Hello brothers and sisters,
On the morning of Pentecost, Peter preached the first sermon of the church, and he pointed at a grave to do it.
The Spirit had just fallen. Pilgrims from over a dozen nations (and “devout Jews living in Jerusalem, devout men from every nation under heaven,” Acts 2:5) had just heard a band of Galileans telling God’s mighty deeds in their own languages. And Peter, who less than two months earlier had denied his Lord three times beside a charcoal fire, stood up in Jerusalem and talked about a tomb anyone in the city could walk to. David’s tomb, he said, “is with us to this day.”
Then he said something most of us have read a dozen times without ever hearing.
Acts 2:34 (NRSV)
For David did not ascend into the heavens...
Let that land.
David. The man after God’s own heart. The sweet psalmist of Israel, the king to whom God swore an everlasting throne. If anyone in the Old Testament had a claim on heaven (apart from Enoch and Elijah, naturally), it was David. And a thousand years after his funeral, on the birthday of the church, with the fire of the Spirit scarcely cooled, Peter told Jerusalem flatly that David had not gone up.
So where was he?
That question will take us two posts, because it’s really three questions folded into one. Where did the dead go? Where are they now? And where did Jesus go in the three days between the cross and the empty tomb? Today we draw the map. Next time we find out what it is like to be on it.
Last time we stood in a valley you can walk through. This time we follow the dead.
It’s time to go down into the grave.
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The Psalm Peter Needed
Peter’s whole argument hangs on a single psalm. Psalm 16 belongs to David, and in it David says something about death that cannot possibly be about David.
Here it is in the Hebrew tradition.
Psalm 16:8-11 (NRSV)
I keep the Lord always before me; because he is at my right hand, I shall not be moved. Therefore my heart is glad, and my soul rejoices; my body also rests secure. For you do not give me up to Sheol, or let your faithful one see the Pit. You show me the path of life. In your presence there is fullness of joy; in your right hand are pleasures forevermore.
And here it is in the Greek, the form Peter actually quoted.
Psalm 15:8-11 (LXX/LES)
I saw the Lord in front, before me through everything, because he is from my right side, that I would not be shaken. On account of this, my heart was cheerful, and my tongue rejoiced exceedingly. Moreover, my flesh will dwell in hope, because you will not abandon my soul in Hades, nor will you give your holy one to see destruction. You made known to me ways of life. You will make me full of cheer with your face. There are delights at your right side completely.
The two traditions walk side by side almost the whole way. Then, in the middle verse, they split over one word.
The Hebrew says God will not let His faithful one see שַׁחַת (shachat), “the Pit.” That is a place. The hole in the ground, the grave, the realm beneath the grave. When the Hebrew Scriptures want another name for שְׁאוֹל (Sheol), shachat is one of the words they reach for.
The Greek says God will not let His holy one see διαφθορά (diaphthora). That is not a place at all. It is a process. Decay. Rot. What a body does after it is laid in the ground. The LES renders it “destruction,” and when Peter quotes the line, the NRSV renders it “corruption,” in the old sense of that English word: a body coming apart.
Where did the Greek get that? The Hebrew noun shachat is spelled with the same three letters as a verb, שָׁחַת, meaning to ruin, to spoil, to corrupt. It is the verb of Genesis 6:11, when “the earth was corrupt in God’s sight.” The translators in Alexandria heard that verb ringing inside the noun, and they translated what they heard.
So which is it? The Pit, or the rot?
Peter needed both.
The Hebrew line is about the realm: not handed over to Sheol, not left to see the Pit. The Greek line keeps the realm, naming it ᾅδης (Hades), and adds what happens to the body. Put them together and the claim is complete. The Messiah would enter the realm of the dead and not be held there, and His body would not decay. Watch Peter assemble exactly that.
Acts 2:29-31 (NRSV)
Fellow Israelites, I may say to you confidently of our ancestor David that he both died and was buried, and his tomb is with us to this day. Since he was a prophet, he knew that God had sworn with an oath to him that he would put one of his descendants on his throne. Foreseeing this, David spoke of the resurrection of the Messiah, saying, “He was not abandoned to Hades, nor did his flesh experience corruption.”
His soul, the whole living self Part 3 taught us to hear in that word, was not abandoned to Hades. His flesh, lying in Joseph’s tomb, did not decay. The Hebrew handed Peter the place. The Greek handed him the process.
And the proof was a short walk away in David’s tomb.
