L’shanah tovah tikateivu! May your name be inscribed in the Book of Life! This phrase, or a variation of it,1 is the most commonly used greeting for the High Holy Day season.

From the time of Moses and onward, the idea of a Book of Life has been closely connected with Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. So, you may ask, “What’s it really all about?”

Ancient Precursors

In ancient Mesopotamia, religious writings speak of the Tablet of Destinies, which records the fate of people. 2 Other writings talk about a Tablet of Sins. Scholar Shalom M. Paul speaks of a Mesopotamian “tablet of life”3 and gives this example of a related prayer: “May [the god Nabu] inscribe the days of his life for long duration in a tablet.”

Does all this sound similar to the Book of Life idea from the High Holy Days?

Did Judaism get the idea of a book of life from the ancient Mesopotamians? No one knows! But we do know that many things we find in the Tanakh, such as priests, temples, and sacrifices, were all part of the ancient world surrounding Israel. The difference is that God sanctified the Jewish priests, temples, and sacrifices so that they no longer had pagan meanings, but were given fresh significance by the God of Israel. It could have been the same with the Book of Life.

The Jewish Book of Life: The Origin Story

Others think there is a different back story to the Book of Life concept. Maybe it corresponds to the civil list, or register in ancient Israel, which recorded all the names of fully qualified citizens. If your name was in the Book of Life, it would mean that you were a member of good standing in the divine commonwealth. 4

Interestingly, the phrase “Book of Life” is never found in the Hebrew Bible, but there is something that comes close. Remember the story of the Golden Calf in Exodus? Moses is up on Mount Sinai for 40 days and nights, receiving the Torah from God. That was more than a month, but the Israelites had grown discouraged from ever seeing Moses again. In response to their despair and impatience, someone had the bright idea to make a calf out of gold and worship it. The result, as the story develops in Exodus 32, is total calamity. This scene, by the way, is engraved in my mind from the Jewish calendars we used to get at our synagogue, with a picture of some biblical event on each month’s page. For the Golden Calf incident, I’m pretty sure I remember some women dancing around the whole thing, disconcertingly mirroring a Broadway musical. In the real story, it was no musical!

This is where the Book of Life comes in, or something close to it. Following the entire incident, we read the following:

The next day Moses said to the people, “You have sinned a great sin. And now I will go up to the LORD; perhaps I can make atonement for your sin.”

Moses then returned to the LORD and said, “Alas, this people has sinned a great sin. They have made for themselves gods of gold. But now, if you will forgive their sin—but if not, please blot me out of your book that you have written.”

But the LORD said to Moses, “Whoever has sinned against me, I will blot out of my book. (Exodus 32:30-33)

This encapsulates the essence of the Book of Life that we know of today. Those who are righteous, get their names written in the Book of Life:  those who sin, get blotted out.

Some Jewish Traditions

Later Jewish traditions also speak about this book. The Mishnah tells us, “Know what there is above you: an eye that sees, an ear that hears, and all your deeds are written in a book.” (Pirkei Avot 2:15)

One of the more well-known interpretations speaks of not one, but three, books:

Three books are opened on Rosh HaShana before the Holy One, Blessed be He: One of wholly wicked people, and one of wholly righteous people, and one of middling people whose good and bad deeds are equally balanced. Wholly righteous people are immediately written and sealed for life; wholly wicked people are immediately written and sealed for death; and middling people are left with their judgment suspended from Rosh HaShana until Yom Kippur, their fate remaining undecided. If they merit, through the good deeds and mitzvot that they perform during this period, they are written for life; if they do not so merit, they are written for death. (Rosh Hashanah 16b6)

The High Holy Day synagogue liturgy includes a prayer called Zakhrenu Le-Hayyim, meaning “Remember us for life”: “Remember us for life, King who desires life; and inscribe us in the Book of Life, for Your sake, Living God.”7 There we have another reference to the Book of Life!

Getting into the Book of Life

A Short High Holiday Manual

We can be pretty sure that God is not keeping a literal book with people’s names written in it, in some kind of heavenly ink! But the idea behind the book (or books), is real enough. We’ve sinned and we need to repent. This time of year might be the only time that many Jews are even thinking about sin. It’s a good reminder to have, even if it’s once a year in the form of a holiday.

In the old days—no, not when your great-grandmother lived, but rather in biblical times—we obtained forgiveness or atonement through the sacrifice of animals. The idea was that the innocent animal would then take on itself the consequences that should have accrued to us, because of our sin. Of course, we had to repent as well.

The sacrifices ceased when the Temple was destroyed in 70 CE., and the priests who presided over the sacrifices ended up on the unemployment line. What to do now for atonement?

