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.

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.

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."

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, 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 do not 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.

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