David’s body had done exactly what bodies do. Years later Paul made the same argument in Pisidian Antioch, and the NKJV preserves a word in his sermon we’re going to need hold onto.
Acts 13:35-37 (NKJV)
Therefore He also says in another Psalm: “You will not allow Your Holy One to see corruption.” For David, after he had served his own generation by the will of God, fell asleep, was buried with his fathers, and saw corruption; but He whom God raised up saw no corruption.
Fell asleep. Hold that. We’ll need it next time.
But here is what I most want you to see. Peter never says Christ didn’t go to Hades. He says He wasn’t abandoned there.
No one is abandoned in a place they never entered.
Tucked inside the very first Christian sermon, in a psalm read through both its Hebrew and its Greek, is the claim that the Messiah would go down into the realm of the dead and not be left there.
The descent of Christ is not a late theological invention. It was in Peter’s mouth, by implication, the day the church was born.
And David? David saw corruption. David’s tomb was in Jerusalem. David did not ascend.
He went where everyone goes.
Everyone Goes Down
This is the claim this entire series has been building toward. It’s the one that I’ve been increasingly convicted by the deeper I dig into Scripture.
When the people of the Old Testament died, they did not go to heaven. They went to Sheol. All of them.
Not just the wicked.
The righteous too.
Jacob, grieving a son he believed was dead, said he would go down to Sheol to him mourning (Genesis 37:35), the very sentence we watched the translators carry into Greek at the start of Part 2.
Hezekiah, one of the best kings Judah ever had, expected to pass through the gates of Sheol in the prime of his life (Isaiah 38:10).
The Teacher of Ecclesiastes, urging his reader to enjoy life with the one they love, reminded them where they were headed: Sheol, “where you are going” (Ecclesiastes 9:10).
And one psalmist asked a question with no exceptions in it.
Psalm 89:48 (NRSV)
Who can live and never see death? Who can escape the power of Sheol?
No one. That is the answer the psalm expects.
The historical books say it in their own idiom. When a king dies, he “slept with his ancestors”: שָׁכַב עִם־אֲבֹתָיו (shakav im-avotav), “he lay down with his fathers.”
David slept with his ancestors (1 Kings 2:10). So did Solomon (1 Kings 11:43). So did Ahab (1 Kings 22:40), the worst king the north ever produced. So did Manasseh (2 Kings 21:18), who made his own son pass through the fire in the Valley of Hinnom (2 Chronicles 33:6). The same words for the man after God’s own heart and for the man whose name became a byword for atrocity.
One realm.
But not a single experience.
Scripture will show us that Sheol has a structure, that the righteous and the wicked are kept apart inside it, and that life on either side of that divide could hardly be more different.
But it is one realm, the gathering place of every human being who has ever died. Next time we will hear Samuel tell Saul, the king God rejected, that by tomorrow night the two of them will be together.
Now before your itching finger jumps to that comment button, let me just say this:
I can already hear your objections, because I have raised them myself a hundred times on the way to this.
Paul’s desire “to depart and be with Christ” (Philippians 1:23). Being “away from the body and at home with the Lord” (2 Corinthians 5:8). The man (Paul himself, we can be certain) caught up into Paradise in the third heaven (2 Corinthians 12:2-4). “The spirits of the righteous made perfect” (Hebrews 12:23).
Those objections deserve better than a paragraph tucked away in a post as long as this one.
So they will be the heart of Part 8, when we look at Lazarus and the rich man and other texts to see what the two sides of Sheol are actually like.
There are also a few genuine exceptions, people Scripture says did not go down. We will get to them next time.
But for now, let’s discuss what we know about the place itself.
The Shape of Sheol
Back in Part 2 I promised that eventually we would stop talking about the word and start walking the terrain.
This is the map, drawn from the texts alone.
It is down. Always. Jacob goes down. Korah goes down. The king of Babylon goes down. The Song of Moses pictures God’s anger burning “as far as Hades beneath” (Deuteronomy 32:22, LES), and the Hebrew there is שְׁאוֹל תַּחְתִּית (Sheol tachtit), “the lowest Sheol.”
The realm of the dead has a lower floor.It has a mouth. “Sheol has enlarged its appetite and opened its mouth beyond measure” (Isaiah 5:14, NRSV). The word behind “appetite” is נֶפֶשׁ (nephesh). Part 3 showed us nephesh as the breathing, hungry, embodied person, and here the word bares its most physical edge: the throat.
