Resurrection lies at the heart of the foundational covenant structure of Israel. Believing in the resurrection wasn’t a matter of interpreting an obscure text but of rightly understanding the very nature of what God promised.

The resurrection ranks among the most crucial doctrines of Christianity. For Jesus and the apostles, the resurrection is the bedrock of New Testament theology (e.g., John 11:25–26; 1 Cor. 15:12–58). It lies at the heart of our salvation and the cornerstone of the history of redemption.

But, perhaps surprisingly, the Old Testament doesn’t often explicitly mention the resurrection of the dead. While a few Old Testament passages indeed refer to the resurrection (e.g., Job 19:26–27; Isa. 26:19; Dan. 12:1–2; Ezek. 37:1–14), this cardinal doctrine doesn’t seem to permeate the Old Testament.

Yet, when the Sadducees try to confound Jesus about the nature of the resurrection, he responds not by citing Job, Isaiah, Daniel, or Ezekiel but by quoting Exodus 3:6. Strikingly, he says,

As for the dead being raised, have you not read in the book of Moses, in the passage about the bush, how God spoke to him, saying, ‘I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is not God of the dead, but of the living. You are quite wrong. (Mark 12:26–27)

Why does Jesus quote Exodus 3:6, a passage that doesn’t appear to refer to the precious doctrine of the resurrection? Jesus’s choice of Exodus 3:6 may seem puzzling at first, but when we grasp its meaning in the original Old Testament context, we discover how Jesus understands the nature of God’s covenants and why he cites it. Exodus 3:6 concerns God’s faithfulness to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and their eventual inheritance of the new creation.

Smaller Canon?

Commentaries have a long history of explaining the reason for Jesus’s reference by appealing to the Sadducees’ beliefs. For example, in the late fourth century, Jerome’s Commentary on Matthew alleges, “They received only the five books of Moses and rejected the prophets’ predictions. It would have been foolish, then, to bring forth testimonies [from the prophets], whose authority the Sadducees did not follow.”

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