Hello Paavo, thanks for taking the time to respond.

You said:

“Even grimmer: with near instant burial, many deemed dead would have been unconscious, comatose or frail, buried to die of dehydration enclosed in a crypt. Some of those might have been awoken by the quake, which also provided a means of escaping the tomb by shifting the sealing stone.”

Perhaps—yet this doesn’t account for the time differential in the text.

The quake happens on Friday. The dead don’t rise from their tombs until Sunday.

If someone was buried prematurely and awoken by the quake, they’d likely scramble out of the tomb immediately. They wouldn’t wait three days.

You said:

“These verses may be a grim reminder why lack of medical facilities and instant burial are a bad mix.”

They didn’t lack for medical care. Recall that Luke, the author of the third Gospel, is a physician.

Naturally, their medical science wasn’t as advanced as ours is, today.

Yet they certainly had medical knowledge and employed it to save their loved ones.

You said:

“Not even to mention the possibility of intentional premature burial of troublesome elderlies.”

This society revered their elders.

They weren’t like the selfish youth of today, who want to lock their elders up in a care facility and ignore them.

They considered it their great honor to care for their elders. You would never disrespect an elder or bury them prematurely to get them out of the way. Even if one child tried, the whole community around them would be shocked and horrified, stopping them immediately.