I am a Christian and have been studying what we call the Old Testament, and been surprised to have difficulty to find a reference to afterlife in the Jewish books of the Christian Canon. I know that canon constitutes only a portion of Jewish books but for example in the book of Kings, we read the kings to be "sleeping" with their fathers. Also psalms refer to restitution of the person in this world and not a promise for the future.
So can you please bring references (ideally from the Jewish Bible, alternatively other books of your faith) which refers to the resurrection of the dead and afterlife. Obviously there is Ezekiel and resurrection of the bones but I feel the context is different.
Answer
The answer is there are few if any Biblical references. The afterlife is more emphasized in the oral tradition than in the actual Bible. Which is why you had the Sadduccees (the priestly Jews who only believed in the first five books of the Bible with no oral tradition) who did not believe in an afterlife at all. To this day there are still many Jews who are ambivalent about the afterlife, it's not something we talk about often (if it all). Which is probably more of a response to the emphasis in which Christians and Muslims talk about it and their consequences. Holy wars, crusades, are often brought about by the emphasis of, or promises for, the afterlife for their participants.
For more information, you can read an essay from the Jewish virtual library. Here is a snippet of it:
The Torah, therefore, might have been silent about afterlife out of a desire to ensure that Judaism not evolve in the direction of the death obsessed Egyptian religion. Throughout history, those religions that have assigned a significant role to afterlife have often permitted other religious values to become distorted. For example, belief in the afterlife motivated the men of the Spanish Inquisition to torture innocent human beings; they believed it was morally desirable to torture people for a few days in this world until they accepted Christ, and thereby save them from the eternal torments of hell.
In Judaism the belief in afterlife is less a leap of faith than a logical outgrowth of other Jewish beliefs. If one believes in a God who is all-powerful and all-just, one cannot believe that this world, in which evil far too often triumphs, is the only arena in which human life exists. For if this existence is the final word, and God permits evil to win, then it cannot be that God is good. Thus, when someone says he or she believes in God but not in afterlife, it would seem that either they have not thought the issue through, or they don't believe in God, or the divine being in whom they believe is amoral or immoral.
Source: https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Judaism/afterlife.html
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