Sheol

Sheol is the underworld of the Hebrew Bible, and it is important precisely because it is not heaven or hell in the later sense, it predates that division. In the older strata of the Hebrew scriptures, Sheol is the common destination of all the dead, righteous and wicked alike: a shadowy, silent pit deep in the earth to which everyone descends, where the shades (rephaim) exist in a dim, weakened, sleeplike state. Its most striking feature is separation from God and from worship, "the dead praise not the Lord," says the Psalmist; "in Sheol who shall give thee thanks?", so that the tragedy of death is above all the loss of the vibrant relationship with the living God that defined Israelite religion. There is little sense here of reward or punishment after death; the emphasis of the Hebrew Bible falls overwhelmingly on this life, on covenant and blessing in the land.

Only in the latest books and in the Second Temple period does a differentiated afterlife emerge, resurrection, judgement, and the sorting of the dead, transforming the undivided gloom of Sheol into the beginnings of heaven and Gehenna. Sheol thus preserves an older Israelite vision: death as a universal descent into silence, its sting not torment but the end of praise.

In most of the Hebrew Bible everyone goes to Sheol. The righteous and the wicked, the king and the labourer, all go down to the same place, and it is described as silence, dust, darkness and a state in which the dead do not praise God. There is no judgement in it, no division, and no return. Passages that appear to promise more are few and are argued over, and the general picture is remarkably consistent across a long period.

The change belongs to the Second Temple period. Under Persian and then Hellenistic influence, and in the pressure of persecution where the righteous were visibly dying badly, Jewish writing developed resurrection, judgement and a division of the dead. By the first century the Pharisees held resurrection and the Sadducees did not, which is a live dispute recorded in sources on both sides.

The translations then blurred what had happened. The Septuagint rendered Sheol as Hades, importing a Greek geography with rivers and a ruler. Early English Bibles rendered both Sheol and Gehenna as hell, which merged the neutral grave of the older texts with the fiery judgement of the later ones. A reader working only in English translation cannot see the development at all, because two very different ideas arrive under the same word.