Death in the Bible Encyclopedia - ISBE

(maweth; thanatos): PHYSIOLOGICAL AND FIGURATIVE VIEW The word "Death" is used in the sense of (1) the process of dying (Gen 21:16); (2) the period of decease (Gen 27:7); (3) as a possible synonym for poison (2 Ki 4:40); (4) as descriptive of person in danger of perishing (Jdg 15:18; "in deaths oft" 2 Cor 11:23). In this sense the shadow of death is a familiar expression in Job, the Psalms and the Prophets; (5) death is personified in 1 Cor 15:55 and Rev 20:14. Deliverance from this catastrophe is called the "issues from death" (Ps 68:20 the King James Version; translated "escape" in the Revised Version (British and American)). Judicial execution, "putting to death," is mentioned 39 times in the Levitical Law. Figuratively: Death is the loss of spiritual life as in Rom 8:6; and the final state of the unregenerate is called the "second death" in Rev 20:14. Alex. Macalister THEOLOGICAL VIEW 1. Conception of Sin and Death: According to Gen 2:17, God gave to man, created in His own image, the command not to eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and added thereto the warning, "in the day that thou eatest thereof, thou shalt surely die." Though not exclusively, reference is certainly made here in the first place to bodily death. Yet because death by no means came upon Adam and Eve on the day of their transgression, but took place hundreds of years later, the expression, "in the day that," must be conceived in a wider sense, or the delay of death must be attributed to the entering-in of mercy (Gen 3:15). However this may be, Gen 2:17 places a close connection between man's death and his transgression of God's commandment, thereby attaching to death a religious and ethical significance, and on the other hand makes the life of man dependent on his obedience to God. This religious-ethical nature of life and death is not only decidedly and clearly expressed in Gen 2, but it is the fundamental thought of the whole of Scripture and forms an essential element in the revelations of salvation. The theologians of early and more recent times, who have denied the spiritual significance of death and have separated the connection between ethical and physical life, usually endeavor...