Sheol

Dust gets into everything down there. It settles on the mouths of kings who once kept servants to sweep for them, and nobody sweeps now, because nobody in Sheol has hands worth the name. The word surfaces sixty-five or sixty-six times across the Hebrew Bible, depending on which disputed lines are counted, and not one of those appearances is cheerful.

The writers agree on very little about the place except the three things that matter most. It lies under the ground. Everyone alive is going there. It is dark and it is joyless. Job reaches for four separate words for blackness inside two verses and still cannot get the shade right, and settles for a land of gloom and deep shadow, without order, where the light itself is like darkness. Elsewhere the ground is wet. Job puts water down there and the Psalms put mud, the sucking kind that keeps a foot. It is fitted with gates, which says something about the anxieties of the people who imagined it, and it has corners and chambers and a farthest recess, one room beneath another. It marks the greatest possible distance from heaven. That is the measurement the poets keep coming back to, the full height of the cosmos, top to bottom.

The dead there are the rephaim, which English renders as shades, and the Hebrew carries a sense of slackness. Whatever they were has gone loose. Ezekiel walks the ranks of the fallen warriors and finds them laid out nation by nation in their allotted quarters, swords set beneath their heads, shields laid over their bones, weapons kept for men who will never lift them again. None of them moves. Jacob, told that Joseph is dead, says he will go down mourning to his son in Sheol and be a mourner there still, which is one of the very few glimpses of anyone doing anything at all. Rank survives the journey in a purely decorative way. Nobody praises God down there, and one of the names for the place is simply Dumah, the abode of silence.

Once, and the passage is worth the trouble of reaching, the place wakes up. Isaiah imagines the king of Babylon on his way down, and Sheol rouses itself from beneath to meet him at the door. The shades stir. Every dead king of every nation gets off his throne to look, and what they say to the man who ruined them is not a curse but a flat observation, that he has become weak, like them. Then the arrangements. His pomp comes down with him and the sound of his harps comes down too, and he is given a bed of maggots and a blanket of worms.

The place has a mouth, and the texts are not shy about it. Sheol is never full and never satisfied, and Isaiah has it widening its throat without limit while the noise and the glory of Jerusalem slide in. Proverbs pictures it swallowing the living whole. Occasionally it does exactly that: when Korah and his household defy Moses the ground splits under their feet and they go down alive with their tents and everything they own, and the earth shuts over them. The ordinary route requires dying first. The arrival is the same either way. Older imagery gives the place ropes as well, cords of Sheol that bind a man where he stands, so that being close to death is described as being already tangled.

Saul tried to reach in the other direction, which was forbidden, and he went at night in a disguise because he had outlawed the practice himself. The woman at En-dor called Samuel up and saw an old man rising out of the earth wrapped in a robe, and the first words out of the prophet were a complaint about being disturbed. The dead do not enjoy being called. What the scene concedes is stranger than what it forbids, since somebody down there was still available, still recognisable, still in the coat he was buried in, and still in a position to deliver very bad news.

Where the whole idea came from is a real argument. One reading traces it inward from Mesopotamia, where the dead went to a land of no return behind seven gates with a watchman at the first of them, and then finds a second reshaping in Greek Hades, on the reasonable grounds that both empires held the country in their turn and ideas travel with garrisons. The other reading keeps it at home and older, and grows it out of the family tomb. Judahite burial went down into rock, a passage cut into a hillside, chambers with benches and carved headrests, the bones of earlier generations swept aside into a pit in the corner to make room for the newly dead. Graves had gates and bolts, so Sheol had gates and bolts. Families lay together, so Sheol had compartments, a clan to a room. On that reading it is a family grave drawn at national scale, and the insistence in the law that ancestral land must never be sold away starts to look like an obligation owed to whoever is lying under it.

