ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the key concepts covered in the preceding chapters of this book. The crises of the Maccabean period generated further ideological reflection upon concepts of an afterlife which, to the lament of the Hebrew Bible, saw no distinction between the righteous and the wicked. The Jewish authors of the post-Biblical texts stand in discontinuity with the Hebrew Bible most likely following reflection on the afterlife following the Maccabean wars. The oft-repeated idea that Jews believed in the resurrection of the body and Greeks the immortality of the soul appears not only incorrect, but erroneous to the point that actually the opposite is true: Greek tradition required the presence of a physical body while Jews of the Second Temple Period emphasized the afterlife of the soul. For Homer, the afterlife for the vast majority was an eternity spent as a disembodied yet conscious soul in Hades.
