Thank you for your sharing the way you see and understand things with me. I don’t fully grasp everything you are stating to me however, and that may be due to my own ignorance. Thank you for answering my question.
It is difficult to comprehend that when you have believed all your life in an immortal soul, that the Bible does not teach such a concept. There was only 'life or death' for God's people.....death was reversed only by resurrection, which was nothing to do with a conscious part of man that departed from the body at death. It relied solely on the resurrection.....which was not expected to take place until Messiah was ruling in his Kingdom.
Subsequently is it wrong to suggest that most Jewish people did believe in an afterlife? The Pharisees too, believed in the afterlife, and the scribes as well.
I think you are confusing belief in the resurrection with belief in an immortal soul. The Pharisees believed in resurrection, but the Sadducees did not.
The ones who did not seemed to the people called the Sadducusees, wasn’t they the ones who came asking Jesus a question about the 7 brothers who married the one wife?
Yes, they tried to trip him up by using the custom of "brother-in-law marriage", whereby if a man died childless, and therefore had no one to inherit his land, the male next of kin would marry his widow and provide her with a child for her dead husband. He would then inherit his possession and be able to pass it down to his own children.
So the Sadducees used this to see how Jesus would answer what to them was a conundrum.
Under Israel's law, death ended a marriage and freed the widow to remarry, so the Sadducees suggested that if she married all seven brothers, whose wife would she be in the resurrection? But Jesus was not phased at all by the question....
"In reply Jesus said to them: “You are mistaken, because you know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God; 30 for in the resurrection neither do men marry nor are women given in marriage, but they are as angels in heaven."
Or in Luke's account....
"Jesus said to them: “The children of this system of things marry and are given in marriage, 35 but those who have been counted worthy of gaining that system of things and the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage. 36 In fact, neither can they die anymore, for they are like the angels, and they are God’s children by being children of the resurrection."
Whether Jesus was referring to those who were to be resurrected to heaven, or those who are resurrected back to life on earth, he does not state, so we will have to wait and see how that turns out. It would be a most unhappy situation if a woman married several husbands who all died, and then they expected to still be married to her when they are returned to life. The Bible says that death ends a marriage, but it doesn't say that death ends the love that people shared.....it will possibly be a higher kind of love, not involving sexual intimacy.
That is how I understand things....