Hello brothers and sisters,
I want to begin with a funeral. Not a particular one. The generic one, the service that runs almost on autopilot in chapels and parlors across the Western world. Someone we love has died, and the words begin to arrive, soft and sure of themselves. She is in a better place now. He is looking down on us. She got her wings. He is finally free of that broken body, a soul released upward into the light.
We say these things because they comfort us, and there is real comfort in them, so I have no interest in being cruel about it. But I want to ask the question underneath them, the one almost nobody stops to ask, because we assume it was settled long ago and filed away.
Where did that picture come from?
The disembodied soul. The immediate flight upward. The body left behind like a husk, discarded, unimportant. The endless existence somewhere above the clouds. Ask most Christians where the dead are at this very moment, and some version of that map is what they will sketch for you.
Then ask them where they got it and watch the room go quiet.
Here is the uncomfortable claim this whole series rests on. That map is not the Bible’s map. A great deal of it was drawn by hands that never read Moses or the prophets.
Some of it is Greek. Some of it is medieval. Some of it, as we will see in a few weeks, was lifted straight from pagan poetry and handed back to us with a Christian label glued on the front.
We inherited a geography of the dead assembled from a dozen mismatched sources, laid it over the text like a sheet of tracing paper, and then read the text through it for so long that we stopped noticing the lines underneath do not match the lines on top.
This series is an attempt to peel the tracing paper off and look at what Scripture actually drew.
Let’s dig in.
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Two witnesses, one country
If you have followed this publication for any length of time, you know the lens I read through, but a new series deserves a fresh statement of it. Especially with how many new readers we’ve picked up since starting the Daniel series.
I hold that both the Hebrew Masoretic Text and the Greek Septuagint are authoritative. Both were preserved, intentionally and providentially, to tell us the truth. I do not treat one as the real Bible and the other as a flawed cousin. When they say the same thing, they confirm each other. When they diverge, and on the geography of the dead they diverge in some fascinating places, I do not assume one of them slipped. I assume, until the evidence leads me somewhere else, that they are two witnesses describing the same country from two vantage points, and that the fuller truth is standing where their lines of sight cross.
That matters enormously for this subject, because the afterlife is exactly the kind of territory where the Hebrew tends to hold its cards close and the Greek tends to say the quiet part out loud. Over and over in the posts ahead you will watch the Masoretic Text leave a hope implicit, buried, waiting, and watch the Old Greek step forward and speak it plainly.
Neither is wrong.
The Hebrew guards the mystery. The Greek draws out the answer. You need both to see the whole map.
The problem is partly in the words
Before we can talk about where the dead go, we have to admit that our English Bibles handed us a broken instrument.
There is one word in particular that has done more to distort this subject than any other, and I am going to make a decision right now that will feel strange to some of you. Across this entire series, I am not going to use the word “hell.”
Not once, if I can help it.
After thinking and praying long and hard about it, I’ve decided to do this not to be provocative, but because that single English word has been made to carry the weight of at least four completely distinct things in Scripture and it’s vital that we keep them straight.
Sheol, the realm of the dead in Hebrew, which was translated to Hades in Greek.
Gehenna, which was a real, smoking valley you could walk to outside Jerusalem.
Tartarus, a prison connected to Sheol/Hades that was never built for humans at all.
The Lake of Fire, which is something else entirely.
Four different words, four different realities, flattened by translators into one blunt syllable that then got filled up with imagery no biblical writer would recognize.
When you use one word for four things, you lose the ability to think clearly about any of them. So we are going to set the blunt instrument down and pick up the precision blades. And I’m going to spend a whole post on where our modern picture of hell actually came from, because the answer isn’t Scripture.
The word “hell” is not the only casualty. There is also the word “soul.”
Most of us carry, without ever choosing it, a picture of the human person as a ghost driving a body around. The real you is the soul, invisible and immortal, temporarily housed in a shell of meat, and death is simply the moment the ghost steps out of the car and walks away intact.
That picture feels biblical, but it isn’t. It’s a product of Greek dualism, and it runs almost exactly backward to how Scripture describes you.
Look at the first time the Bible tells us what a human being is.
Genesis 2:7 (NRSVUE)
“then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.”
Okay, so far so good. Now let’s look at how the KJV renders it, because it’s one of the major sources for this problem.
Genesis 2:7 (KJV)
“And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.”
Now here’s a highly instructive footnote on this verse from the NET Bible:
The Hebrew term נֶפֶשׁ (nefesh, “being”) is often translated “soul,” but the word usually refers to the whole person. The phrase נֶפֶשׁ חַיָּה (nefesh khayyah, “living being”) is used of both animals and human beings (see 1:20, 24, 30; 2:19).
Now let’s slow down and really look at that last clause across these renderings, because everything downstream depends on it.
The man did not receive a soul in the modern sense of a spiritual essence. The man became a living being. The Hebrew word behind “living being” is נֶפֶשׁ (nephesh, “living being” or “self.” Sometimes also used for “life,” “appetite,” or “persons” as in a population count).
Now here’s the important bit. This word does not mean a spiritual part or essence locked inside you. Not in any use anywhere in the Hebrew Bible. It means the whole living creature, the entire animated person, dust and breath together as one. You do not have a nephesh. You are one. God took earth, and added breath, and the sum of those two things standing up and drawing air was the living being.
