The conception that the soul enters into man as the breath of life and leaves him at his death, flying toward heaven like a bird,(913) is quite as ancient and as universal as the other, that the soul descends into the nether world as a shadowy image of the body, there to continue a dull existence. The two are related to one another, and in the Bible, as well as in the literature of other peoples, they have given rise to diverse definitions of the soul. This was the point of departure for the development of the conception of immortality in one or the other direction, according to whether the body was considered a part of the personality which somehow survives after death, or only the spiritual substance of the soul was thought to live on in celestial regions as something divine. The former led to the theory of the resurrection of the body and its reunion with the soul; the latter to the belief in a future life for the soul, after it had been separated or released from the body. 3. When once the soul was felt to be a “lamp of the Lord,” filling the body with light when man is awake,(914) it was easy to imagine that the soul had escaped and temporarily returned to God in sleep. This induced the teachers of the Synagogue to prescribe a morning prayer of thanks which reads, “Blessed art Thou, O God, who restorest the souls unto dead bodies.”(915) The conception underlying this prayer throws light upon the entire belief in resurrection. Death to the pious is only a prolonged sleep. On that account the prophet in the passage from Isaiah already referred to, as well as the Hasidic author of the Book of Daniel,(916) could express the hope that “those who sleep in the dust shall awake.” As at every awakening from sleep in the morning, so at the great awakening in the future, the souls which have departed in death shall return again to their bodies. These bodies could then hardly be conceived of as subject to decomposition, and the picture in Ezekiel’s vision of resurrection(917) had to be accepted as fact. Still R. Simeon b. Yohai in the especially instructive thirty-fourth chapter of Pirke de R. Eliezer assumes the complete disintegration of the body, in order to render the miracle of resurrection so much the greater. Later still arose the legend of an indestructible bone of the spinal column, called _Luz_, which was to form the nucleus for the revival of the whole body.(918) The name Luz, which denotes an almond tree and is the name given in the Bible to a city also,(919) seemed to point to a connection with two legends, a fabulous city into which death could not enter,(920) and the tree of resurrection in the Osiris cycle.(921)