Tod und Jenseits im alten Israel und in seiner Umwelt

This collection of essays contains the results of an international and interdisciplinary conference on this topic which took place in Leipzig in 2007. The articles provide new approaches to the reevaluation of the different concepts of death in the ancient world. The authors give new insights into grave and burial customs, the iconography of death, conceptions of the underworld, life after death and resurrection in the Old Testament and the cultures of the Ancient Near East. In doing so, they conclude that the ancient world from the 3rd millenium BC up to early Judaism did not find it necessary to develop a complete system of concepts of death, the underworld, the hereafter and resurrection.