Soul-Searching: The Evolution of Judeo-Christian Thinking on the Soul and the Afterlife

By Luke Jeffrey Janssen and Malcolm A. Jeeves

There are well over one hundred different views of the nature of human existence; though the Bible may rule out many of these, there still remains a large number that are all compatible with Scripture. The Bible never explicitly defines the nature of the soul or spirit, which is actually quite puzzling or even ironic, given that one major aim of Scripture is spiritual development and ultimate questions about the soul. In fact, Judeo-Christian thinking on those questions has been evolving over the course of four thousand years.
This book documents that evolution as a man named Abram left Babylon four thousand years ago, journeying through the lands and the philosophies of civilizations preceding him by many more thousands of years, while he and his descendants (both physical and spiritual) unpacked their understanding of our inner being--the human soul--and the afterlife. That journey is followed to the present day, and examines how a critically thinking Christian can embrace a theology of the human soul that is fully compatible with modern scientific findings, including explanations for consciousness, mind, and soul.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Release date: Aug 6, 2019
• ISBN: 9781532679834

Luke Jeffrey Janssen

Luke J. Janssen is a Professor of Medicine at McMaster University at Hamilton, Ontario. He is the author of 140 scientific papers, as well as the book Reaching into Plato's Cave (2014), and blogs regularly on the subject of faith-and-science at https://lukejjanssen.wordpress.com/.

Book preview

9781532679810.kindle.jpg

Soul-Searching

The Evolution of Judeo-Christian Thinking on the Soul and the Afterlife

Luke Jeffrey Janssen

foreword by Malcolm Jeeves

865.png

Soul-SearchinG

The Evolution of Judeo-Christian Thinking on the Soul and the Afterlife

Copyright © 2019 Luke Jeffrey Janssen. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

Wipf & Stock

An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3

Eugene, OR 97401

www.wipfandstock.com

paperback isbn: 978-1-5326-7981-0

hardcover isbn: 978-1-5326-7982-7

ebook isbn: 978-1-5326-7983-4

Illustrations used with permission.

Cover: The Last Judgement, a bas-relief residing in Autun Cathedral, France, believed to have been created around 1130 AD. In this scene, the Devil and the Archangel Michael weigh human souls (lined up along the lower right) to determine who will go to heaven (up the left side of the scene) or to hell (down the right hand side). I felt this image was perfectly suited to draw the reader’s attention to my offering on this subject. The figures and images themselves overtly speak the key themes of the book: the soul and the afterlife. As well, the sense of antiquity and the sacred with which this image is imbued resonate with the historical and theological nature of the book’s contents. The observer will likely find that they need to take the image in slowly and parse it carefully in order to fully comprehend it: the same will be true of what they will find inside this book.

Manufactured in the U.S.A. 10/08/19

Table of Contents

Title Page

Foreword

Preface

Chapter 1: Introduction

Chapter 2: Premodern Human Ontology: The Mind, Soul, and Spirit

Chapter 3: A Synthesis of Modern Thinking on Our Inner Being

Chapter 4: The Afterlife

Chapter 5: Change

About the Author

Bibliography

Foreword

Malcolm Jeeves

CBE, FMedSci, FRSE

Emeritus Professor, School of Psychology and Neuroscience, St. Andrews University

Past President of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Scotland’s National Academy

The past half-century has witnessed remarkable advances in our understanding of the brain. The last decade of the twentieth century, labeled The Decade of the Brain by the US Senate, resulted in increased funding for brain research of all kinds. By the turn of the twenty-first century, researchers realized the possibility of actually seeing which areas of the brain are most active when volunteers were doing all sorts of tasks, such as looking at art, listening to music, showing maternal love, meditating, or praying. Everything seemed well set for yet further rapid advances in the study of mind and brain, leading some scientists to suggest that the first decade of the present century should be called The Decade of the Mind and Brain. Very soon, with the widespread use of smart phones and similar devices, it became customary to talk about the software and the hardware of such devices. This way of thinking about the relationship between mind (the software) and brain (the hardware) seemed to make good sense. It served further to underline the unity of the device being used and by implication the unity of the human person. It made sense to see mind and brain as two essential aspects of the one unity: the human person.

