard Christian understanding (summarized above) is essentially that of the NT. I agree with you that the OT understanding was not as well developed, but I don't see any evidence that the OT understanding is fundamentally inconsistent with the NT.

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Unfortunately when you say that death means separation, that is how it is being used; creatively. The word death when referring to living creatures means a permanent cessation of all vital functions or when referring to the non-living the passing or destruction of something inanimate. Death, dead, or die do not carry the definition of separation currently or in the OT; but the word can be used creatively to convey other meanings.

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So you claim. Do you have any scholarly or textual evidence for your claim that OT death = extinction rather than separation?I see two reasonable possibilities:
1) In the OT, death = extinction. Those who understand death as separation are applying a NT interpretive overlay on the OT writers. (This overlay could either be an invalid anachronism, or a valid theological application.)
2) In the OT, death = separation (similar to the NT but less developed). Those who understand death as extinction are anachronistically applying modern naturalistic definitions to the OT text instead of understanding it as the original audience would have.

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The excerpt from the NET study note is a creative religious view of death.

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Only if possibility #1 above is true. Not if possibility #2 is true.

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The word translated as death in the OT does not carry a meaning of spiritual death from what I have seen so far.

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Since Adam and Eve did not physically die immediately after they ate the fruit, we can infer that either God was not speaking of physical death, or His prophecy was wrong. Rejecting the latter possibility as against the character of God revealed in the OT, we infer that the death spoken of was a non-physical death of some sort. The rest of the account shows us the effects of Adam & Eve's sin, with separation, alienation, and gradual decay of society. We can infer from the account that eating the fruit caused some sort of negative inner (spiritual) change in Adam & Eve. Correlating this data, we could conclude that Adam & Eve had experienced "spiritual death". But I agree that much of this is inferrential, and I'm not sure we can go much further in defining spiritual death from the OT alone.

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I showed in Message 29 that it carries the meaning of "to kill".

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It CAN mean "to kill," but only if it is in the Polel or Hifil stem. (But you seem to want to read it as "to be killed" which would require the Hofal stem.) In the Qal stem, as in Gen 2:17, it CANNOT mean "to kill" or "to be killed." Here it can only mean "to die," and the best dictionary definition from context is "2) to die (as penalty), be put to death".

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In the verses I provided in the OP the usage of the word die does not mean separation. It means to kill.

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No, the stem is Qal, so it CANNOT mean "to kill" (or "to be killed"). It means "2) to die (as penalty), be put to death".This only tells us that muwt means "to die." It does not tell us how they understood death; was it extinction, or separation? You seem to be assuming that they understood it as extinction. If so, do you have any support for this?

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We can infer that the fruit wasn't poisonous and that God changed his mind. No you can't infer (to derive as a conclusion from facts or premises) all the rest from the simple reading of the text.

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Yes, I suppose this could be another inference. But the OT tells us that God does not change His mind (Num 23:19), and in the few places that He seems to do so the text comments on it. Since we see no such comment relating to Gen 2:17, I think it highly unlikely that God changed His mind here.Edited by kbertsche, : No reason given.

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Death means a permanent cessation of all vital functions. There is no evidence that the ancient Hebrews thought otherwise.

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This is what I meant by "extinction." What is your evidence that the ancient Hebrews viewed death as you describe instead of as a "separation" of body from soul? How can you be sure that you are not reading a modern definition back into an ancient text? (We've seen from the usages of "sheol" that they did believe in continued existence with separation of body and soul after death.)Edited by kbertsche, : No reason given.

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This is what I meant by "extinction." What is your evidence that the ancient Hebrews viewed death as you describe instead of as a "separation" of body from soul? How can you be sure that you are not reading a modern definition back into an ancient text? (We've seen from the usages of "sheol" that they did believe in continued existence with separation of body and soul after death.)

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I addressed that in Message 38.
If you feel I am reading a modern definition back into an ancient text, then show me; don't ask me.

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Sorry for the delayed reply--this has been a busy week.The question is how the OT writers understood the word "death." It is clear that the OT writers did not view death as the end of the person, but saw the person continuing after death in an inferior state in She'ol. Death is often spoken of as "going to your fathers" (e.g. Gen. 15:15).So I have two problems with your definition of death as "permanent cessation of all vital functions". First, the OT writers saw the dead as still existing in some sort of "vital" state in She'ol, so they would not have viewed "all vital functions" as ceasing. Second, your definition seems to speak only of the body in distinction to the spirit; this view is inconsistent with your proposal that the Hebrews viewed man as monistic (body and spirit inseperable).Here is an interesting quote from the International Standard Bible Encyclopedia that seems to be a sort of combination of your position and mine: (FYI--for those here who aren't familiar with ISBE, it is an old, scholarly, theologically-conservative reference work. The general editor was James Orr, one of the original "Fundamentalists.")Edited by kbertsche, : No reason given.