Note 150 — Chapter XI · THE JEWISH PROPAGANDA

Ben Sira knows of no life after death except Sheol. Perhaps it is better to say that he refuses to acknowledge any. His repeated affirmations have the air of consciously repudiating a doctrine advanced by others. The author of Wisdom (iii. 4) is sure of an immortality of the elect. It is in the apocryphal literature generally, in Enoch, the Testaments of the Patriarchs—most of them written in the first century B.C.E.—that the scattered and contradictory references to a future life are to be found.