Hello brothers and sisters,
Somewhere in Alexandria, more than two centuries before Christ, a group of Jewish scholars sat down with the Hebrew Scriptures and a problem.
They had been given the task of carrying the Law of Moses into Greek. Not because they wanted to be clever, and not because anyone thought the Hebrew was deficient, but because their own people were losing the ability to read it. Greek had become the language of the street, the market, the school, and the courtroom. A generation of Jewish children was growing up in Egypt speaking the language of Alexander’s empire as their mother tongue. If those children were going to hear Moses at all, someone was going to have to hand them Moses in Greek.
So they worked. And somewhere in the thirty-seventh chapter of Genesis they came to an old man refusing to be comforted, saying he would go down to his dead son in שְׁאוֹל (Sheol).
And they had to pick a word.
That decision, made by careful and pious men doing honest work, is the reason we are starting here rather than anywhere else. Because the word they chose was the right word. It was also a word that came with furniture. And almost everything that has gone wrong in the popular Christian picture of the afterlife can be traced, in one way or another, to what later readers did with that furniture.
Let’s dig in.
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The problem on the table
Put yourself at that desk for a moment.
Sheol appears in the Hebrew Scriptures around sixty-six times. It is the place the dead go. Not the individual tomb, which Hebrew calls קֶבֶר (qever), but the gathering place, the realm, the great below where everyone ends up. Jacob expects to go there. David sings about it. Job begs for it. It is where the righteous and the wicked alike descend, and the Hebrew Bible is remarkably restrained about what happens once you arrive.
Now translate that into Greek.
You have exactly two options, and both of them cost you something.
Option one is transliteration. Just carry the sound across. Write sheol in Greek letters and let the reader figure it out. This is what modern translators do with words like amen and hallelujah, and it has the great advantage of importing no foreign concept whatsoever.
It also has an enormous disadvantage.
Your reader is a fourteen-year-old in Alexandria who has never heard the word in his life. You have just handed him a meaningless syllable in the middle of the most emotionally devastating sentence in the Joseph narrative. The old man is weeping over his son and going down to... what? The reader stops. The text goes dead in his hands.
Because here’s the thing. It’s the third century B.C. The reader can’t just run to the book store and pick up a Bible dictionary or a lexicon. Especially since this is the first time the Hebrew scriptures have been translated into another language. There is no resource anywhere in Greek to help the reader understand.
That’s a real problem.
Option two is translation. Find the Greek word that means what Sheol means, the ordinary word every Greek speaker already uses for the place the dead go, and use it. Your reader understands the sentence instantly. Jacob is going down to the realm of the dead. The grief lands.
There was only one such word. ᾅδης (hadēs). It was the only Greek word that had a meaning anywhere in the same category as Sheol.
Clearly, the LXX translators went with option two. And I want to say plainly, before we look at what that cost, that I think they made the right choice.
What they actually did
Here is the scope of the decision. Across the Septuagint, Sheol is rendered as Hades in nearly every single occurrence. There are only a small handful of exceptions, where the translators reached instead for words meaning earth, or death, or pit. Otherwise it is Hades, over and over, throughout the Law and the Prophets and the Writings.
That is not a slip. That is a settled, deliberate, consistent editorial policy carried out across an entire library of books by multiple hands over multiple centuries.
They knew exactly what they were doing.
And notice what it tells us. When you see Hades in the Greek Old Testament, you are not looking at a new idea. You are looking at Sheol with a Greek coat on. Same realm. Same concept. Different alphabet.
Let’s look at a survey of six examples from the Brenton translation of the LXX.
A note before we start, because the numbering will look strange if you are checking along in your Hebrew-based Bible translation. The Septuagint counts some things differently than the Hebrew does. It calls 1 Samuel “Kings I” (or “Reigns” or “Kingdoms” depending on the English translation). And its Psalms run one number behind the Hebrew for most of the book. So what your English Bible calls Psalm 16 the Septuagint calls Psalm 15. Neither system is wrong. They are just two ways of dividing the same material, and they diverged early.
