Reward and Punishment

The belief that Divine justice will reward the righteous and punish the wicked. In the Pentateuch, God appears as a moral being and Justice is an integral part of morality (see Ethics); it follows that God acts justly in the world. As a universal principle, justice pertains to all entities, to the individual as well as to the nation. God's governance of the world in accordance with justice is called Providence.

As part of their Covenant with God, the Jewish people as a nation is promised material wealth and prosperity for obedience and is threatened with various punishments (including exile) for disobedience (Deut. 11:13-21). This is emphasized in great detail in the Blessings and Curses passages in the Bible (Lev. 23; Deut. 28).

Promises of rewards for observing individual Commandments are generally found in connection with positive precepts which call for the exercise of benevolence and charity. These rewards are described in terms of long life and material blessing (Ex. 20:12; Deut. 15:10).

Already the books of the Prophets and the Wisdom Literature contain critical reflections upon the principle of Reward and Punishment. Jeremiah asks, "Why does the way of the wicked prosper?" (12:1) and Habakkuk says, "How long O Lord shall I cry out and You not listen, shall I shout to You 'Violence' and You not save?... therefore the law fails and justice never emerges ... For the wicked do beset the righteous, therefore judgment emerges perverted" (1:2-4). The problem is raised in Ecclesiastes and Psalms (37, 49, 73), and receives its most comprehensive and dramatic treatment in the Book of Job. This problem, called "theodicy" (justifying the acts of God), surfaces when experience is seen to conflict with what man expects on the basis of the principle of Divine Reward and Punishment. If the righteous suffer instead of being rewarded, the moral sense is outraged, as happens also if the wicked go unpunished and are free to oppress the innocent. The prosperity of the wicked offends. One biblical response is to say that the success of the wicked is only temporary. "When the wicked spring up as grass and when all the workers of iniquity do flourish, it is that they may be destroyed forever" (Ps. 92:6).

To the question why Israel's punishment seems to be more severe than that meted out to other nations, Amos replies, "You alone have I known of all the families of the earth; therefore I will visit upon you all your iniquities" (3:2), i.e., precisely because of God's special relation to Israel more is expected of it. At the same time, while other nations may have been utterly destroyed for their sins, the eternal existence of Israel is assured (Jer. 31:34).

For those who interpret the "suffering servant" of Isaiah (53) as referring to Israel, another meaning emerges for the suffering of Israel. It is not punishment for their sins but rather atonement for the sins of others. The justness of such vicarious suffering remains unexplained in the Bible.

Job, as well as other parts of the Bible (Gen. 22:1; Ex. 16:4; Deut. 8:2), introduces the concept of nissayon ("test" or "trial"). Suffering need not be a punishment but a means by which God "tests" the faith or character of the individual for his ultimate benefit.

In the last chapters of Job (where God appears to Job out of the whirlwind), Job is humbled before the awesome power of God in nature (38-41). His own egocentric concerns are dwarfed in comparison to the magnitude of the universe (40:3-5). Man cannot comprehend the Divine plan.

Rabbinic Literature In principle, the talmudic sages affirmed the biblical concept of Reward and Punishment, but in certain crucial areas developed the concept in new directions. While there are some allusions in the Bible to life after death (see Soul, Immortality of), nowhere is an explicit connection made between it and the principle of Reward and Punishment. The rabbis concluded that the decisive arena for the Reward and Punishment of the individual is in some more permanent existence after death (see Afterlife). R. Jacob said, "This world is like an antechamber to the world to come; prepare yourself in the antechamber so that you may enter into the hall" [i.e., the bliss of the World to Come is incomparable to anything experienced in this world] (Avot 4:21, 22).

Two considerations led the rabbis to this conclusion. The first was the empirical evidence that the promise in the Bible of material reward for the performance of particular commandments by the individual was not being fulfilled in this world. The rabbis observed: "There is no reward in this world for the fulfillment of commandments" (Ḥul. 142a), and that the biblical promise, "that your days may be prolonged" (Ex. 20:12), may refer to the eternal existence of the spirit after the death of the body. Reward for fulfilling the precepts is not necessarily accorded in this world. The dominant rabbinic view remained that both this world and the World to Come were theaters for the Providential application of the principle of Reward and Punishment for every individual in various complicated permutations.

This concept of a "two-stage" human existence helped to alleviate the problem of "the righteous who suffer and the wicked who prosper." The rabbis also cultivated the idea of "afflictions of love" (Ber. 5a), i.e., that suffering may not be a punishment but a test and an opportunity for spiritual growth (Gen. R. 32:3). While the rabbis thought of various possible explanations for the suffering of the righteous, R. Yannai concluded: "It is not in our power to explain either the prosperity of the wicked and certainly not the afflictions of the righteous" (Avot 4:19).

Another factor which led the rabbis to develop the notion of the World to Come as the ultimate theater for individual Reward and Punishment was the realization that material reward is not a proper motivation for the worship of God: "Be not like servants serving a master for the sake of reward but like servants serving a master without thought of reward, and fear God" (Avot 1:3).

