Loading...I was recently asked what the Old Testament teaches about “hell” and whether that’s what “Sheol” refers to. If not (or if so), what it the view of the afterlife in the Hebrew Bible? This is a topic I dealt with in my book Heaven and Hell (Simon & Schuster, 2020) and I posted on it some years ago on the blog. This is what I said.
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When trying to figure out where the Christian ideas of heaven and hell came from, an obvious place to start is with the Hebrew Bible. Jesus himself held to the authority of the Hebrew Scriptures. To be sure, there was not a completely fixed canon in his day, which all Jews everywhere agreed to. But virtually all Jews we know of ascribed to the high authority (and Mosaic authorship) of the Torah (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy); and most Jews – including Jesus – also considered the prophets authoritative; Jesus also
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Hi Bart, Answers become simple when we come to understand and accept the notion of ‘Mind” being the foundation of everything, that solid physical objects exist ONLY in mind, for absent Mind there are no solid objects. Most people find this impossible to accept, yet Albert Einstein in 1905 wrote of everything being Energy, and he proclaimed that there are no solid objects, just energy slowed to vibrations low enough to be seen by the eye (this would be the ‘inner eye’, for our eyes too are Mental constructs). This is the Jesus message: Everything is Mind, and is the power of Jesus: Energy internal of the Mind IS the healing energy. This is entirely Jesus’ message; everything else is myth and symbolism. Heaven is having this understanding, it is not a place, it is a state of Mind. Hell too is a state of mind; mental confusion that degrades and disorders energy, creating an unwelcome mental result — terribly unwelcome; horrifying! The Gospel of Thomas makes perfect sense when read having this understanding of Mind. It is not ‘First Century” because the Bible was written and compiled by Paul’s travel companions, whose iinterests were otherwise: of building churches.
This view of the “afterlife” has never made sense to me. If there was no differentiation between body and soul in the ancient Israelites’ view, what exactly was it that they thought went to sheol? If your body was placed in the grave after death, that should have been the end of it in their view, correct? In that case, nothing apparently survived and there should be nothing to experience after death, correct? Belief in an afterlife goes back at least to ancient Mesopotamia, where their conception of it as a “house of dust and darkness” closely resembles the Hebrew concept of sheol. The famous grave pit of queen Puabi at Ur, with her many attendants and grave goods buried with her, is hard to conceptualize apart from the concept of an afterlife. Indeed, belief in an afterlife of some sort probably goes back much further, into prehistory, and perhaps even as far back as the Neanderthals or before (e.g. Homo Naledi). Why should the ancient Israelites be the only exception to this general and cross-cultural belief in an afterlife?
There were many other peoples who did not believe in an afterlife (it was not widely believed in by ancient Greeks and romans). In any event, the problem with thinking that souls can’t go somehwer without bodies is still with us today. In the oldest account from Mesopotamia, the Epic of Gilgamesh, the afterlife entails eating dirt in the grave….
Maybe it’s just my Greek philosophical heritage functioning as a mental block, but I can’t see how an inanimate corpse (then or now) could have been conceived as being able to eat anything, dirt included. Unless the ancients had a conception of a ‘life-force’ as somehow remaining with the body in the grave – something to do the eating, as it were(?) Or are you saying their term Sheol was only just a metaphor for death?
Regardless, I do wonder about your first sentence, however. How can we know that the regular man or woman ‘in the street’ didn’t believe in an afterlife of some sort? Are you sure that we’re not just conflating what the educated literati of the Greek and Roman world thought with what the general population may have believed, since we only have access to what is in our written sources?
Not just your Greek philosophical heritage, but more important your post-Enlightenment scientific understanding of how the world works. Ancients didn’t have that.
We can’t really know about the person in the street one way or the others. That’s a long story but historians have grappeled with it long, hard, and seriously for many years. Our sources re all from literates, and even when they describe hoi polloi, we have *their* perceptios of them. There may be a few ways around the problem (ancient satire may be more useful than ancient polemics, e.g.), but it’s very, very difficult.
