The question whether the soul alone is rewarded or the body alone or both has been answered variously. In favor of the soul alone as the subject of reward and punishment it has been urged that reward raises man to the grade of angels, who are pure spirits. How then can the body take part? And punishment must be of the same nature as reward. On the other hand, it is claimed that the Bible says nothing of man being raised to the status of angels, and we know in this world of physical reward and punishment only. The Garden of Eden of which the Bible speaks is not peopled with angels, and that is where the righteous go after death. The true solution is that as man is composed of body and soul, and both share in his conduct, reward and punishment must attach to both. As we do not understand the nature of spiritual retribution so the composite is equally inconceivable to us. But everyone who believes in the resurrection of the dead has no difficulty in holding that the body has a share in future reward and punishment. CHAPTER III SAADIA BEN JOSEPH AL-FAYYUMI (892-942) Saadia was the first important Jewish philosopher. Philo of Alexandria does not come within our purview as he was not mediæval. Besides his work is not systematic, being in the nature of a commentary on Holy Writ. Though Philo was a good and loyal Jew, he stood, so to speak, apart from the real centre of Jewish intellectual and spiritual development. He was on the one hand too closely dependent on Greek thought and on the other had only a limited knowledge of Jewish thought and tradition. The Bible he knew only in the Greek translation, not in the original Hebrew; and of the Halaka, which was still in the making in Palestine, he knew still less. It was different with Saadia. In the tenth century the Mishna and the Talmud had been long completed and formed theoretically as well as practically the content of the Jew's life and thought. Sura in Babylonia, where Saadia was the head of the academy, was the chief centre of Jewish learning, and Saadia was the heir in the main line of Jewish development as it passed through the hands of lawgiver and prophet, scribe and Pharisee, Tanna and Amora, Saburai and Gaon. As the head of the Sura academy he was the intellectual representative of the Jewry and Judaism of his day. His time was a period of agitation and strife, not only in Judaism but also in Islam, in whose lands the Jews lived and to whose temporal rulers they owed allegiance in the East as well as in Spain. In Islam we saw in the introduction how the various schools of the Kadariya, the Muʿtazila and the Ashariya arose in obedience to the demand of clarifying the chief problems of faith, science and life. In Judaism there was in addition to this more general demand the more local and internal conflict of Karaite and Rabbanite which centred about the problem of tradition. Saadia found himself in the midst of all this and proved equal to the occasion.