Six windows
Genesis 37:35 (LXX/Brenton)
And all his sons and his daughters gathered themselves together, and came to comfort him; but he would not be comforted, saying, I will go down to my son mourning to Hades; and his father wept for him.
Start with the grief, because it clarifies everything.
Jacob has just been handed a bloodied coat. He believes a wild animal has torn his son to pieces. His children stand around him trying to say something useful and he will not hear any of it. What he says is that he is going to go down to his boy, still mourning, in Hades.
Now ask yourself the question that looks obvious to us, having even a passing knowledge of Greek mythology. Is Jacob expecting to meet a Greek god there?
Of course not.
The idea is absurd on its face, and no reader in Alexandria would have given this a single thought. Jacob is saying what any grieving Hebrew father would say. My son is among the dead. I will be among the dead soon enough. I will carry this grief with me the whole way down. The Greek word is Hades. The place is Sheol. They are the same place, and the sentence means exactly what the Hebrew meant.
Genesis 42:38 (LXX/Brenton)
But he said, My son shall not go down with you, because his brother is dead, and he only has been left; and suppose it shall come to pass that he is afflicted by the way by which ye go, then ye shall bring down my old age with sorrow to Hades.
Same man. Same fear. Years later.
Now they want Benjamin, and Jacob has learned exactly one thing from losing Joseph, which is that he cannot survive it twice. Take this one too, he says, and you will put my grey head in the ground with grief still on it.
I include this second one for a simple reason. One instance proves nothing. Two instances in the same book, in the same voice, in the same idiom, tell you this is settled vocabulary. The translators were not fishing around for a word each time they hit Sheol. They had made their decision and they were keeping it.
Psalm 15:10 (LXX/Brenton)
because thou wilt not leave my soul in hell, neither wilt thou suffer thine Holy One to see corruption.
This is Psalm 16:10 in your English Bible, and it is the keystone of the whole argument.
But the first thing to recognize is that “hell” here is Brenton’s linguistic choice, largely (if not entirely) because that’s how the KJV renders it. And if you didn’t know, Brenton based his LXX translation off the KJV in the same way that the translators of the NETS based their text off the NRSV and the Orthodox Study Bible used the NKJV; they start with their base translation and make changes only where the Greek says something different from the Hebrew.
In the Greek of Psalm 15:10, the word being used is ᾅδην (Hades).
Now, watch what happens to this verse. On the day of Pentecost, Peter stands up in Jerusalem and preaches the resurrection, and he reaches for this psalm as his proof text.
He quotes it in Greek.
He quotes it with this word in it. And he applies it to Jesus Christ, arguing that David was not talking about himself, because David died and was buried and his tomb is right over there. David was talking about the Messiah, whose spirit was not abandoned in the realm of the dead and whose body did not decay.
Sit with that for a second. The apostolic preaching of the resurrection, on the birthday of the church, rests on a Greek Old Testament text that uses this word. If the word were a pagan corruption, Peter picked a strange hill to stand on.
He did not think so. He thought he was quoting Scripture, because he was.
That is the ratification. The translators made a call, and the apostles preached from it.
1 Kings 2:6 (LXX/Brenton)
The Lord kills and makes alive; he brings down to the grave, and brings up.
This is Hannah’s song, 1 Samuel 2:6 in your Bible, and it does something the others do not.
Everything in the Greek myth says the underworld belongs to somebody else. Hades the god got the realm of the dead when the cosmos was divided among three brothers, and it is his, and what happens down there is his business. Hannah says something flatly incompatible with that.
The Lord brings down, and the Lord brings up. The realm of the dead is not another god’s territory. It is under the authority of the God of Israel, who kills and makes alive, and who is not finished with anyone He puts down there.
As with Psalm 15, notice the English word Brenton used. But this time we’re going to hold that thought. We’ll come back to it very soon.