Judaism eventually turned to repentance, prayer, deeds of charity, and (on Yom Kippur) fasting, as the means of atonement. What is interesting though, is that there are vestiges of the belief that someone or something needs to be sacrificed so that we can receive atonement. In other words, repentance, prayer, deeds of charity, and fasting are all good things—but there are indications that they may not be quite sufficient.

For example, the machzor, prayer book for the High Holidays, at one time included this prayer as part of the Yom Kippur Musaf (additional service):

Our righteous anointed is departed from us: horror hath seized us, and we have non to justify us. He hath borne the yoke of our iniquities, and our transgression, and is wounded because of our transgression. He beareth our sins on his shoulder, that he may find pardon for our iniquities. We shall be healed by his wound, at the time that the Eternal will create him (the Messiah) as a new creature. O bring him up from the circle of the earth. Raise him up from Seir, to assemble us the second time on Mount Lebanon, by the hand of Yinnon.8

That prayer was from a 1931 prayer book, and alluded to Isaiah chapter 53 in the Tanakh, a chapter that is often interpreted to refer to the nation of Israel, but which many have maintained has reference to the Messiah. 9 It suggests that the Messiah will be “wounded” or perhaps even experience death. (By the way, the explanation of “the Messiah” in the above text is original to that prayer book.)

Some ultra-Orthodox Jews today have a Yom Kippur ceremony called , in which a rooster (for a man) or a hen (for a woman) is swung around the head and then killed. This is the accompanying prayer: “This is my exchange, this is my substitute, this is my expiation. This chicken shall go to death and I shall proceed to a good, long life and peace.”10

In alignment with these ideas, Jesus said he would sacrifice his own life to provide atonement:

…even as the Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” (Matthew 20:28)

At Jesus’ final Passover, he reiterated this in different words:

And he took a cup, and when he had given thanks, he gave it to them saying, “Drink of it, all of you, for this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins. (Matthew 26:27-28)

Finally, Jesus stressed that his death was voluntary on his part:

For this reason, the Father loves me, because I lay down my life that I may take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down, and I have authority to take it up again. (John 10:17-18)

This, by the way, should be enough to put to rest the antisemitic canard that “the Jews killed Christ.” No matter if Romans, Jews, or Martians all played a part, Jesus voluntarily gave up his life so we could receive atonement. Anyone who complains that Jesus died, doesn’t understand Jesus at all or what his death was meant to be about.

We should always encourage teshuvah (repentance), tzedakah (deeds of charity), and tefillah (prayer). But the 1931 prayer book, the kapparot ceremony, and especially the words of Jesus encourage us to ask: Does someone still need to die sacrificially for us to have atonement?

That is why the New Testament speaks of Jesus’ followers as being written in the Book of Life:

The apostle Paul wrote:

Yes, I ask you also, true companion, help these women, who have labored side by side with me in the gospel together with Clement and the rest of my fellow workers, whose names are in the book of life. (Philippians 4:3, emphasis added)

Jesus also said:

The one who conquers will be clothed thus in white garments, and I will never blot his name out of the book of life. I will confess his name before my Father, and before his angels. (Revelation 3:5, emphasis added)

What do you think? What does it take to end up in God’s book of life?

 

Endnotes

1. The form here is plural; there are other forms for addressing a man and addressing a woman. Often the greeting is shortened to, Shana Tovah! (a good year).

2. See for example, Myths from Mesopotamia: Creation, the Flood, Gilgamesh, and Others. Ed. and Tr. Stephanie Dalley (Oxford World’s Classics; rev. ed.; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). p. 329. Also “Tablet of Destinies (mythic item),” wikipedia.org.

3. Shalom M. Paul, “Heavenly Tablets and the Book of Life,” Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society 5:1 (1973). Paul, who died in 2020, taught at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

4. See for instance, Kaufmann Kohler and Max L. Margolis, “Book of Life,” Jewish Encyclopedia: “The figure [of being blotted out of God’s book] is derived from the citizens’ registers.”

5. Pirkei Avot  2:1

6. Rosh Hashanah 16b:12

7. Remember Us? / Zochreinu Le-Chayim

8. A. Th. Philips, Machzor Leyom Kippur / Prayer Book for the Day of Atonement with English Translation; revised and enlarged Edition (New York: Hebrew Publishing Company, 1931), p. 239. The passage can also be found in, e.g., the 1937 edition.

9. For more about Isaiah 53, see The Messiah Would Be the Suffering Servant; Who’s the Subject of Isaiah 53?; The Rabbis’ Dilemma: A Look at Isaiah 53.

10. Text of Kapparot