The Prophets Begin to See Through

"Your dead will come back to life; your corpses will rise up. Wake up and shout joyfully, you who live in the ground! For you will grow like plants drenched with the morning dew, and the earth will bring forth its dead spirits." — Isaiah 26:19 (NET)

This is one of the earliest explicit statements of bodily resurrection in the Hebrew Bible. This is not metaphor for national restoration, though Isaiah uses such metaphors elsewhere. This is a direct promise of the dead being raised.

Ezekiel 37 — the valley of dry bones — is primarily a vision of national restoration for Israel, but it draws on the category of resurrection as the image that carries the promise. The reason that image works is that bodily resurrection was already a real theological category in the world Ezekiel was writing in. You cannot use an image as a metaphor if the literal thing the image depicts is not already present in your audience's understanding.

"Many of those who sleep in the dusty ground will awake – some to everlasting life, and others to shame and everlasting abhorrence." — Daniel 12:2 (NET)

Two outcomes. A divided destination. The map is becoming specific. And significantly, the division is not between those who were in one compartment of Sheol versus another. The division at resurrection is between those who wake to everlasting life and those who wake to shame and abhorrence. What happened to them in Sheol before the resurrection is not described. What happens to them after the resurrection is.

This canonical progression is not contradiction. It is revelation unfolding. The Spirit is teaching the covenant people, through their own suffering and worship and prophetic encounter with God, what lies on the other side of the boundary of death. The picture gets more detailed as the canon advances. By the time the last Old Testament books are written, the broad outlines of what the New Testament will assume are already visible: Sheol holds the dead, there are different conditions within it, something called resurrection lies ahead, and the outcomes of that resurrection are differentiated.