Isaiah 14:9, 11 (LXX/Brenton)
Hell from beneath is provoked to meet thee: all the great ones that have ruled over the earth have risen up together against thee, they that have raised up from their thrones all the kings of the nations.
Thy glory has come down to Hades, and thy great mirth: under thee they shall spread corruption, and the worm shall be thy covering.
Here is the taunt against the king of Babylon, and it is the most vivid picture of the realm of the dead anywhere in the prophets. The place stirs itself awake to receive a new arrival. The dead kings get up off their thrones to greet him. The conqueror comes down and finds a waiting room full of conquerors, all of them just as dead as he is, all of them delighted to see that the great man has become exactly what they are.
I should note in passing that verse 12 in Brenton reads “Lucifer,” and that this passage carries a great deal of freight about the fall of a spiritual power behind the throne of Babylon. That is a genuine and important discussion, and I have treated it at length in the Divine Council series, where it belongs. For our purposes here, keep your eye on the realm itself.
And keep your eye on the two English words in those two verses. Three verses apart. The Greek word underneath them is the same word both times, as we’ve seen in each case.
Job 14:13 (LXX/Brenton)
For oh that thou hadst kept me in the grave, and hadst hidden me until thy wrath should cease, and thou shouldest set me a time in which thou wouldest remember me!
Job is not asking to die. Read it again. He is asking to be hidden, tucked away in the realm of the dead like a man stepping into a doorway to wait out a storm, until the wrath passes and God remembers him and calls him back out.
That is a stunning thing for a man in the Hebrew Scriptures to say, and we will come back to it much later in this series, because Job keeps almost saying the thing he cannot quite say.
For now, notice only the word Brenton chose here: Grave.
One Greek word. Three English words.
Now put the six verses side by side and look at the English.
In Genesis, Brenton wrote Hades. In the Psalm, he wrote hell. In Hannah’s song and in Job, he wrote grave. In Isaiah, within three verses of each other, he wrote hell and then Hades.
Underneath every one of those, in every case, sits the same Greek word.
I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to turn this into an accusation, and an accusation would be both unkind and wrong. Sir Lancelot Brenton was a serious scholar doing serious work, and he was not being careless. He was doing precisely what the Septuagint translators had done two thousand years earlier. He came to a word that named the realm of the dead, and he reached for the ordinary word in his own language that fit the tone of the sentence in front of him. When the verse felt like a burial, he wrote grave. When the verse felt like judgment, he wrote hell. When the verse felt like a realm, he wrote Hades.
Every individual choice is defensible. But the cumulative effect is that his English reader can no longer see that each of these choices were all the same word.
That is the whole problem in miniature, and it did not stop with Brenton. Open almost any English Bible and you will find the same fracture. One realm in the original, splintered into three or four English words, each of which drags its own crowd of associations along behind it. Grave sounds like a hole in a churchyard. Hell sounds like fire and pitchforks. Hades sounds like Greek myth. A reader meeting those three words never suspects they are standing in the same place.
And here is the part that ought to make you set your coffee down. If a single careful translator working in the nineteenth century, with lexicons and concordances and centuries of scholarship at his elbow, produced three different English words for one Greek term, what do you suppose happened to the concept over two thousand years of readers who had no idea the splitting had occurred?
That is not a rhetorical flourish. That is the actual history of the doctrine.
The furniture that came with the word
So what was in the room when the translators walked in? What did an ordinary Greek speaker already picture when he heard this word?
Start with the most important thing, which is that Hades was a person before it was a place. He was a god, one of three brothers who divided the cosmos between them after the war with the Titans.
Zeus took the sky, Poseidon took the sea, and Hades drew the underworld. Greek speakers originally spoke of going down not to Hades but to the house of Hades, the way you might speak of going to your uncle’s house. Over the centuries the owner’s name migrated onto the property, until the word could mean either the god or his realm depending on the sentence. That ambiguity is baked into the word, and it is the single heaviest piece of furniture in the room.
