Resurrection is a key Bible doctrine -- but some critics think the Bible also excludes the possibility of the dead rising. Let's see what they cite:

Eccl. 3:19-21 Man's fate is like that of the animals; the same fate awaits them both: As one dies, so dies the other. All have the same breath ; man has no advantage over the animal. Everything is meaningless. All go to the same place; all come from dust, and to dust all return. Who knows if the spirit of man rises upward and if the spirit of the animal goes down into the earth?

Each of these verses is regarded as a refutation of any possibility of resurrection. However, the first three are in a proverbial genre-context that indicates that they are not be taken absolutely. (Note also that Ecclesiastes is a discourse that takes the persona of the man who lives without knowledge of God, and that the Job verse is words said by Job and thus do not necessarily reflect an accurate teaching, but merely reporting what he said; though that book too is written as a discourse/dialogue.) In the he fourth verse, "rise" carries the sense of action and accomplishment ("Cain rose up against Abel his brother"), not of resurrection, which is an action performed by God. The specific word in Timothy means "deathlessness," something men must put on (1 Cor. 15:53), but have not yet; hence it is right at this time for Paul to say that only God is "immortal" for there has yet been no putting on of immortality by men. 1 Tim. 15-16 will become anachronistic after the resurrection! None of these verses therefore contradicts an idea of resurrection.

And yes, now for a burp from the Ebon website. Ebon begins with the hayseed threat that "proverbial literature" is an "exception he has granted himself...that basically says he's free to interpret any verse as non-literal and non-absolute whenever he thinks the context indicates it." Proverbial literature, of course, lends itself to the argument that the genre of proverbial literature displays non-wooden-literal and non-absolute tendencies. We might contrast this to the genre of historical narrative to illustrate that Ebon is constructing his straw man with the strokes of an extra-wide brush. What he calls "games" are called, by real scholars, "conetxtual study" and his appeal to popular opinion (among Christians) constitutes the logical fallacy of argumentum ad populum. Ebon then again makes clear that his charges of contradiction rely on his own wooden-literal interpretations, as illustrated by his charge that I claim that "it doesn't mean what it says". After airing the same old impotent complaints (was that the umpteenth time he's done that?), Ebon is able to bring himself his next osteoporotic bone of contention, sprinkled liberally with admitted hayseed:

Regarding "proverbial literature" as it relates to not being able to take verses literally, I will only say this: Boy, the Word of God sure is hard to understand! Especially for a hayseed skeptic like myself. I can't help but wonder if Mr. Holding believes there is any part of the Bible that can be understood by modern readers without detailed linguistic, literary and historical studies. Does the Bible contain any universals at all? Or must we all be scholars like Mr. Holding before we can even begin to understand it, and if not, how are us poor ignorant laymen to discern which parts can be taken literally and which can't? I really would like to know this.

What's this? Ebon has no real argument at all against the resolution of his claim that the Bible teaches against resurrection. Ebon is ignorant of the considerations of genre (which took me a mere few books' worth of study to initially grasp, and in time, much less than the 30 episodes of Seinfeld Ebon has wasted his life watching), therefore the Bible is a text only comprehensible by experts. The fact is that churches abound where Ebon could learn such basic considerations, as these things are commonly mentioned in Sunday sermons (or Saturday sermons with respect to Seventh Day Adventists!), and the seminary libraries are open, and I could probably name four or five within Ebon's driving distance. After whining (Barbie-like paraphrase after pulling the string) "Understanding the Bible is hard," Ebon trades the claim that a portion of Ecclesiastes was written from the point-of-view of the man who lacks accurate knowledge of God for a straw man claim that the author of Ecclesiastes himself had no knowledge of God. We suppose that this is the only way that Ebon is able to conceive of a person writing from that point-of-view. If he wants contextual evidence, that's what the link titled "nopass" was for.

As for the verse from Job, it is true that this phrase is spoken by Job himself in the middle of a rant against God's injustice. But nothing and no one in the entire book contradicts it - Job's pals Eliphaz and Bildad don't tell him he's talking nonsense, and neither does God (whose sole answer to all of Job's complaints is essentially, "I created the universe and you didn't, so hush your mouth.")

What paranoid reading! I thought only my fictional creation Hyper the Literalist was this loony, but in his throes of desperation, Ebon will now tell us that any false statement not corrected must be taken as true! Even so Ebon goes directly from his claim that God did not tell Job that he was talking nonsense to a paraphrase of God's response to Job that could itself be paraphrased "You are talking nonsense." If the Bible quotes a person who is not speaking for God (that is, a prophet), then the content of that quotation is not a Bible teaching per se. This is yet another very simple principle that Ebon routinely trips over.

Immediately, Ebon returns to wooden-literal interpretation to divine the reason for Job's words to God in 7:11. When Job says that a man who dies does not return to his house, it is taken as indicative of Job had no belief in the resurrection, rather than an observation that the living do not generally continue to interact with the dead on a personal level. Ebon draws his final conclusion ("the contradiction stands") based on a failure to consider Job's statement apart from the context of an afterlife. (He and his Jewish source could also stand a correction on the Jewish afterlife; see here.)