Marcus J. Borg, an American New Testament scholar and theologian, in his last book ponders the strange absence of the afterlife in the Jewish Bible: 

‘In the Old Testament, which is more than two-thirds of the Christian Bible, belief in an afterlife is basically absent. Not until the final chapter of its last book to be written (Daniel, around 165 BCE) is there an unambiguously clear reference to a blessed afterlife.  And even there, it’s not about eternal punishment of the wicked and rewards for believers, but specially about the resurrection of the martyrs – of Jews who were killed because of their loyalty to God by the power that ruled their world.’

‘In all the centuries before that, the great figures of the Old Testament – Abraham and Sarah and their descendants, Moses in the time of the exodus from Egypt, the prophets in the time of the…