According to medieval Jewish texts, the Roman emperor Hadrian once asked Rabbi Joshua ben Chanania about the doctrine of bodily resurrection. How, the emperor asked, could God reassemble bodies that had long since turned to dust? The Rabbi replied that when resurrected, people would be rebuilt around the luz, or ‘nut’, a small bone in the spine that could not be destroyed. To prove his point, the Rabbi took such a bone and “immersed it in water, but it was not softened; he put it into the ...