It’s interesting that you see the Hebrew Bible as indicating there’s nothing after we die. Jesus taught from the Hebrew bible and believed in the resurrection. I mean, he’s the Resurrected OG. Josephus believed in resurrection (War of the Jews 2:163; 3.374). Philo believed in the soul, and I’m pretty sure he believed in a resurrection as well. Educated Jews from the first century did not believe death was the end based on these same Hebrew Scriptures.
How could eternal death have been the prevalent view before Christianity hit the scene when there are so many scriptures that indicate otherwise? Psalm 16:8-11; Psalm 49:13-15; Psalm 71:20; Isaiah 16:19-20; Daniel 12:2-3; Hosea 6:1-2; the book of Jonah.
In my book I explain that Sheol is not a place people went to as a kind of Israelite Hades, but is a synonym for “grave” or “pit” Philo, of course, is a different story.
According to Strong’s Hebrew concordance, there are 66 uses of sheol (in various forms). In Talmudic times, the rabbis were so disturbed by the lack of any mention of resurrection (revival of the dead) in the Torah (though they did try to stretch some verses) that they decreed that anyone who denied it could be found there would lose his place in the world to come.
A realm of darkness, or an unfurnished space, a threshold to the great,,,next,,,,?
Beneath the earth, in Sheol’s silent shade,
A realm of rest, where all are equal made.
No torment fierce, no blissful paradise,
But tranquil pause, the soul’s quiet respite.
A threshold vague, where past and future meet,
Here, souls may find their course in calm retreat.
Is this the end, or but a place between,
Where spirits pause, and life’s next steps convene?
Unseen by any mortal eye’s clear sight,
It holds the keys to darkness and to light.
A waiting room for those who’ve left the day,
To choose their path, to go or yet to stay.
In Sheol’s grasp, we find a deeper lore,
The silent echoes of the evermore.
A place to ponder, where all journeys blend,
The soul’s brief stop, on its way to the journey’s end.
The ancients had a hard way of looking at things. My own “favorite” worst view of an afterlife is from the Epic of Gilgamesh, Enkidu’s dream of the deceased as birds sitting in the dark, their wings covered in mud and dust. Yikes! I’ll take oblivion over that!
In Mathew 10:28 Jesus differentiates between the body and the soul. Is this an indication that Mathew was influenced by Greek philosophy? I can’t imagine that Jesus himself was
Here’s what I say about it in my book Heaven and Hell:
And so, for example, in Matthew 10:28, Jesus says that people should not fear anyone who can “kill the body but cannot kill the soul.” In other words – they should have no fear of physically dying. We will all die, one way or another; we should not fear those who can make it happen sooner rather than later. Instead, he continues, “fear the one who can annihilate both the soul and body in Gehenna.” It is important to note that Jesus here does not merely say that God will “kill” a person’s soul: he will “annihilate” (or “exterminate”) it. After that it will not exist.
This stands in contrast to those Jews who could expect a future resurrection. For them, the “soul” or “breath” that enlivens their body is taken away at death. But at the resurrection it will be returned, bringing the body back to life. That, however, would only come to those whose bodies have died but whose life force is restored. If the life-force too is destroyed, there will be no resurrection into God’s coming kingdom. There will only be death. God alone can destroy the life-force. When he does so the person is not just physically dead, but completely dead, destroyed, exterminated out of existence.
Worse than that, these enemies of God would be cast, unburied, into Gehenna, infamous as a place of utter desolation, a place despised and abandoned by God. This was worse even than not being buried – not because it implied future torment, but because it precluded any possibility of a place of rest, a place of peace. Sinners would end as cadavers gnawed by worms and burned by fire. For them there would never again be any hope of life.
Dear Dr Ehrman,
Longtime reader of your blog. This is slightly o/t. I am working on a paper for the ISBL this July-August on biblical scholars who also write novels within the category of Christian Fiction, and have something of an unusual question to ask you. What is your height?
I ask solely for scholarly reasons. I am trying to account for a piece of data in one particular biblical scholar’s novel. If you prefer, please email me your reply at [email protected]
Yours sincerely,
Deane Galbraith
My height? Shrinking. Currently 5′ 8.5″ but it’s hard to see how that could shed light on a fictional account of someone who might be me???
