> > > Yet there was still a moment of "death," whether
> > > they're dead now or not. They died spiritually,
> > > and THEN God gave them life again.
> >
> > I guess, then, we're working from different definitions of death. To me, death is final - you don't die "for a while" and then come back - once you're dead, you're dead. So if there was redemption, then they were spiritually ill, but not quite dead.
>
> Without the concordance, the first verses I thought of are Hebrews 9:27-28, which reads in part, "...man is destined to die once, and after that to face judgement..."
>
> You've hit the nail mentioning different definitions of death. The Bible's uses it as a spiritual state or the physical transition from this world to the next, rather than our cultural take of it as permanent non-being.

Not entirely accurate. The Bible as a whole doesn't even agree with itself about definitions of death; this makes sense, cosidering the fact that it was written in pieces over the course of several hundred (nearly two thousand, actually) years. The oldest books of the Bible (the histories and the prophets chronologically prior to Jeremiah) use death quite literally - Hebrew society at the time had no concept of an afterlife. Furthermore, not only did the Hebrews have no concept of afterlife, they also had no concept of individual judgement. God does not judge individuals at this point, he judges societies. For that matter, God doesn't even deal with individual people, prophets and patriarchs excepted.

In the book of Jeremiah, we see our first mention of something other than life. God tells Jeremiah that he was chosen for prophesy from before he was born, thereby implying that there was something of Jeremiah that exists outside of his physical self - a previously-unheard-of concept in Hebrew society. After Jeremiah, the concept slowly emerges (finally becoming fully developed in Deutero Isaiah, or during the time of the Babylonian captivity) that, after death, man will go to live with God in paradise.

However, the concept of "judgement" or "spiritual death" was still unknown to the Hebrews for several hundred years. All who were Israel went to paradise to be with God at this point. The concept of Judgement did not come into play until the apocalyptic writings, most notably Daniel and the entire New Testament. I'll get into this more a bit later if anyone cares, but right now it's three o'clock and I've had a long day of work, so I'm going to bed. :-}