But what about the soul? Is the soul the same as the mind? If not, how does it differ? For two millennia a pervasive theme of dogmatic and systematic theology when focusing on theological anthropology and the doctrine of humanity emphasized that humankind alone is created in the divine image or in the image of God. This refers, of course, to the book of Genesis chapter 1 verse 27 where we read, God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him. On this view, it was held that a straightforward answer to the question of what makes us human and distinguishes us from the rest of creation was that, since God is a spiritual being, He endowed us also with spirituality, giving us an immortal soul. That, however, turns out to be too simple. Any reference to the writings of biblical scholars and theologians who have traced out the understanding of the concept of soul over more than two millennia demonstrates the wide variety of views that have been taken over that period, and, as Janssen documents, indeed before.

Few contributors to the ongoing debate about the nature of the soul and the human person have the knowledge and background from both within science and within theology to make a sustained attempt at working out a view of the human person, and in particular of the soul, which does full justice to advances in scholarship in both theology and science. The author of this present book is one such person. His distinguished career as a medical scientist with a deep understanding of the almost unbelievable intricacy of our biological makeup, and, at the same time someone who has made the effort to undertake further specialized training in biblical scholarship and theology, equips Professor Janssen to guide us through the minefields of competing theories about our human nature and specifically about the soul.

Of the many excellent features of this volume, two are particularly noteworthy since they illustrate how the author has made reference to and underlined the range of relevant evidence, whether within the domain of biblical studies and theology or of contemporary science, which speak to a deeper understanding of our mysterious human nature including the soul. First, he underlines the need to recognize that Homo sapiens left Africa approximately 70,000 years ago via what is sometimes called the Levantine corridor—a narrow stretch of land adjoining Africa to Eurasia—and landed first in what is now the Near East before expanding to the rest of the world. Views of the soul did not begin with Hebrew and Greek views. They were preceded by the influence of the Babylonians, the Assyrians and the Persians, each of which left a mark and reshaped not only Judaism but also the development of Christianity and hence views of the soul. Second, from a position of firsthand knowledge as a medical researcher over several decades, he reminds the reader that our bodies have in fact been in a continuous process of dematerialization and rematerialization throughout our whole lives! and that the unique body which I have today is not, to be precise, the same one I had ten years ago, and will not be the same one I possess in another ten years. Nevertheless, he concludes that philosophers and scientists are rejoining theologians in the belief that we are more than just the material. There is a seemingly immaterial component—consciousness, both individual as well as universal—which we just cannot yet explain.

Strong claims and counterclaims have been made about the merits of so-called monism and dualism as models of the human person. Janssen offers us a detailed and evenhanded account of the evidence in support of monism and of dualism. On balance, he comes down on the side of monism but throughout, at no point, understates the strength of the dualist case. A view I share and which has led my view to be characterized as dual-aspect monism. For him, as for many of us still working on this topic, the important message is keep an open mind and seek to do full justice to advances both in the relevant sciences and in the fields of biblical scholarship and theology. This is not a book for those who want slick and simplistic answers to profound and difficult questions. It is a book that will guide the thoughtful reader to a deepening understanding of our mysterious human nature.

Preface

I was raised in a Fundamentalist Christian setting which placed a high priority on the words of the Bible—an ancient document—as interpreted through the lens of a sixteenth-century Western worldview (given to us by the Reformation) that underwent a few relatively minor adjustments during the five centuries that followed its appearance on the world stage. This setting and worldview worked just fine for me during the first three decades of my life. However, going to university in pursuit of a career in science, while also being exposed to other entirely new (to me) philosophical and religious ideas, changed everything for me. After descending into an ever-deepening state of agnosticism which occasionally dipped into atheism, I began to look for a Christian faith that might be consistent with modern science and a view of world history that is not biased by certain theological presuppositions. I have detailed that deconstruction and ongoing reconstruction in a self-published book entitled Reaching into Plato’s Cave: Bringing the Bible into the 21 st Century . When I refer to an unbiased view of history, I mean one which accepts at face value the overwhelming evidence of humans arising out of Africa and migrating across the planet over the course of countless millennia, rather than starting with a certain interpretation of Genesis set in the Mesopotamian basin less than ten thousand years ago and then trying to fit around that a carefully selected subtotal of whatever scientific data I could find to be compatible. That alternative paradigm is the focus of a second book—entitled Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: Genesis and Human Origins —which summarizes the scientific data pointing to human descent from other hominid ancestors, and then reexamines Christian theology in light of that.

