re: #16 b_sharp

Now I’m not trying to poke anyone with a stick here and I’m not trying to be disrespectful, but I’ve always wondered about the phrase ’ rest in peace’. If you’re dead, you’re dead, you aren’t about to get up and party, nor are you likely to have a fitful sleep death. Where the heck did that saying come from?

An explanation:

Found inscribed in Hebrew on gravestones, in the 1st century BC graveyard of Bet Shearim. This verse speaks of the righteous person who passed away, because he could not stand the evil surrounding him. A recapture of these words read as “come and rest in peace” has been transferred to the ancient Talmudic prayers in a mixture of Hebrew and Aramaic of the 3rd century AD, and used to this day in traditional Jewish ceremonies.[5]

The phrase in English was not found on tombstones before the eighth century.[6][7] It became common on the tombs of Catholics in the 18th century for whom it was a prayerful request that their soul should find peace in the afterlife. When the phrase became conventional, the absence of a reference to the soul led people to suppose that it was the physical body which was enjoined to lie peacefully in the grave.[8] This is associated with the Catholic doctrine of the particular judgment which is that the soul is parted from the body upon death but that they will be reunited on Judgment Day.[9]