Then there are the shades. In the eleventh book of the Odyssey, Odysseus travels to the edge of the underworld and performs a ritual to summon the dead, and what comes up to meet him is genuinely disturbing.
The dead are there, and they are recognizable, and they are also hollowed out. Strengthless. They have to drink sacrificial blood before they can even speak coherently.
In a later book they are compared to bats squeaking in a cave. When Odysseus tries to embrace his own mother, his arms pass through her three times. And most devastating of all, the great Achilles tells him he would rather be a landless hired laborer among the living than king over all the exhausted dead.
That is the Greek verdict on the afterlife. Existence continues, and it is not worth having.
Then the geography accumulated.
Rivers, most famously the Styx, along with Acheron and the wailing Cocytus and the burning Phlegethon, and eventually Lethe, whose water erases memory. A ferryman named Charon appears in the later tradition, not in Homer, who must be paid to carry the dead across, which is why coins were placed with the dead.
A monstrous dog at the gate. Judges of the dead. Regions of punishment for the notorious, where Sisyphus pushes his stone and Tantalus reaches forever for water he cannot drink, and eventually a bright quarter called Elysium for the specially favored.
There is also Persephone, and her story is worth a moment because it shows how differently the two cultures thought. She is a goddess, carried off by Hades to be his queen, and because she eats pomegranate seeds in the underworld she is bound to return there for part of every year. Her descent and return are the Greek explanation for winter and spring.
Stop and feel how foreign that is to the Hebrew Scriptures. The Greek underworld is woven into the machinery of the seasons and populated by a divine family with a domestic drama.
Sheol is a realm under the authority of the God who kills and makes alive.
Two more details, because they matter for where this series is going.
First, the living occasionally went down and came back. Odysseus reached the edge, Heracles hauled the guard dog up into daylight, Orpheus went after his wife and lost her at the last moment, and in the Roman continuation of the tradition Aeneas took the full tour.
Second, and more importantly, the dead almost never came back. There are a bare handful of exceptions, and every one is a spectacular intervention rather than a rule. The gates were understood to open in only one direction.
That is precisely the assumption Christ will overturn, and we will spend two full posts on it later in this series.
I am deliberately keeping this sketch short, and I am deliberately not describing the layout of the Greek underworld in any detail.
When we get to the actual geography of Sheol, we are going to want to look carefully at what Scripture says about its structure, and I would rather you come to that with the biblical furniture in your head instead of the Greek.
Where it actually went wrong
So the translators picked up a word with all that baggage attached to it.
Was that a mistake?
I don’t think so. Let me explain why.
Every translator in history faces this exact problem, because there are no neutral words. Every word in every language arrives already used, already colored by whoever used it last.
When missionaries carried the gospel into new languages they had to choose local words for God, for sacrifice, for spirit, for holiness, and every one of those words came pre-loaded with the local religion.
There is no clean vocabulary anywhere on earth. You either use the words people actually have, or you do not communicate.
The Alexandrian translators had one word for the realm of the dead. They used it. They then proceeded to fill it with Hebrew content, verse after verse, until anyone reading the Greek Scriptures straight through would absorb a picture of the realm of the dead that is markedly different from Homer’s.
And watch how the biblical writers handle the borrowed word once they have it.
They discipline it. Hannah puts the realm under the Lord’s authority, which strips Hades of his ownership. Isaiah fills it with dethroned kings rather than mythological machinery. The psalmist insists God will not abandon him there. And when the Lord Jesus tells us about two men who died, one comforted and one in torment, there is no ferryman in the story.
There are angels.
There is no river to be crossed for a fee. There is a fixed chasm, and its meaning is not geographic but moral, defined out loud by Abraham. We’ll spend an entire post on that account later. I don’t want to spoil it here, but notice the pattern. Every time the Greek furniture might have walked in, Scripture put something else in its place.
The word crossed the border. The mythology did not come with it.
So where did our trouble come from?
It came from what was read into the text, and it came later.