One of the lessons I learned in researching both books was that we humans have been on a journey stretching out over hundreds of thousands of years to find the Divine. That search had us always looking at the eastern horizon, toward the rising of the sun which seems to have always represented new beginnings and supreme power, and which may have been one of the impulses that drew us out of Africa and into the new lands which stretched out before us. One of the major routes we took was via a narrow stretch of land connecting Africa to Europe: Egypt on the African side, and that which we now call the Middle East on the Eurasian side. Those migrants—our genetic and theological/philosophical ancestors—rested their feet in Mesopotamia for a while as they planned the next stages of our collective journey into Europe and Asia (and then eventually the Americas and Australia). As they did, they continued to look outwardly to understand the divine, as well as inwardly to understand the essential core of our inner being: the human soul. That geographical region—the ancestral lands of Babylon, Egypt, Persia . . . as well as Israel—is precisely where we now find the world’s oldest remains of temples and religious texts: it is the birthplace of human writing, and an incubator of religious thinking.

Coming to this realization opened up for me a whole new perspective on many of the biblical passages which had long been so puzzling or even upsetting for me. This spurred me to dig more deeply into the development of our thinking about the human soul. The central core of this book is a summary of what I learned: how that thinking transformed over the many millennia; how an ancient Near Eastern worldview that dominated the entire region for millennia may have influenced the emerging theology of a man from Babylon named Abram, and his many descendants who eventually gave us Judaism; how that in turn was transformed during the Babylonian captivity and by classical Greek philosophy, eventually becoming Christianized; and finally how Judeo-Christian ideas were challenged severely in their encounters with modern science and the emergence of more critical thinking. All of this is summarized in chapter 2 of this book, and sets the stage for chapter 3 in which I explore modern thinking about the human soul, including the science underlying consciousness, the mind, personality, soul, and spirit (five very different aspects of the human experience).

But much of the content of those two chapters may be foreign, perhaps even threatening, to my primary intended audience: Christians with relatively little training in world history, philosophy, and biblical theology. They may base much of their worldview on the words on the pages of their Bibles, but without an awareness of the contexts of the writing of those biblical texts, nor an appreciation of the roles played by other humans in the writing and interpretation of those texts. Most readers will know that it was not lowered down fully formed out of heaven; but just the same, many will have little or no idea of how we did receive it. They might have vaguely formed mental images of authors sitting at desks, writing specific words that they heard audibly or somehow perceived subconsciously. An informed understanding of this process and journey of spiritual discovery is crucial for a more complete picture of what those words were intended to mean to the original hearers/readers of the biblical narratives, and also their meaning to us in the modern context. So before presenting chapters 2 and 3, I felt the need to set the stage for the reader: to describe how we came to receive the Bible as we now have it. Thus: chapter 1.

Having in this way laid out a full history of the Judeo-Christian understanding of the (immaterial) soul which is intimately tied to our very material bodies, it made sense to explore what happens when we encounter that one inevitability in life: death (I disagree with Benjamin Franklin that taxes are the other experience of which all humans can be certain). It turns out that the Judeo-Christian understanding of the afterlife has also been constantly transforming over the past many millennia. Some might say it has been maturing, or opening like a flower. At any rate, chapter 4 summarizes this part of our theological history as well. Finally, chapter 5 ties many of the ideas together and raises a number of questions regarding how this applies to us in the twenty-first century.

