"Resurrection of the Dead" - Part 3 - The Sleeping Dead

We ended the last article with Matthew 22:32 in which Jesus suggested that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are not dead because the Divine is not a God of the dead. How do we explain this statement? There are several possibilities.In this article we will look at one of them: Jesus may see death as a form of sleep. This idea is important in future articles about “resurrection.”

In Jesus’s era, there was a close tie between sleep and death.As we said in the first article, the Greek word Jesus uses for death is thanatos, and Thanatos was a Greek god of the dead, a personification of death. Who was Thanatos’s brother? Hypnos, the Greek god of sleep. His name means “sleep” just as Thanatos’s means “death.” Jesus uses a verb from the root of this word, hynos, that means “wake from sleep.” More about that word below.

None of the verses connecting sleep and death use the nouns discussed in the earlier articles in this series. This fact itself is interesting and may tell us something about Jesus’s view of both sleep and death. We examine this idea at the conclusion of this article.

Jairus’s Daughter

Let us start the topic of the sleeping dead with what Jesus says about a girl who everyone else thinks has died: Matthew 9:24:

KJV: Give place: for the maid is not dead, but sleepeth.
NIV: Go away. The girl is not dead but asleep.
Listeners Heard: Get back because she didn't pass away, this little girl. Instead she sleeps.

The two other versions of this verse, Mark 5:39 and Luke 8:52  both use the same verbs for “dead” and “sleep/asleep.” Though we can’t tell from its English translation, this “dead” and “pass away” is not the noun,  nekros, discussed in the previous two articles. Some English versions are a mistranslation of a verb into a noun. This Greek verb is apothnesko (ἀπέθανεν ). It is usually translated as “to die,” “to pass away,” or “to die away.” Its root is another Greek word that also means “to die” and “to be dead.” The prefix added to the root “to die” means “away from.” The compound verb that Jesus uses has a clear sense of separation and motion, going from one place to another. This is why I prefer the “pass away” translation.

In this verse, the verb translated as “asleep” is the common verb for sleep, katheudo (καθεύδει), Jesus uses the verb a dozen times, whenever he talk about sleep. He never uses the noun for sleep.

Of course, in the case of Jairus’s daughter, Jesus’s diagnosis could be correct. Perhaps the girl was still alive but had such daint life signs that the people of the era could not detect them. It is important to note that the verb he uses in this verse is different than the verb for sleep in the next verse.

Lazarus

Unlike the story of Jairus’s daughter, which appears in all three synoptic gospels, the story of the resurrection of Lazarus only appears in John. In its verses, the connection between sleep and death is clear-cut. The two relevant verses are John 11:11 and John 11:14. We use only the NIV translation here because the KJV Greek verse has an ending that isn’t part of the current Greek source.

NIV: Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep; but I am going there to wake him up.
NIV:  Lazarus is dead.
Listeners Heard: Lazarus, that friend of ours, has fallen asleep. Instead, I do [this[ in order that I might awaken him.
Listeners Heard: Lazarus passed away.

John 11:11 has two words referring to sleep that Jesus only uses in this verse. Jesus often uses uncommon words to create a play on words, which is the case here. These words were chosen for their very specific meanings.

The verb translated as “has fallen asleep” is koimao (κεκοίμηται,). It also has the sense of “sleeping the sleep of death, which the word in Matthew 9:24 doesn’t have. Choosing this verb, Jesus was saying Lazarus had died, but his followers did not understand.

The verb he uses for “awaken” is another word that Jesus only uses this once. It is exypnizo, (ἐξυπνίσω) "I may wake" is from exypnizo, which means "awaken from sleep." The root of this word is hypnos, the name of the Greek god of sleep. Like koimao , exypnizo is not the common word that Jesus uses for “awake.” The common word that he uses to refer to “awaken” is the word he uses in phrases we translated as “raising” the dead. Usiing a different word indicate that what he is doing with Lazarus is different from the different form of “awakening.” This word is a play on the verb “fallen asleep,”

Conclusions

Jesus connects “sleep” and “death” together in only six verses and three of those are parallels in the synoptic Gospels. This is too small a sample to make any definite statements about his meaning, especially since he uses keywords we don’t see anywhere else, but what see here is intriguing.

As I said earlier, all these verses use verbs. None of them use nouns. In these versions, Jesus is casting both sleep and death as activities, not states of being. Indeed, Jesus never uses the noun for sleep, hypnos, or any noun meaning “sleep” anywhere in the Gospels. He always describes it in verb form. The odd thing in these verses is that Jesus always describes death with a verb as well. This is odd because he usually uses nouns. The verb he uses for death is interesting because it implies movement. He never uses the simpler verb that means “to die” which is a more static form of death. What does this mean?

Perhaps we will learn more in the next article where we begin to look at how Jesus describes people as “awakening” from death.