Sheol
Sheol is the Hebrew abode of the dead, of departed spirits; the underworld. In the Hebrew Bible it is portrayed as a comfortless place deep beneath the earth, beyond gates, where both the bad and the good, slave and king, pious and wicked must go after death to sleep in silence and oblivion in the dust. In some sources, for example in Deuteronomy 32:22, Sheol seems to be synonymous with the depths of the earth. Sheol is comparable to the gloomy, twilight afterlife inhabited by miserable, incorporeal souls as in the Hades or Tartarus from Greek mythology. Sheol is the common destination of both the righteous and the unrighteous dead; the righteous Job sees it as his destination (Job 3). In the Book of Job, while Satan is portrayed as tormenting and testing the living, he does not appear to have any particular presidency over Sheol, or to dwell in Sheol.Jacob, not comforted at the reported death of Joseph, exclaims: "I shall go down to my son a mourner unto Sheol" (Genesis xxxvii. 36). Sheol may be personified: Sheol is never satiated (Proverbs 30:20); she "makes wide her soul," (Isaiah. 5:14).
Psalms Chapter 18:
- 5 The breakers of death surged round about me; the menacing floods terrified me.
- 6 The cords of Sheol tightened; the snares of death lay in wait for me.
- 7 In my distress I called out: LORD! I cried out to my God. From his temple he heard my voice; my cry to him reached his ears.
The Hebrew concept is paralleled in the Sumerian Netherworld to which Inanna descends. See also Ereshkigal..
The English word hell comes from Germanic mythology, now used in Judeo-Christian senses to represent the Hebrew word "Gehinnom," which technically means landfill.
The New Testament seems to draw a distinction between Sheol and "Gehinnom", or Gehenna (Jahannam in Islam), the fiery pit in which the evil dead are tormented for eternity. Both words are sometimes rendered into English as Hell. The most "hellish" notion in Jewish tradition is the Biblical word Gehinnom, later interpreted to refer to a place of eternal torment. But the source of the word is most interesting. Gei Hinnom was the valley of Hinnom (Joshua 15:8, 18:16; II Kings 23:10; Jeremiah 7:31; Nehemiah 11:30), a place where children were sacrificed to the Canaanite god Moloch. In Islam, this same word became Jahannam, an Islamic term for Hell.
The traditional Christian doctrine of the Harrowing of Hell asserts that Jesus delivered the souls of the righteous dead from Sheol between his crucifixion and resurrection.