Let me emphasize, the goal of this book is not to give the final authoritative definition of the soul or the afterlife. I leave that to the readers to formulate their own answers for themselves, only now with some additional background material on the table. Instead, I hope to show how our understanding of both has changed tremendously over the past several thousand years, and seemingly in response to the thinking of culture(s) all around us. A secondary goal will be to raise awareness of other viewpoints on these two questions, and to encourage dialogue without confrontation. Related to this, I want to show that a modern understanding of the human mind and soul does not have to be fundamentally different for a Christian compared to a nonbeliever (reader please note: this statement does not apply to our understanding of the human spirit, a completely different matter): in fact, no more different than their respective views on the nature and origin of the physical aspect of our existence. We may have our differences on certain key theological points, but it seems that some Christians too often act as if we must disagree with non-believers on everything, and become alarmed when it is claimed that we can find common ground. When it comes to biological origins, Christians and nonbelievers alike can and should find it possible to explain the appearance of humans using similar natural mechanisms (gradual biological evolution, not an instantaneous shaping of clay). As my Old Testament professor, Dr. Gus Konkel, asked me: Is not evolution simply a somewhat sophisticated way of describing the sculpting of clay or mud? Likewise, Christians and nonbelievers can just as easily use natural mechanisms to explain the origin of the cosmos (big bang cosmology), or how babies are formed (not via knitting needles, as per Psalm 139), or the weather and climate (not the way these are described in Job chapters 37 and 38). And now we can have similar naturalistic explanations for the human soul. All of these statements are testimony to the fact that resorting to natural, physical explanations does not need to jeopardize Christian faith. In fact, I find that reconciling scientific discoveries with a biblical theology presents a much greater God than simply believing he acts only through mystical, magical means. The Book of God’s Word and the Book of God’s Works indeed!

A tremendous amount of the thinking that went into this book was done in the context of taking courses at the McMaster Divinity College, leading to the completion of a master of theological studies degree. In fact, many sections which now appear in this book were first written as essays for some of the courses I took while studying there. I am immensely grateful for the instruction, mentorship, camaraderie, intellectual stimulation, and coffee chats enjoyed with the professors and students there. Special thanks in this respect go to my fellow student Ambrose Thomson and to Drs. Paul Bates, Mark Boda, Paul Evans, Gus Konkel, and Christopher Land. I want to reiterate an acknowledgment I made in my previous book toward all the students and faculty at the McMaster Divinity College—coming from such diverse backgrounds and having so many different faith journeys—for opening up a whole new perspective on Christian belief, for putting up with (and even sometimes responding to) my many outrageous questions in class, and for helping me find a Christian faith which I can now easily hold up side-by-side with my secular vocation in medical research and general interest in all things scientific.

I also benefitted greatly from innumerable discussions with fellow members of the American Scientific Affiliation and its Canadian partner the Canadian Scientific and Christian Affiliation. Presentations made at the annual ASA meetings and the monthly CSCA meetings, as well as a 2017 meeting hosted by the BioLogos Foundation in Houston, Texas, have unfailingly been a source of new ideas, new collegial relationships, and inspiration.

I am greatly indebted to several other individuals for being sounding boards and discussion partners as I explored this subject and bounced ideas off their well-read and critically-thinking minds: Scott Dyer, Paul Almas, Rev. Steve Baldry, and my siblings, Allan Janssen and Margot Casuccio. Scott, Steve, and Allan in particular were an immense help in reading drafts of this monograph and providing critical feedback from the point of view of a nonexpert (the intended target audience for this book). Likewise, Dr. Konkel read the final draft and provided feedback as an expert scholar of the Old Testament and ancient Near East, while Dr. Ken Post played the same role as a scholar of theology and philosophy.

Many of the ideas in this book were also tested in a blog post forum that I maintain at https://lukejjanssen.wordpress.com/. A large number of people dialogued with me there—some friendly, others not so much—and gave me much food for thought. They are too many to name, and perhaps several would not wish to be named. But I thank them just the same.

Finally, and most importantly, I want to thank my wife, Miriam, for indulging my new hobby and vocation, listening to my thoughts, reading my writings, and invariably providing new perspectives and insights into what I’m saying or how I say it. It was in fact she who proposed the title for this book, after I had spent weeks casting around with a number of lesser alternatives. She is indeed the iron which sharpens me.

chapter 1

Introduction

In ancient Egyptian mythology dating back to the middle of the third millennium BCE, the soul of the dead would be weighed in a balance against the feather of Ma’at: the person’s eternal destiny would be determined by that weighing. Well over a millennium later, Job would plead, Let God weigh me in honest scales and he will know that I am blameless (Job 31 : 6 ). A millennium or two later yet, Roman Catholicism developed a tradition of Michael the Archangel weighing human souls in a balance on the judgment day (see cover). Fast-forward yet another millennium, we find a twentieth-century physician in Massachusetts placing dying patients on weigh scales in an attempt to determine the mass of their soul at the moment of death. We will revisit all four stories in later chapters of this book, but they are juxtaposed here to highlight a recurring theme: our fascination with defining the human soul.

