Sheol

In Hebrew, Sheol (שאול) is the "abode of the dead", the "underworld", "the common grave of mankind" or "pit". In the Hebrew Bible, it is a comfortless place beneath the earth, beyond gates, where both the bad and the good, slave and king, pious and wicked must go after death to sleep in silence and oblivion in the dust. Sheol is the common destination of both the righteous and the unrighteous dead, as recounted in Ecclesiastes and Job.

Sheol originated from the ancient Sumerian view that after one dies, no matter how benevolent or malevolent he or she was in life, in Sheol he or she is destined to eat dirt to survive. Sheol is sometimes compared to Hades, the gloomy, twilight afterlife of Greek mythology. In fact, Jews used the word "hades" for "sheol" when they translated their scriptures into Greek. The New Testament (written in Greek) also uses "hades" to mean the abode of the dead (sheol).

By the first century, Jews had come to believe that those in sheol awaited the resurrection either in comfort (in the bosom of Abraham) or in torment. This belief is reflected in Jesus' story of Lazarus and Dives.

Western Christians, who do not share a concept of "hades" with the Eastern Orthodox, have traditionally translated "sheol" (and "hades") as "hell." Unlike hell, however, sheol is not associated with Satan.

It is also transliterated Sheh-ole, in Strong's Hebrew and Greek Dictionaries and Strong's Concordances.

Sheol in the Bible

Sheol is shown to be literally under the ground when the ground opens up under the household of Korah and the people go down living into sheol (Numbers 16:31-33).

Jacob, not comforted at the reported death of Joseph, exclaims: "I shall go down to my son a mourner unto Sheol" (Genesis 37:35). Sheol may be personified: Sheol is never satiated (Proverbs 30:20); she "makes wide her throat" (Isaiah 5:14).

Psalm 18:5-7 "The breakers of death surged round about me; the menacing floods terrified me. The cords of Sheol tightened; the snares of death lay in wait for me. In my distress I called out: Lord! I cried out to my God. From his temple he heard my voice; my cry to him reached his ears.

Psalm 86:13: "Your love for me is great; you have rescued me from the depths of Sheol."

The Hebrew concept is paralleled in the Sumerian Netherworld to which Inanna descends. See Irkalla.

Jonah 2:2: "...Out of the belly of Sheol I cried, And You heard my voice."

The English word hell comes from Germanic mythology, now used in the Judeo-Christian sense to translate the Hebrew word Gehinnom, which is a valley outside Jerusalem once used for burning refuse (basically a landfill), and the Greek Hades and Tartarus.

The prominent Biblical scholar William Foxwell Albright suggests that the Hebrew root for SHE'OL is SHA'AL, which means "to ask, to interrogate, to question." Sheol therefore should mean "asking, interrogation, questioning." John Tvedtnes, also a Biblical scholar, connects this with the common theme in near-death experiences of the interrogation of the soul after crossing the Tunnel.

Sheol and gehenna

The New Testament seems to draw a distinction between Sheol and "Gehinnom", or Gehenna (Jahannam in Islam). The most "hellish" notion in Jewish tradition is the Biblical word Gehinnom, later interpreted to refer to a place of condemnation. But the source of the word is most interesting. Gei Hinnom was the valley of Hinnom (Joshua 15:8, 18:16; II Kings 23:10; Jeremiah 7:31; Nehemiah 11:30), a place where children were sacrificed to the Canaanite god Moloch. In Islam, this same word became Jahannam, an Islamic term for Hell.

Book of Enoch

The Book of Enoch records Enoch's vision of the cosmos. The author describes sheol as divided into four sections: one where the faithful saints blissfully await judgment day (see bosom of Abraham), one where the moderately good await their reward, one where the wicked are punished and await their judgment at the resurrection (see Gehenna), and the last where the wicked who don't even warrant resurrection are tormented.