Which tells you something about death, too. Watch what the same picture does in reverse.
Ecclesiastes 12:7 (NKJV)
Then the dust will return to the earth as it was, And the spirit will return to God who gave it.
Formed from dust and breath. Unmade back into dust and breath.
The body returns to the ground it was taken from, and the spirit or breath, רוּחַ (ruach, which means “breath,” “wind,” and “spirit” all at once, just as the Greek pneuma does), returns to the God who first breathed it in.
Notice the word Scripture reaches for there. Not soul. Spirit. That distinction is going to do some major heavy lifting in this series, and I will give it a full post of its own before long, because until we are clear on what a human being actually is, every question about where a human being goes will come out crooked.
If you’ve found this work insightful, enlightening, or even challenging, the most direct way to share it is by restacking. But you can also share it directly with any friend who needs to see that Sheol and the afterlife are nothing like what we were always taught.
The road ahead
So here is the country we are going to map together, and roughly the order we will walk it.
We will start with a single word and the moment it crossed a language barrier, because that crossing is where most of the confusion was born.
Then we will turn to the person, since you cannot trace where someone goes until you know what they are, and clear the ground of the other borrowed word, the pagan-rooted “hell.”
We will stand in the smoking valley of Gehenna while it was still a real place with a real reputation.
Then we’ll follow the dead down into Sheol, and I will make the case that this, not heaven, is where the dead of this age have gone to wait. All of them. And we’ll explore the evidence for this view.
From there the ground begins to tilt upward. We will follow Christ Himself down into the realm of the dead, and ask what He did there, and for whom. We will reach the resurrection, the hinge on which the whole map turns, the moment the popular picture of floating souls finally collapses under the weight of raised bodies.
And we will end where Scripture ends, which is not with disembodied spirits drifting forever in a cloudy heaven, but with heaven and earth remade and joined, and a very physical, very embodied home on a renewed creation.
I want to be honest with you at the outset about how I am going to handle the hardest ground. On some of these questions I hold real convictions and I will tell you plainly what they are.
On others, and the eternal state of the lost is the sharpest of them, I am going to lay the views side by side, argue each one at full strength, and trust you to weigh them before God rather than tell you what to conclude. Where I lean, I will say I lean. Where I am genuinely unsettled, I will not pretend otherwise to give you a tidier answer than the text gives me.
If you’ve been with me for any length of time, you’ll know that this not false modesty. It is the only honest way I know to handle a subject this large with a Bible this deep and an understanding that falls far short of God.
Why any of this matters
You might be tempted to file all of this under interesting but academic.
I implore you not to.
How you picture the dead shapes how you grieve them. It shapes what you say at the graveside and whether the words are true. It shapes how you hope, and whether that hope can survive an honest look at the text or shatters the first time someone asks a hard question.
It even shapes how you evangelize, because a gospel aimed at getting disembodied souls up to heaven is a smaller and stranger thing than the gospel Scripture actually preaches, which aims at raising the dead and remaking the world.
And here is the part I most want you to hear before we begin.
The biblical map is not the grim downgrade you might fear. When you trade the floating soul for the resurrected body, when you trade the evacuation of the world for the renewal of it, you do not lose the comfort. You gain a bigger one.
The inherited picture asks you to hope that the best part of you escapes. The biblical picture promises that the whole of you, dust and breath, is going to be raised and set down in a world made new. That is not a consolation prize. That is a better and more solid hope than the one we were handed, and it has the enormous advantage of being the one actually written down.
For most of my life I carried the popular map without ever once checking it against the text. When I finally sat down and read Scripture for what it plainly says instead of for what I had been told it says, this was one of the very first places the inherited picture cracked in my hands.
I do not regret that it cracked. I only wish it had happened sooner.
So that is where we are going. Next time we start with a translation decision made more than two centuries before Christ. Jewish scholars sat down to carry their Scriptures into Greek, came to the Hebrew word for the realm of the dead, and had to choose a Greek word for it.
The word they reached for was the right one.
But it also arrived carrying a great deal of luggage that had nothing to do with Scripture. And sorting out what the translators actually did from what later readers piled on top of it turns out to be the front door to everything else in this series.
Until then, be Berean. Keep reading. Keep studying. Keep pushing back when something doesn’t sound right.
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Dropping the word is the right call, and there is a number that makes the case for you.
The King James renders sheol as grave thirty one times, hell thirty one times and pit three times. Sixty five occurrences, one Hebrew word, three English ones. Translators were deciding verse by verse who they thought was down there and picking a word to match it, and four centuries of readers inherited the decision without ever seeing the reasoning behind any of it.
When you reach the post about where the picture came from, that count earns its place, because it puts the sorting inside the translation instead of in the text.
When you wrote: “After thinking long and hard about it, I’ve decided to do this to be provocative, but because that single English word has been made to carry the weight of at least four completely distinct things in Scripture and it’s vital that we keep them straight.”
Did you mean “… I’ve decided to to this to be provocative …” or “… I’ve decided not to do this to be provocative …”. The reason I ask is because the following “but” suggests a contrast but without the “not”, it doesn’t feel like there is a contrast. Just wondering.