The living kept up their end for a long while. Iron Age tombs in Judah come with lamps and dishes and food left for the occupants, and the Bible preserves the word marzeah for a feast held with and for the dead, the same institution attested up the coast at Ugarit, where the cognate of rephaim names a line of dead kings and heroes. In one prickly passage of Isaiah even the word normally reserved for gods is used of the dead. The prophets disapproved of nearly all of it. Their disapproval is the best evidence that it was going on.

What Sheol does is level. It takes the righteous and the wicked on identical terms, a state of affairs Ecclesiastes calls an injustice and then declines to fix, and it takes the rich and the poor, the master and the slave, the old and the young into the same dark. There is no fire in it and no punishment, because there is no judgement in it, nothing to be sorted, only somewhere to be put. Its cruelty is entirely subtractive. No work, no knowledge, no memory, no daylight, and above all no God, since the one thing said of the dead over and over is that they cannot praise him and he does not walk among them.

Its limits belong to a single party. No hero fights his way back out in the Hebrew Bible, no rite buys anybody free, and return is ruled out plainly: a cloud disperses and is gone, says Job, and so does the man who goes down. But God’s reach is said to run further than the pit’s. He kills and makes alive, brings down to Sheol and raises up. Amos has him promise that a man who digs his way into Sheol will be pulled out by the hand. Jonah, in the fish, says he called from the belly of Sheol and was heard. These are declarations of range rather than offers of rescue, and the texts mostly intend them that way, as the claim that there is nowhere God cannot go, including the one place nobody comes back from.

The bleakness did not hold. Across the Second Temple centuries the chambers acquired a moral function, and the compartments that had once sorted the dead by clan began sorting them by desert instead. The Book of Enoch gives four: one with a bright spring where the righteous wait in comfort, one for the moderately decent, one where the murdered wait on justice, and one where the wicked are kept. Out of that last room came Gehenna and its fire. When the scriptures went into Greek the translators reached for the nearest available word and put Hades where Sheol had stood, and in time everything Hades meant came back the other way. The older idea underneath is colder and considerably odder than the hell it turned into. Sheol never burned anybody. There was nothing left down there to burn.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Sheol?

Sheol is the underworld of the Hebrew Bible, a dark subterranean land where the dead exist as weakened shades called rephaim. It is described as dusty, silent, disordered and fitted with gates, lying at the greatest possible distance from heaven. The word appears roughly sixty-five times in the Hebrew Bible and is translated in English versions as the grave, the pit, or the nether-world.

Is Sheol the same as hell?

No. Sheol in the Hebrew Bible contains no fire, no torment and no judgement, and it receives the righteous and the wicked on exactly the same terms. The conflation with hell began when the Hebrew scriptures were translated into Greek and Sheol was rendered as Hades, and it deepened in the Second Temple period when Sheol was imagined as divided into moral compartments, one of which developed into Gehenna.

Who goes to Sheol?

Everyone. The Hebrew Bible offers no exemption for piety and no worse destination for wickedness, and Ecclesiastes states outright that the same fate comes to the righteous and the wicked alike. Kings, slaves, the rich and the poor all arrive on equal footing, and Isaiah pictures dead kings rising from their thrones only to tell a newcomer that he is now as weak as they are.

Can anyone come back from Sheol?

Not by their own effort, and no hero or ritual in the Hebrew Bible retrieves a soul from it. The texts describe return as impossible, comparing the dead man to a cloud that disperses and does not re-form. The one exception granted is God’s own reach, since passages in Samuel, Amos, Jonah and the Psalms insist he can bring people down to Sheol and raise them up again.

Where is Sheol located?

Sheol is placed underneath the earth, deep enough that it functions in Hebrew poetry as the opposite pole to heaven. Some passages describe it as watery or muddy, and one strand of scholarship reads the whole conception as an enlargement of the rock-cut family tomb, with its downward passage, its sealed entrance and its separate chambers for separate clans.

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Lilith, Nephilim, Leviathan, Behemoth, Ziz, Dybbuk, Shedim, Golem, Satan, Ereshkigal, Hades, Tartarus, Erebus, Hel, Mictlan