Sheol

“For you will not abandon my soul to Sheol, or let your holy one see corruption.”

— Psalm 16:10 (ESV)

Sheol is the Hebrew Old Testament term for the realm of the dead, used of both the righteous and the wicked rather than naming one destiny alone. It occurs sixty-five times, and does not always carry the same sense: sometimes it names the abstract state of death itself, and sometimes a literal locality, either the grave or the place of punishment threatened against the wicked.¹ The Septuagint and New Testament render the same underlying reality by the Greek term Hades.

Confessional Witness

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession does not use the Hebrew word “Sheol”; it states the same twofold destiny the word names in its own seventeenth-century English instead:

“The bodies of men after death return to dust, and see corruption; but their souls, which neither die nor sleep, having an immortal subsistence, immediately return to God who gave them. The souls of the righteous being then made perfect in holiness, are received into paradise, where they are with Christ, and behold the face of God in light and glory, waiting for the full redemption of their bodies; and the souls of the wicked are cast into hell; where they remain in torment and utter darkness, reserved to the judgment of the great day; besides these two places, for souls separated from their bodies, the Scripture acknowledgeth none.”²

The Savoy Declaration’s identically numbered chapter confesses the same twofold destiny in different words: the righteous soul is “received into the highest heavens,” not “paradise,” the wording the 1689 alone adopts among these confessions.³

Biblical Basis

Both the righteous and the wicked are said to descend into Sheol. Jacob, mourning Joseph, said, “I will go down to Sheol to my son mourning” (Gen. 37:35), and the psalmist asks, “What man is he that shall live and not see death, that shall deliver his soul from the power of Sheol?” (Ps. 89:48). Korah and his company “went down alive into Sheol” as a direct act of divine judgment (Num. 16:33), and the wicked generally are described as “appointed as a flock for Sheol” (Ps. 49:14).⁴ Other texts use the word simply for the grave or the state of death, without reference to reward or punishment either way: Ecclesiastes says “there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in Sheol, whither thou goest” (Eccl. 9:10), and Sheol even names the belly of the fish that swallowed Jonah (Jonah 2:2).⁴

Elsewhere descent into Sheol is set forth specifically as punishment against the wicked: “The wicked shall be turned back unto Sheol, even all the nations that forget God” (Ps. 9:17), and God’s anger “is kindled … and burneth unto the lowest Sheol” (Deut. 32:22).⁴

The King James Version renders the word inconsistently: as “hell” thirty-one times, though Scripture’s own word for hell is Gehenna, not Sheol, so each of these is a mistranslation; as “the grave” thirty-one times; and as “the pit” three times. The American Standard Version corrected this by transliterating the Hebrew word as “Sheol” throughout, rather than translating it differently from one passage to the next.⁴

Peter’s Pentecost sermon reads David’s confidence that God “will not abandon my soul to Sheol” (Ps. 16:10) as a prophecy of Christ’s own resurrection: his soul would not be “abandoned to Hades,” nor his flesh “see corruption” (Acts 2:27, 31).⁵

Historical Development

Jewish background and patristic reception

By the New Testament era, many Jews held that Sheol contained two departments, paradise and Gehenna, holding the righteous and the wicked dead respectively until the Messiah’s coming delivered the righteous.⁶ Charles Hodge traces the same doctrine into the early church: because “most of the early Christians were Jews,” the Jewish belief that “the souls of those who died before the coming of the Messiah descended into Sheol, and there awaited the advent of the Redeemer” carried over into the Christian teaching that the souls of believers, rather than passing immediately into glory, are “shut up in Hades, awaiting the second coming of Christ.” Many of the fathers carried over the same paradise-Gehenna distinction as well: “the souls of believers went to paradise; the souls of the wicked into hell.”⁶