Another idea developed by the rabbis is Resurrection of the dead, which, according to one view in the Talmud (Ta'an. 7a), will be granted only to the righteous. Ultimate Reward and Punishment should be visited upon the unity of body and soul (Sanh. 91a-b; but see Lev. R. 4.5 for an opposite view).

In their speculations about the nature of the ultimate Reward and Punishment, the rabbis spoke of gan eden (Garden of Eden) as the "place" of reward and gehinnom as the "place" of punishment (Pes. 54a; Er. 19a). The duration of the punishment for sins is given as 12 months. However, for the unrepentant wicked, some stipulate eternal punishment (RH 16b), described in physical terms as fire, while the happiness of ultimate reward is described as a wonderful banquet (Ber. 34b). Some of the rabbis clearly understood these teachings as purely symbolic (AZ 3b; Ber. 34b).

In Medieval Jewish Thought The medieval Jewish theologians who attempted to recast biblical and rabbinic thought into a coherent whole were compelled to treat the pivotal issue of Reward and Punishment. This was difficult in view of the non-philosophic character of the biblical material, on the one hand, and the variety of conflicting opinions in the rabbinic tradition, on the other.

The crucial issue on which these thinkers were divided was whether justice and reason require that the body and soul as a unity or the soul alone be the recipient of the ultimate Reward and Punishment. Accepting the former as the case, Saadiah Gaon, for example, outlines a system in which, after death, the souls of the righteous and the wicked are kept in separate "places" until the major eschatological event, the resurrection of the dead. This will take place after the Redemption and the coming of the Messiah, which, for Saadiah, are merely preliminary to sorting out the truly righteous and wicked of the Jewish people. Once the body and soul are reunited, judgment will take place, after which a single Divinely revealed substance will constitute "light" for the righteous and "fire" for the punishment of the wicked. Thus will commence the World to Come, consisting of a radically transformed, highly spiritualized "new heaven and new earth" in which the righteous, after being purified of their few sins, will enjoy eternal happiness and the unrepentant wicked will suffer eternal punishment. A similar approach was taken by Naḥmanides.

Maimonides, however, followed a different course. His starting point was that the essence of man is his reason and that only the rational soul has a capacity for immortality. The ultimate "reward" for the individual, which is identical with human self-fulfillment, is a totally spiritual existence in the presence of God which the righteous attain immediately after death. This is what is known as "the World to Come." The ultimate punishment is the failure of the wicked to attain immortality and thus simply perish in total extinction. Unrelated to these metaphysical events is the Messianic Age, which takes place on the historical plane and signifies a natural, non-miraculous arena for the reward and punishment of the nations and the establishment of the Kingdom of God.

For Maimonides as well as for others like Albo, there is nothing in this theory of Reward and Punishment which logically necessitates the doctrine of Resurrection of the Dead. It is, however, included by both of them on traditional grounds. Resurrection, according to Maimonides, will occur sometime after the advent of the Messiah in order for the righteous to further perfect themselves, or in order to provide just compensation for some of the righteous who might have suffered in a particularly cruel manner in times when the forces of evil seemed triumphant. After living a full life in the Messianic Age, those resurrected will die a natural death and resume their eternal spiritual existence in the World to Come.

Isaac Abravanel perceived the Resurrection as designed to help bring about the Messianic Age, for it would constitute the single most overwhelming, incontrovertible "wonder" and have the immediate effect of winning over the people of the world to accepting God's sovereignty.

Albo tries to answer the question of why the Bible itself did not fully and explicitly expound the doctrine of spiritual reward and punishment in a hereafter. The Pentateuch, he says, delineates essentially the constitution of the Jewish people or the history and provisions of the covenant between God and the nation called Israel. In reference to a people as a whole, which lives its collective life in history, reward and punishment can only be couched in material terms: prosperity, military victory, drought, defeat, exile. There is no such thing as a spiritual hereafter for the nation as such. Hence the Bible, in addressing itself to the destiny of Israel the nation, is silent on the subject of the spiritual salvation of the individual.

In discussing the need for otherworldly rewards, Saadiah makes some modern-sounding existential observations. We find, he says, that even people who reach the highest positions in life still suffer from insecurity and yearn for something higher and better. The experiences of this life with all its pleasures are simply not satisfying and not sufficient. A just God must therefore have provided for those deserving an "untroubled existence and pure happiness."

Almost all of the medieval thinkers, at least to some extent, subscribed to a doctrine of natural rewards and punishments. Already, the rabbis taught: "The reward of a mitsvah is the mitsvah" [i.e., the positive effect of the commandment itself upon the doer] (Avot 4:2). Reward and Punishment can be seen not as some extraneous condition imposed by a judge to induce compliance or deter violations, but as a natural and inevitable outgrowth of the actual deeds themselves. Similar views were propounded by Maimonides, Naḥmanides, and Albo.

Modern Thought The principle of Reward and Punishment, together with the concept of Divine Providence, has come under intense scrutiny in the wake of the Holocaust and the establishment of the State of Israel. The rise of the State of Israel, with the return of Jewish sovereignty in the land, has led many Orthodox Jews to see these events as the "beginning of Redemption" and the fulfillment of biblical prophecy. For reactions to the Holocaust, see Holocaust: Religious Responses among Victims and Subsequent Religious Thinking.

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