4. Biblical Judaism evinced such a powerful impetus toward a complete and blissful life with God, that the center and purpose of existence could not be transferred to the hereafter, as in other systems of belief, but was found in the desire to work out the life here on earth to its fullest possible development. Virtue and wisdom, righteousness and piety, signify and secure true life; vice and folly, iniquity and sin, lead to death and annihilation. This is the ever recurring burden of the popular as well as of the prophetic and priestly wisdom of Israel.(893) In the song of thanks of King Hezekiah after his recovery, the Jewish soul expresses itself, when he says:(894) “I said, I shall not see the Lord, even the Lord in the land of the living.... But Thou hast delivered my soul from the pit of corruption. For the nether world cannot praise Thee; death cannot celebrate Thee. The living, the living, he shall praise Thee, as I do this day. The father to the children shall make known Thy truth.” Therefore the author of the seventy-third Psalm, ennobled by trials, finds sufficient comfort and happiness in the presence of God that he can spurn all earthly treasures.(895) Job, too, in his affliction longed for death as release from all earthly pain and sorrow, but not to bring him a state of rest and peace like the Nirvana of the Indian beggar-monk, or an outlook into a better world to come. Such an awakening to a new life seems to him unthinkable,—although many commentators have often endeavored to read such a hope into certain of his expressions.(896) Instead, his belief in God as the Ruler of the infinite world, with His lofty moral purpose far outreaching all human wisdom, lent him courage and power for further effort and persistent striving on earth. Since to this suffering hero, impelled to deeds by his own energy, life is a continuous battle, a hereafter as a “world of reward and punishment” can hardly solve the great enigma of human existence in a satisfactory manner for him. The wise ones—says a Talmudic maxim—find rest neither in this world nor in the world to come, but “they shall ascend from strength to strength, until they appear before God on Zion.”(897)