Human origins (anthropogony) and human existence (ontology) have been subjects of particular interest across all societies in all periods of history. This has been especially true for theists. In the fourth century, St. Augustine prayed: What then am I, my God? What is my nature?¹ Millennia before him, the psalmist wrote: What is man that you are mindful of him? (Ps 8:4). Long predating both, the mythical hero Gilgamesh intrigued ancient Babylonians with his story of embarking upon a quest to discover the secret to immortality and the afterlife. Today, through our intellectual and scientific sophistication, we continue to cultivate an interest in this subject of human existence. Hollywood has long fueled this discussion with movies that explore aspects of human origins, of the core essence of what it means to be human, and of immortality (2001: A Space Odyssey; Contact; Prometheus; Ex Machina; Transcendence; Blade Runner; Her; The Discovery; I, Robot). Needless to say, innumerable books have been written on this subject. Is there a ghost in the machine, or are we just molecules bouncing around? This is very much an important question that literally strikes at the heart of our existence.

My primary goal in this book will not be to give a final definition, description, or explanation about our inner being or the afterlife, but rather to show how Christianity arrived at the position(s) that we now find ourselves to hold: to trace a journey which has been unfolding over thousands of years. And in the process of traversing this path, how we constantly borrowed ideas and theories from others around us, and were influenced by our cultural, philosophical, and even religious environments. Christians may claim to derive their understanding on these questions from the Bible. Any readers who pause over the words claim to derive here might ask themselves how much time they actually invest in studying the Bible to explore these questions for themselves, versus how much of their understanding is merely parroted from hearing what others have to say about the matter (their religious leaders and/or fellow believers, who in turn are parroting what they have heard from yet others, and so on). Rather than beginning a sentence with The Bible says . . . , they might want to consider substituting that with My pastor says . . . , or My parents taught me . . . , recognizing that the latter in turn have likely simply heard the same from yet others before them.

Furthermore, irrespective of the extent to which readers consult the Bible for their understanding, many believers do not fully understand the origins of Scripture itself, nor appreciate the extent to which various Christian traditions have derived widely different interpretations of those writings.

For these reasons, it will be illuminating to explore briefly in this opening chapter three key points: (1) the cultural influences which constantly acted on the unfolding and evolution of Judeo-Christian thinking; (2) the authorship of religious texts; and (3) the process by which the Bible came to be. For some, coming to understand those three points in detail for the first time can be quite disorienting; it may lead them to have doubts about Scripture. Those who come to that inner conflict should learn to distinguish between what is actually written in the Bible and what they were led to believe is written in the Bible (by well-meaning pastors, parents, teachers, peers, and others), and should also seek to learn how certain concepts were understood very differently in a cultural context completely different from our own. It is often said that those of us in twenty-first-century Western society would do well to remember that the Bible was written for us, but not to us.²

Cultural Context in Which Judeo-Christian Thinking Took Shape

Many Christian and Jewish scholars accept that Abraham—the ancestral patriarch of the nation of Israel, and the spiritual father of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity—lived sometime around the beginning of the second millennium BCE. (Estimates for dates such as this one vary markedly among scholars: being more specific does not advance my argument any further and only creates a red herring to dispute over. I hope the reader will indulge imprecise statements such as this one in which relative timeline comparisons are being made.) Those scholars would further agree that the bulk of the texts upon which Judaism and Christianity are founded were written by Abraham’s descendants during the next fifteen hundred years, a period which includes Israel leaving captivity in Egypt to become an independent nation (approximately the middle of the second millennium BCE), establishing her own monarchy and temple-centered religion (approximately the turn of the first millennium BCE), having her political and religious systems being utterly destroyed by the neo-Babylonian empire (approximately the middle of the first millennium BCE), and the reestablishment of a new national identity and religious system during a rapid succession of global superpower empires. We will see below how those empires (neo-Babylonian, Assyrian, Persian, Greek, and Roman) and several later ideological forces left their mark on the reshaping of Judaism and the development of Christianity. However, even the earliest Hebrew writers, and Abraham himself, did not live in an ideological vacuum. Long before them, the Near East was already dominated politically, culturally, and intellectually by several other civilizations, and it was saturated with their religious ideas. With this thumbnail sketch of the history of the ancient Near East, we will now look more closely at the political and religious incubator which produced Judeo-Christian thinking.

