WHAT IS HELL? Welcome to Hell Two: "Sheol"

 A bible student pokes around inside the scriptures, looking for hell fire and damnation. This, the second post, concerns "Sheol," a Hebrew word translated as "hell" in the King James version of the Holy Bible.

Among the big surprises ... the Jewish hell/Sheol originally was not hot!


But there were other surprises in store:

1. "Sheol," translated in the KJV as “hell,” is the Hebrew word for the common grave, not for a burning lake of fire. Many of the places where you read "hell," you should have been reading "grave."
2. Sheol is it not the lake of fire: Even the most conservative scholars admit that only after hundreds of years did Sheol begin to take on the implications of afterlife punishments and or judgment of the dead. Sheol was a threat held over the living: the threat that they would be killed.
3. Sheol originally did not necessarily imply eternal damnation or hell fire or eternal suffering.
4. Modern translations now render the word as “grave,” not "hell," and rightly so, because the grave is truly all that is implied.
5. God is in Hell! This may be of little comfort, however, the idea that God is in Heaven but that the Devil rules Sheol is a much later myth. Psalms 139:8, for example, says the following: “If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there.” The God of the Bible is in hell as well as in heaven.
6. The conventional wisdom of Christianity says that the worst thing about Hell/Sheol is that, in Hell, men will be eternally separated from God, but this notion conflicts with the scriptures, including the scripture above. God is present everywhere, the bible teaches, even in hell/the grave!

“Sheol” has sometimes been confused with “Hades” (the Greek word for the grave) probably because the Christian Bible was first translated to Greek. The Greek New Testament (Septuagint) used the word Greek word “Hades“ in place of the Hebrew word "Sheol." However, the Greek concept of Hades had connotations that were not present in the Jewish word “Sheol,” although Jewish and Greek cultures intermingled and undoubtedly influenced each other’s thinking about the grave.

By the time of Jesus, the Greeks had developed the concept of an “abode of the dead.” Hades is not particularly a Jewish concept, although by the time of the Roman occupation, Judaism had also developed a similar (though not identical) concept of an underworld.

To make a long story short, so far as the bible is concerned everyone goes to hell when he/she dies, but Greeks reading the word Hades would naturally attach to the word different, new connotations, based upon their own world view. For more information on Sheol see Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheol

I now invite you to visit the next post, which is on the hell subtopic of "Hades:: http://peddlersack-religion.blogspot.com/2007/11/biblical-hell-word-study-part-three.html

P.S. Did you know that Frank Ellsworth Lockwood is also the author of the novel, "Captains All"? If you like, you can pre-view or purchase the book here:

https://www.createspace.com/4133264