BOOK REVIEW in Commentary Magazine:

Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel by Jon D. Levenson
Reviewed by David Berger

February 2007

“Who Revives the Dead”
Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel: The Ultimate Victory of the God of Life
by Jon D. Levenson
Yale. 274 pp. $40.00

[...]

Jon D. Levenson, a professor of Jewish studies at Harvard, is a distinguished biblical scholar and theologian whose interest in this theme was foreshadowed in his The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son: The Transformation of Child Sacrifice in Judaism and Christianity (1993). Here he has given us a beautifully written, multi-faceted work that begins with 19th and 20th-century Jewish theologians and liturgists, moves back in time to touch on Maimonides in the 12th century, back still farther to the Talmud and midrash, and finally turns to the biblical material that stands at the core of the book.

Levenson’s purpose is to refute two widely held positions, or what might be called contemporary orthodoxies. The first of these is a counter-orthodoxy current among many Jews—to wit, that Judaism rejects belief in physical resurrection, either because Judaism is a this-worldly religion or because it accords pride of place to the idea of a disembodied immortality of the soul. As Levenson notes, those who apply either of these characterizations to classical Judaism are very numerous, but uninformed.

A more serious variant of this same contention is that Judaism should reject belief in resurrection, in favor of a putatively more sophisticated alternative. ...