Thank you, especially given that this was a bit of an out-of-the-box question. The character in question is fictional and a composite, but almost certainly based primarily on you. Your height confirms it. If you like, I can send you a copy of our paper (a joint one) once delivered at the beginning of August. I think you will be interested, but can’t say too much more right now. Thanks again.
OK, but I don’t see how. Anyone could guess my height! And there are roughly a 389 million people in the world with exact same height!
I hope there might be more blog posts on Sheol forthcoming, especially concerning the more controversial positions you came to during the research for Heaven and Hell. That’s something you’ve never really covered in detail on the blog.
Hi, Bart,
1) What kind of salvation of women is talked of in 1Timothy 2:15 ?
[15] Yet she will be saved through childbearing, provided they continue in faith and love and holiness, with modesty.
I wish I knew. Is he saying they’ll survive childbirth, or that by fulfilling their divine function of having children they’ll obtain salvation?
I see in another post that Psalm 16 is not about being dead but how God rescues from death. Psalm 71 I think is about being revived or renewed in spirit like one who is rescued from death.(?)
Psalm 49, though, I’m reading it as the foolish and ignorant will perish and be dead forever, but the psalmist will be rescued from Sheol upon his death.
I linked the wrong Isaiah passage in my previous comment. I meant Isaiah 26:19-20.
After reading subsequent posts, my attempt to rephrase your argument. How did I do?
Two views of Sheol are (a) a shadowy underworld of sorts, and (b) a poetic word for the body’s resting place. Other views may exist.
Most instances are in poetry that parallels Sheol with “the grave” etc. Exceptions are too few to deduce any pervasive concept of an afterlife, even if individual thinkers entertained the idea. Passages that animate the dead may be a literary device akin to us referring to someone turning in their grave. References to inability to worship etc are consistent with cessation of existence.
Sheol as an underworld raises questions. If soul is akin to breath, reliant on body, what, exactly goes to Sheol? If bodily resurrection emerged from earlier views rather than radically supplanting them, how would an earlier underworld have worked?
An intermediate concept between “the grave” and “an underworld” is that of being “in storage”. Inert, unplugged, but revivable in principle. The concept of bodily resurrection presupposes this. As an aside, note that in English we may parallel “in storage” with “on the shelf”.
All looks pretty good to me.
That was a challenge to get under 200 words. My first draft was twice that length.
As well as reading subsequent posts, I also had another look at some of your Youtube interviews from after the publication of Heaven and Hell. In several of them I feel you overstate things, e.g. saying that Sheol *always* occurs in parallel with “the grave”, rather than just usually.
I’ve heard people argue that the fact Sheol occurs without a definite article strongly suggests it’s a place. However, I don’t know if Hebrew has counterparts to my English counterexample of the word “storage”, but I expect so.
I’ve also heard people argue that some Biblical stories (including the Saul/Samuel one) are illuminated by beliefs about the dead in neighbouring Mesopotamian cultures. I don’t know much about that, but it would be an interesting topic to explore. I expect ancient Israelites were indeed influenced by such borrowed ideas, but to what extent they ever really integrated them into their own religion is another question. (At the very least, we know necromancers existed, so there must have been folk tales to account for what necromancers did.)
Please let me know if you think anything I’ve said is misguided.
I talk about Mesopotamia in my book, at least the Epic of Gilamesh, if that’s what they have in mind. Sheol is indeed a place. It’s the place bodies are buried in (a tomb / grave)
Dear Professor Ehrman,
I agree that the Israelites believed that we are living souls (as are birds… in Genesis.) In death, the soul does not leave us and it can die.
So, I was surprised by a tv documentary on archeological finds in Israel that featured an ancient home with a hole in the ceiling/roof. They said that the Jews believed that the soul left the body and headed up to ??? The holes were called soul holes. I have no idea how a ceiling could impede a soul’s trip.
My only solution is that they actually meant spirit not soul. The spirit goes back to God. Although, again, why would a roof be a barrier?
Have you ever heard of a soul hole and does it reflect actual beliefs in Jesus time?
No. Sounds like a TV producer wsa going for something intriguing. Making stuff up?