It is important to recognize that Homo sapiens left Africa approximately seventy thousand years ago via the Levantine corridor—the narrow stretch of land which joins Africa to Eurasia—and landed in what is now called the Near East before expanding throughout the rest of the world. We now have overwhelming evidence of our ancient African origin and those human migrations (including other launching points further down the eastern coast of Africa), which will not be presented here; many other sources are available for that information,³ and I have reviewed it extensively in a previous book which also explores the impact of this new information on Christian theology.⁴ This makes the relatively small patch of land that we now call the Near East or the Middle East one of the oldest incubators of modern human philosophical and theological thinking. Over the course of dozens of millennia, as humans entered and passed through that narrow stretch of land between Africa and the rest of the world, they began to generate various mythologies, cosmogonies (theories describing the origin of the universe), anthropogonies (theories describing the origin of humans), and ontologies (theories about existence, and what it means to be human), borrowing ideas from others that they encountered in their wanderings and social interactions and passing the net product on to subsequent generations.

Eventually, certain people groups founded large cities in the Mesopotamian basin, which grew to dominate the entire region around them, including the people of Sumer (Sumerian civilization) in the late fifth millennium BCE, Egypt in the fourth millennium BCE, and the people of Akkad (Akkadian civilization) in the third millennium BCE.⁵ Many biblical scholars accept that the first eleven chapters of Genesis bear a striking resemblance to mythological ideas held by those surrounding ancient Near Eastern civilizations for millennia before those Hebrew chapters were written. Those civilizations (and Genesis) share in common the belief that the cosmos began as a primordial watery mass out of which the land was separated, and that humans were created from some form of dirt.⁶ At the twelfth chapter of Genesis and onward, however, many scholars see actual Jewish history, beginning with the introduction of Israel’s patriarch, a Babylonian named Abram. Even if this is true, the surrounding superpowers of that ancient Near Eastern world had been developing their mythologies, theologies, and philosophies for several millennia before Abram appeared on the scene.

The Torah tells us that Abram was thoroughly Mesopotamian in his origin and upbringing: he came from Ur of the Chaldeans (Gen 11:31), and his family originally worshiped other gods (Josh 24:2) and had a corresponding Mesopotamian mythology. Abram’s family would have been very familiar with that mythology: for example, we have evidence that, at a later period, the Babylonian mythological Epic of Creation (Enuma Elish) was recited, and possibly enacted, on the fourth day of every New Year festival.⁷ Abram took his immediate family on a long journey from Ur to Canaan. At one point along the way, one of Abram’s clan is said to have taken her family idols with her (Gen 31:19, 34); it seems that others also kept their gods, since much later in their story, Jacob said to his household and to all who were with him, ‘Get rid of the foreign gods you have with you’ (Gen 35:2). Although those gods were eventually discarded, it is impossible to ascertain to what extent the Mesopotamian zeitgeist was passed on through the successive generations of children raised by the mothers who sang to their babies the lullabies they themselves learned when they were young: we know of no proscriptions against them doing so, and we have no reason to think that they suddenly stopped singing those lullabies or repeating those stories. We are never told that YHWH revealed to Abram/Abraham an entirely new cosmogony and anthropogony distinct from that of the Babylonians.

In fact, we also do not know when or how YHWH might have revealed a wholly different theology to Abram, and it is possible that Abram and his descendants were still working that out while journeying to the promised land of Canaan. For example, Abraham (his name had now been changed; Gen 17:5) told Abimelech that "elohim caused him to wander from his homeland (Gen 20:13). Elohim is a plural noun which is often used in the Old Testament (well over two thousand times). When scholars find this plural noun followed by a verb in the singular form, they routinely translate it as God"; when it is followed by a verb in the plural form, it is taken to refer to the gods of other nations (Exod 12:12; 1 Kgs 11:33), to angels (Ps 8:5), and to the spirit brought forth to King Saul by the medium at Endor (1 Sam 28:13). Except in this singular occurrence of the conversation between Abraham and Abimelech. Abraham referred