Secular outlook

According to Professors Stephen L. Harris and James Tabor, sheol is a place of "nothingness" that has its roots in the Hebrew Bible (or Old Testament). Professor Tabor, Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, states in his What the Bible says about Death, Afterlife, and the Future:

"The ancient Hebrews had no idea of an immortal soul living a full and vital life beyond death, nor of any resurrection or return from death. Human beings, like the beasts of the field, are made of "dust of the earth," and at death they return to that dust (Gen. 2:7; 3:19). The Hebrew word nephesh, traditionally translated "living soul" but more properly understood as "living creature," is the same word used for all breathing creatures and refers to nothing immortal...All the dead go down to Sheol, and there they lie in sleep together–whether good or evil, rich or poor, slave or free (Job 3:11-19). It is described as a region "dark and deep," "the Pit," and "the land of forgetfulness," cut off from both God and human life above (Pss. 6:5; 88:3-12). Though in some texts Yahweh's power can reach down to Sheol (Ps. 139:8), the dominant idea is that the dead are abandoned forever. This idea of Sheol is negative in contrast to the world of life and light above, but there is no idea of judgment or of reward and punishment. If one faces extreme circumstances of suffering in the realm of the living above, as did Job, it can even be seen as a welcome relief from pain–see the third chapter of Job. But basically it is a kind of "nothingness," an existence that is barely existence at all, in which a "shadow" or "shade" of the former self survives (Ps. 88:10)."

Professor Harris shares similar remarks in his Understanding the Bible: "The concept of eternal punishment does not occur in the Hebrew Bible, which uses the term Sheol to designate a bleak subterranean region where the dead, good and bad alike, subsist only as impotent shadows. When Hellenistic Jewish scribes rendered the Bible into Greek, they used the word Hades to translate Sheol, bringing a whole new mythological association to the idea of posthumous existence. In ancient Greek myth, Hades, named after the gloomy deity who ruled over it, was originally similar to the Hebrew Sheol, a dark underground realm in which all the dead, regardless of individual merit, were indiscriminately housed." While believers in the Bible think that it has contains one doctrine of Hell (regardless of what they think about the nature of Hell), Harris and nontheists may view the doctrine as changing throughout the Bible.

By the time of Jesus, many Jews had come to believe in a future resurrection of the dead. The dead in Sheol were said to await the resurrection either in comfort or in torment, as in the story of Lazarus and Dives.

In popular culture

Possibly the most popular and well known adaptation of Sheol is Shayol Ghul from The Wheel Of Time book series by Robert Jordan. In the books Shayol Ghul is a giant black mountain in which lies the Pit Of Doom ; an otherworldly place where the Dark One is closest to touching the world and his precense can be most keenly felt.

In the Robert A. Heinlein science fiction novel Starship Troopers, Sheol is also the name of an Arachnid colony planet, decimated by a Terran military attack. Likewise in the Walter Jon Williams novel "Voice of the Whirlwind" Sheol is the name of a planet on which a terrible war is waged. Sheol is also the name of a San Francisco bay area rock band.

Cordwainer Smith used the variant spelling 'Shayol' for the Instrumentality of Mankind's prison planet, a world in which humans exposed to the native microbial life would begin growing additional limbs and organs, all the while experiencing horrific pain. These organs would then be harvested for transplantation, which was seen as a restitution for their crimes. Eventually, after a pair of children were wrongfully sent there to be imprisoned, the underpeople serving as jailors rebelled, and the prisoners were released from their punishment.

At Regent's Park College, the Baptist Permanent Private Hall at the University of Oxford, the subterranean complex comprising a laundry and bathrooms is amusingly known as Sheol.

Sheol is the name of one of the Ravers in the series of books, The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant by Stephen Donaldson.

Sheol is the name of one of the TimeKeeper Demons in the series of books, The Wayfarer Redemption by Sara Douglas.

In the MMORPG Anarchy Online, there is a massive area called "Scheol" in the Shadowlands, an alternate universe that is slowly degrading into nothingness. This version of Sheol is divided into two primary sections. Upper Scheol, in the southern portion of the map, is a bleak steppe, dotted with rocky outcroppings, ancient technology and covered mostly in half-dead grasses. Moving further north, the landscape gradually changes into Lower Scheol. Lower Scheol primarily consists of twisted, rocky terrain, though there is some of the aforementioned half-dead grass and ancient technlogy. Transit by foot through the areas of Lower Scheol are quite hazardous, not only due to the monsters that exist there, but the precarious nature of the pathways available to players. The paths in Lower Scheol lead along narrow ledges, wind up cliffs and across thin and narrow rocky protrusions which are quit often near or fully suspended above the interdimensional void. Falling into the void is very easy in Lower Scheol if a player isn't careful, and results in the player being "rubber-banded" or "sling-shotted" back to the real world. This leads to a lot of lost travel time as a player would need to physically return to the Shadowlands and Scheol to get back to where they were. There is probably more hidden nooks, crannies and secret or little known paths in Lower Scheol than in any other place in the game; due to its twisted, convoluted and complex nature, many players avoid it altogether.

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