The seventeenth-century Reformed historian Jean Daillé, whom Hodge quotes, held that this view “was held, though with some variations,” by “Justin Martyr, Irenæus, Tertullian, Augustine, Origen, Lactantius Victorinus, Ambrose, Chrysostom, Theodoret … and many others, as is confessed by all,” and that it was “literally held by the whole Greek Church” into his own day, “nor did any of the Latins expressly deny any part of it until the Council of Florence,” in 1439.⁷ Berkhof independently names the same patristic consensus, “held, though with some variations, by such men as Justin Martyr, Irenæus, Tertullian, Novatian, Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, Ambrose, and Augustine,” while Gregory of Nazianzus, Eusebius, and Gregory the Great instead held that the righteous entered heaven immediately at death.⁸

Medieval theology and the Reformation break

In the Alexandrian school, the idea of an intermediate state developed into a doctrine of the soul’s gradual purification after death, which in time paved the way for the Roman Catholic doctrine of purgatory.⁸ Medieval theology retained the intermediate state and built purgatory upon it for all but the most pure souls, and added the limbus patrum, where the Old Testament saints were thought to await Christ’s resurrection.⁹

The Reformers “rejected the doctrine of purgatory, and also the whole idea of a real intermediate state,” holding instead that those who die in the Lord enter heaven’s bliss immediately, and those who die in their sins descend immediately to hell.⁹ Some Socinians and Anabaptists nonetheless revived the early church’s minority view that the soul sleeps from death until the resurrection, a position Calvin wrote a treatise to refute.⁹

Translation history

English translations have handled the word inconsistently since the King James Version rendered it, in different places, as “hell,” “the grave,” and “the pit.” The American Standard Version of 1901 replaced this with a single, uniform transliteration, “Sheol,” rather than letting the choice of English word vary from one passage to the next.⁴

Opposing Views

Present-day critical scholarship often reconstructs Sheol differently from the confessional reading above: not as a realm within which the righteous and the wicked are distinguished, but as a single, morally neutral underworld borrowed from the surrounding Gentile conception of the afterlife. On this reading, both the righteous and the wicked “enter the dreary abode of the shades, the land of forgetfulness,” which is “in itself neither a place of rewards nor a place of punishment,” but rather “a place of weakened consciousness and of slumbrous inactivity, where life has lost its interests and the joy of life is turned into sadness.” Some who hold this view take Sheol to be the permanent abode of all the dead without exception; others find that it still holds out a hope of eventual escape for the pious.⁹

Objections and Responses

If Sheol is simply the neutral realm all the dead enter alike, the Old Testament’s warnings against the wicked descending there are empty threats. Several passages set descent into Sheol specifically as danger and punishment for the wicked (Ps. 9:17; 49:14; 55:15; Prov. 15:11, 24). “The warning and threatening contained in these passages is lost altogether, if Sheol is conceived of as a neutral place whither all go.”¹

The Jewish and patristic picture of a two-chambered Sheol, paradise and Gehenna, shows Scripture teaches a literal, spatially divided underworld like the pagan one. “The idea of such a divided Sheol is borrowed from the Gentile conception of the underworld, and finds no support in Scripture. It is only of Sheol as the state of death that we can speak as having two divisions, but then we are speaking figuratively.” Even in the Old Testament, those who die in the Lord enter directly upon a fuller enjoyment of salvation’s blessings rather than descending into any underworld in a literal sense (Num. 23:5, 10; Ps. 16:11; 17:15; 73:24; Prov. 14:32), and Enoch and Elijah were taken up rather than descending anywhere at all (Heb. 11:5).¹

Related Doctrines

References

Louis Berkhof, Systematic Theology (London: Banner of Truth Trust, 1969), 670-671. ↩ ↩² ↩³
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677/1689), chap. 31, “Of the State of Man after Death and of the Resurrection of the Dead,” para. 1. ↩
The Savoy Declaration of Faith and Order (1658), chap. 31, “Of the State of Men after Death, and of the Resurrection of the Dead,” para. 1. ↩
Loraine Boettner, Immortality (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company, 1956), chap. 3, “The Intermediate State,” sec. 2, “Terms: Sheol and Hades.” ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵
Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, Volume III (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1873), 733. ↩
Hodge, 3:735. ↩ ↩²
Jean Daillé, quoted in Hodge, 3:736. ↩
Berkhof, 665. ↩ ↩²
Berkhof, 666. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