Sheol #64

Sheol is the Old Testament’s word for the place of the dead. It is usually pictured as below the earth, quiet and dark, and it receives the righteous and the wicked alike. Older English versions, including the King James Version, translate it inconsistently as “grave,” “pit,” and “hell,” which has caused a good deal of confusion, since Sheol is not the place of fiery punishment that the word “hell” suggests in modern usage.

Biblical Usage

When Jacob is shown Joseph’s bloody coat, he says he will go down to Sheol mourning for his son (Genesis 37:35), and the same phrasing marks later expressions of grief. Ecclesiastes 9:10 says that there is no work, device, knowledge, or wisdom in the place to which people go, and the psalmists speak of Sheol as a place where God is not praised (Psalm 6:5). In Numbers 16:30-33, Korah and his followers “go down quick into the pit” as the ground opens, showing Sheol as a destination reached at death.

Yet God is not absent from it. Psalm 139:8 says that if the psalmist makes his bed in Sheol, God is there, and Psalm 49:15 and Hosea 13:14 express the hope of being redeemed from its power. Psalm 16:10, “thou wilt not leave my soul” there, is quoted in Acts 2:27 in connection with the resurrection of Jesus, using the Greek Hades in place of Sheol. In Luke 16:23 Hades is likewise the setting of the rich man’s torment.

Theological Significance

Interpreters disagree on whether Sheol means simply the grave, a shadowy afterlife, or a place of separation from God, and on how far the Old Testament looks for a hope beyond it. Christian traditions have related it to the “intermediate state” between death and resurrection, and have differed on whether Christ “descended” to the dead, a question drawn from passages like 1 Peter 3:19 and Ephesians 4:9. The New Testament distinguishes Hades, the realm of the dead, from Gehenna, the place of final judgment, which takes its name from the Valley of Hinnom, and many readers see Sheol as corresponding to the first and not the second.