Sources: Mishnah Sanhedrin 10:1; Talmud Bavli Sanhedrin 90a; Berakhot 17a; Daniel 12:2; Isaiah 26:19; Ezekiel 37 (dry bones vision); Maimonides, Laws of Repentance 8.

The World to Come (Olam Ha-Ba) and the resurrection of the dead (techiyat ha-meitim) are central eschatological doctrines of rabbinic theology — and the axis around which the great Pharisee-Sadducee dispute turned. Mishnah Sanhedrin 10:1 opens with a list of those who have no share in Olam Ha-Ba, including one who says resurrection is not derived from the Torah. The Talmud (Sanhedrin 90a ff.) then spends considerable energy deriving resurrection from Torah verses — against Sadducean skepticism. The doctrine has two distinct components that rabbis sometimes conflate and sometimes distinguish: (1) Olam Ha-Ba — the spiritual realm that the soul enters after death; Berakhot 17a describes it as a world where the righteous sit with crowns on their heads and bask in the Shekhinah; (2) Techiyat ha-meitim — the bodily resurrection at the end of days, when bodies are reconstituted and souls reunited with them for final judgment. Maimonides makes resurrection one of his 13 Principles of Faith but surprisingly says little about it in the Mishneh Torah, leading to a major controversy in which he was accused of not really believing in bodily resurrection. His Laws of Repentance 8 describes Olam Ha-Ba in purely spiritual terms (souls without bodies) — which his critics saw as Greek philosophy undermining Jewish eschatology. The resurrection doctrine is the deep structural reason why Jesus’s resurrection was theologically legible to his first Jewish followers: it was the anticipated eschatological event, occurring early and to one person rather than all at once.