Picture a Greek-speaking convert three centuries on, raised on Homer the way we were raised on nursery rhymes, who has known since childhood exactly what happens when you die and go down to Hades.
He becomes a Christian. He opens the Scriptures. He finds a word he has known his entire life. And without ever deciding to do it, without a moment of conscious theological reasoning, he reads his childhood furniture into the text.
Not because the translators put it there. Because he brought it with him.
Multiply that by centuries. Add the medieval imagination, which we will get to in a couple of weeks, and which added far more furniture than Homer ever did. Then flatten the whole thing into a single English word that no biblical author ever wrote. A concept that no biblical author would have understood.
That is how we got the picture most of us inherited.
The translators handed us a clean window. Generations of readers painted on the glass.
Dig deeper
If you want to see the pattern for yourself rather than taking my word for it, here are more places where the Septuagint uses Hades and simply means Sheol, the realm of the dead, with no Greek mythology anywhere in sight. I
If I walk through a survey of all of these, we’ll be until until next Tuesday! So what I’m giving is only the verse references so you can look them up in your own Bible and in a Septuagint translation side by side and watch the equivalence hold.
Numbers 16:30 and 33. Deuteronomy 32:22. Job 7:9 and 17:13-16. Psalm 6:5, Psalm 30:3, Psalm 49:15, Psalm 88:3, and Psalm 139:8. Proverbs 15:11. Ecclesiastes 9:10. Isaiah 5:14 and 38:10-18. Ezekiel 31:15-17. Hosea 13:14. Jonah 2:2. Amos 9:2.
Remember the numbering offset when you go looking. Those Psalm references are given the way your English Bible numbers them, so in a Septuagint translation you will generally find them in the psalm previous.
Read a dozen of those and something settles in. This is not a Greek idea wearing Hebrew clothes. This is the Hebrew realm of the dead, spoken in Greek, exactly as the translators intended.
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.
What this sets up
I spent a whole post on a single translation decision because the mechanism it reveals is the key to everything that follows.
Here is the mechanism. A word crosses from one language into another. The translators pour the right meaning into it. And then readers on the far side, who already knew that word from somewhere else, quietly pour their own meaning back in, until the borrowed container is holding something the original authors never put there.
Hold onto that, because it is about to happen again, and the next time it happens the stakes are considerably higher. The next borrowed word is not the name of a place. It is the word for what you are.
Next time we take up the question underneath every other question in this series. What, exactly, is a human being? Because if you believe you are a ghost temporarily driving a body around, then everything you conclude about where you go when you die will be built on a foundation the Hebrew Scriptures never poured.
Until then, may the Lord be with you.
And as always, follow Acts 17:11. Be Berean. Don’t take my word for any of this. Check the texts for yourself to prove whether or not it’s true.
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Kevin, quite good! Your deep dive explains exactly why I recommend to most readers without specialized training the KJV-NKJV (mostly) more than modern translations + a good unabridged dictionary. Those translators were simply much better equipped in original languages and history. They, in most cases, knew what you are talking about.
For readers who have some background but not as much as you, my advice is: anything you read in NT, find equivalent in OT, then port that meaning back into what is said in NT + whatever the NT author is, under inspiration of Spirit, saying about said topic and you have pretty much their intent.
The place your argument gets loudest is Revelation 1, where John stops disciplining the furniture and starts taking it.
Hecate held the keys of Hades in the Greco-Roman world. That was her job title. She is invoked all over the magical papyri and the curse tablets, and the art puts the key in her hand. Then Revelation 1:18 has Jesus say he holds the keys of death and Hades. The office is not described, it is taken, and it is taken in the language of the people who knew whose office it was. That is not a word crossing the border quietly. That is somebody walking into the house and changing the locks in front of the owner.
And then the realm itself does not survive. Revelation 20 has death and Hades give up their dead and then get thrown into the lake of fire. Not reformed, not annexed, ended. That is a long way from a god who drew the underworld in a three-way split and keeps it.