There was a Jewish law, which stated that should a man die childless, the next oldest brother was to marry the widow. The first child of this union would legally be considered the child of the brother who had died. The Sadducees, the priests of Jesus’s day, use this law to build a fantastic story about a woman who married the oldest of seven brothers. The first brother died childless; the woman was taken as wife by the second brother, but he also died before she could conceive. And so with the rest of the seven, each of them died childless, after the woman had married each in turn.

Why did they construct this story? The Sadducees didn’t believe in the resurrection, in life after death. Jesus did. So they figure that if they spring this story on Jesus and then ask him, “If there is a resurrection, which of the seven brothers will be the woman’s husband?” Everyone, especially the people, will see how ridiculous the ideas of resurrection and immortality are.

To this, Jesus answers quite seriously, “When God spoke to Moses, he identified himself as the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, even though the three patriarchs had long been dead,” Jesus continues, “God, however, is the God of the living, not of the dead. If God is the God of the patriarchs, though they have died, they must still be living.”