The Bible generally speaks of man as a psychosomatic unit, yet it is man's "breath of life" (nishmat ḥayyim; Gen. 2:7), in contrast to his body, which is described as emanating directly from God and which is apparently the element in man that represents "God's image" (Gen. 1:27). Words such as nefesh, ru'aḥ, and neshamah, usually translated as "soul" or "spirit," are seldom used in the Bible to refer to any disembodied or separably "spiritual" part of man. Generally, these terms designate the life or the personality of the individual. The later books, however, contain passages which may be understood as referring to the spirit or soul apart from the body: "Yet the soul of my Lord shall be bound up in the bundle of life with the Lord your God ..." (I Sam. 25:29) or: "All go unto one place; all are of the dust and return to the dust. Who knows if the spirit of man goes upward and if the spirit of the beast goes downward to the earth?" (Eccl. 4:20, 21).
For the talmudic sages, the soul of man is clearly separable from the body. Thus, they draw an analogy between God's relationship to the world and the soul's relationship to the body: "Five times did David say, 'Bless the Lord, O my soul.' He said this in reference to God and in reference to the soul. Just as God fills the entire world, so does the soul fill the entire body. Just as God sees but cannot be seen, so the soul sees but cannot be seen. Just as God nourishes the entire world, so does the soul nourish the body. Just as God is pure, so is the soul pure ... Therefore, let the soul which possesses the five attributes come and praise Him to whom these attributes belong" (Ber. 10a). Another version reads: "The soul outlasts the body and God outlasts the world" (Lev. R. 4:8). This conception is recited in the morning liturgy in a prayer already found in the Talmud: "My God, the soul which You gave me is pure. You did create it. You did form it. You did breathe it into me. You preserve it within and You will take it from me, but will restore it to me hereafter ... Blessed are You, O Lord, Who restores souls unto the dead."
The Sadducees denied the immortality of the soul, debating the matter with the Pharisees. According to the rabbis, the soul is the vital element in man, "given" to him by God and constituting man's connection with Him. It is to be identified, in some sense, with the individual "self" of the person and seems to be capable of "existing" before and after its embodiment. By acknowledging that the soul as received is "pure," the worshiper assumes responsibility for the moral struggle and its outcome and admits that it is the task of man to surrender unto God, at the end of each day and certainly at the end of his life, a soul untainted and uncorrupted by its contacts with evil.
Beyond this, the rabbis did not develop any psychological theory which might explain the relationship between the soul and the introspectively discernible elements of consciousness such as mind, emotions, memory, will, reason. The medieval Jewish philosophers attempted to combine the essential rabbinic teachings regarding the human soul with an amalgam of Neoplatonic, Aristotelian, and Muslim concepts which was the accepted wisdom of the period. The different emphases of the biblical and rabbinic treatment of the soul had an analogue in Greek philosophy, in the different approaches of Plato and Aristotle. In the Platonic view, the soul is a distinct entity coming into the body from a different, "spiritual" world and acting on the body by using it as its instrument. According to the Aristotelians, the human is a unitary being whose activity is psycho-physical. In their terminology, all reality consists of matter and form, where "form" is to be understood as that by virtue of which the thing is what it is rather than some other thing: In the case of the human being, the soul is the form of the material body. But since according to this view, individual forms have no separate existence and perish with the dissolution of the matter, it follows that the soul-form of the human being likewise ceases to exist with the death of the body.
For Saadiah Gaon, the soul is created together with the body. It is separated from the body after death but they are reunited for eventual reward or punishment. Maimonides, who generally follows Aristotle, was able to reconcile his philosophy with the theological requirements of Judaism. The soul is essentially one, says Maimonides, but expresses itself in five different activities or through five different faculties: nutritive, sensitive, imaginative, emotional, and rational. While the first four aspects of the soul do indeed perish with the death of the body, each person has the opportunity to achieve immortality by developing his rational faculty, which is initially only a potentiality, into a fully actualized, perfected entity which becomes permanent and indestructible. This developmental notion of the soul helps to pinpoint the centrality of human freedom of choice and connects the ultimate reward (immortality of the soul with God) and punishment (complete extinction) of the individual to his own actions. However, the views of Judah Halevi and Ḥasdai Crescas appear closer to the entire thrust of Judaism by teaching that the development of the soul towards immortality, which is communion with God, depends primarily not on intellectual activity and the attainment of knowledge (the rational faculty) but on moral actions and the love of God.
The Bible itself contains various hints of belief in an Afterlife (II Kings 2; Prov. 12:28; Dan. 12:2), but it has no clear conception of immortality linked to human destiny and Divine justice. In the words of the Bible scholar Yeḥezkel Kaufmann, "It is not the belief in immortality that came later but the breakthrough of the soul to God from the realm of death." As the national document of a people and its covenant with God, the Bible concentrated on this-worldly rewards and punishments, such as peace and prosperity or destruction and dispersion, which apply to the nation, rather than immortality of the soul, which applies to the individual only (Albo).
In the eschatological teachings of the Talmud, a number of different terms refer to the ultimate Redemption. Those like yemot ha-mashi'aḥ (the days of the Messiah) or the ketz (the end) relate to the historic level and refer to the role of the nation, Israel, in the establishment of the Kingdom of Heaven on earth. Terms such as Olam ha-Ba (World to Come) or teḥiyyat ha-metim (Resurrection of the dead) refer primarily to the problem of theodicy, Divine justice, and individual destiny and salvation. Thus, for the rabbis, the World to Come signifies that totally spiritual existence to which the deserving soul ascends after physical death and in which "there is no eating or drinking... but where the righteous sit and enjoy the splendor of the Divine Presence" (Ber. 17a). The place of the righteous after death is also called Gan Eden (Garden of Eden) and the place where the wicked are punished is Gehinnom.
Belief in the physical resurrection of the righteous at some time in the future was considered by the rabbis in the Talmud to be a basic principle of the Jewish faith and was prominently enshrined in the liturgy. While Maimonides included resurrection of the dead as one of his 13 Principles of Faith, he maintained that the righteous who will be resurrected will live a full life and then die a natural death. In his view, the ultimate destiny of the deserving human being is communion with God in a spiritual World to Come.
The concept of resurrection of the dead seems to have been occasioned by the original biblical notion that man is in essence this psychosomatic unity of body and soul, mind and matter, spiritual and physical. Thus, if man lived, sinned, and registered achievements as a psychosomatic entity, justice would seem to require that he be accordingly rewarded and punished (Sanh. 91). The eschatological view developed by Naḥmanides followed along these lines (Sha'ar ha-Gemul).
Many modern Jewish thinkers have stressed the doctrine of the immortality of the soul rather than the resurrection of the dead, although both continue to be fundamental for Orthodox Jews. The Reform Pittsburgh Platform (1885) stated: "We reassert the doctrine of Judaism that the soul of man is immortal, grounding this belief on the Divine nature of the human spirit, which forever finds bliss in righteousness and misery in wickedness. We reject as ideas not rooted on Judaism the belief both in bodily resurrection and in Gehenna and Eden (hell and paradise) as abodes for eternal punishment or rewards."
