Paul in their anthropologies, in spite of many significant differences between them, leads me to think that such platonizing notions of the human being were commonplacealthough not necessarily universalamong Greek-speaking Jews. Certainly, such concepts of the human being became common among the Fathers of the church, who promulgated such metaphors for the body as "prison, tomb, fetters, vestment, ugly mask, garment of skin, dwelling place" of the soul (Spidlík 1986, 111; Dodds 1965, 30).
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Rabbinic Judaism, in contrast, defined the human being as an animated body and not as a soul trapped or even housed or clothed in a body.
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Alon Goshen-Gottstein has brilliantly articulated this difference:
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 | | Rabbinic anthropology differs in this respect from Hellenistic [including Hellenistic Jewish], and laterChristiananthropology. The distinction between soul and body may be seen as a soft distinction rather than a hard one.
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There is much talk of soul and body in the rabbinic sources. There is also a recognition of their different qualities. However, there is not a fundamental metaphysical opposition between these two aspects. There may be an existential confrontation, but metaphysically soul and body form a whole, rather than a polarity. Crudely putthe soul is like a battery that operates an electronic gadget. It may be
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(footnote continued from the previous page)
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| | of humanity was for the purpose of bringing God into the material world, thus uniting the world with God, but they, nevertheless, considered sexuality as temporary and a sign of "man's" fallenness. Bynum (1991) is a very important discussion of these questions from a different point of view. Although her focus is on the medieval period, her discussion raises the question of whether the "platonic" ideology of the person as soul was ever fully accepted in Christian culture.
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| | 4. See Robinson (1952, 14) for very similar formulations regarding biblical Judaism. Rubin (1989) is a very useful collection of "anthropological" rabbinic texts from various periods. Although Rubin describes a shift from a fully monistic conception of the person to a "moderate dualism," there is still nearly nothing that bespeaks an understanding of the human being as a soul trapped or imprisoned in a body or of the task of the soul to liberate itself from the body, as we see in Philo and Origen, as well as several of the Church Fathers.
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| | In any case, Rabbi Meir's famous dictum in the Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 90b, "If a grain of wheat, which is buried naked, sprouteth forth in many robes, how much more so the righteous, who are buried in their raiment," is totally irrelevant. Rabbi Meir is arguing that the righteous will be resurrected with clothes onliterally, not figuratively! Indeed, if R. Meir is using a traditional figure of speech, the very reversal of its meaning from a dualistic, philosophical to a concrete mythological valence is a further demonstration of my point in this chapter and the entire work.
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| | It should be pointed out here that Urbach (1975, 248) argued for a historical shift from the period of the tannaim to that of the amoraim, with the latter more dualist in its understanding of soul and body. See also Stiegman (1977, 51012).
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| | 5. For "soft" dualism in modern thought, see Swinburne (1986, 298312).
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