Isaiah pictures Sheol as a throat stretched wide, swallowing a nation whole. (The Greek keeps the matching word, ψυχή, psychē, and the LES smooths it into “Hades has widened itself.”)It has gates. Hezekiah expected to leave his remaining years “at the gates of Hades” (Isaiah 38:10, LES). Jesus promised that the gates of Hades would not prevail against His church (Matthew 16:18).
And Job holds one of my favorite divergences in the whole Old Testament, right on this point:Job 38:17 (NRSV)
Have the gates of death been revealed to you, or have you seen the gates of deep darkness?
Job 38:17 (LXX/LES)And have the gates of death been opened to you out of fear, and the gatekeepers of Hades, seeing you, cower?
The Hebrew asks whether Job has seen the gates. The Greek asks whether the gatekeepers have seen him, and cowered.In context, it is a rhetorical question put to a mortal man, and the answer is plainly no. But keep that Greek line tucked away as we progress through the series. There is Someone the gatekeepers of Hades did see. We will meet Him at those gates in a few weeks.
It has bars. Job wonders whether his hope will “go down to the bars of Sheol” (Job 17:16, NRSV). Jonah, speaking from the inside, says he went down to a land whose “bars are eternal barriers” (Jonah 2:7, LES). We’ll come back to Jonah next time.
It is dark, and it impacts memory. The psalmist calls it “the darkness” and “the land of forgetfulness” (Psalm 88:12).
And it is not hidden from God. “Hades is naked before him” (Job 26:6, LES). And then the verse we opened Part 4 with, now with the right word restored.
Psalm 139:8 (NRSV)
If I ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.
Notice the furniture. David does not say “if I fall into Sheol.” He says if I make my bed there. Spread my couch. Lie down. It is a bedroom word, and we will need it next time. (The Greek says simply “if I should go down to Hades,” but the Hebrew bed makes a statement here.)
Down. A throat. Gates. Bars. Darkness. A land where the living are forgotten. And God present in every corner of it.
That is not a mood. That is architecture.
Neighborhoods of the Dead
If you want to see how ordered that architecture is, read Ezekiel 32:18-32.
Ezekiel is told to wail for Egypt and send her down to join the nations already in the pit. Then he walks us through it like a guide, district by district (not unlike Virgil in Dante’s Divine Comedy).
Assyria is there, her company all around her grave. Elam is there. Meshech and Tubal. In the Hebrew, Edom too, and the princes of the north, and the Sidonians.
In the Greek, the roll call shifts at the end, putting more of Assyria’s rulers and generals where the Hebrew names Edom and Sidon.
Each nation lies with its own. Each carries the same marks: uncircumcised, slain by the sword, people “who give their terror over the land of life” (32:23, LES).
These dead are not a jumble. They are sorted. Nation by nation, by the same shame they carried in life. There are neighborhoods down there.
And they talk.
“The mighty chiefs shall speak of them... out of the midst of Sheol,” says the Hebrew (32:21, NRSV). Where the Hebrew has אֵלֵי גִבּוֹרִים (elei gibborim), the mightiest of warriors, the Greek has γίγαντες (gigantes): “And the giants will say to you, ‘Come in the depth of clamor!’” (32:21, LES).
Then comes the strangest verse in the chapter.
Ezekiel 32:27 (NRSV)
And they do not lie with the fallen warriors of long ago who went down to Sheol with their weapons of war, whose swords were laid under their heads, and whose shields are upon their bones; for the terror of the warriors was in the land of the living.
Ezekiel 32:27 (LXX/LES)
And they slept with the giants, who had fallen from eternity, who descended into Hades with weapons of war, and placed their swords under their heads, and their lawless acts came upon their bones, because they terrified everyone in their life.
Read the first word of each.
The Hebrew says these nations do not lie with the ancient warriors. The Greek says they do.
And that is not the only split in the verse. Where the standard Hebrew text calls those fallen warriors מֵעֲרֵלִים (me’arelim), “of the uncircumcised,” the Greek translators read מֵעוֹלָם (me’olam), “from of old,” the very phrase Genesis 6:4 uses for the age of the Nephilim: “the heroes that were of old.”
The NRSV, interestingly, follows the Greek on that word (“of long ago”) while keeping the Hebrew’s “not.” And where the Hebrew says gibborim, the Greek, once again, says giants.
The NRSV’s “shields” is a scholarly correction, by the way; the Hebrew and the Greek both lay the warriors’ iniquities on their bones. It did this as an educated guess based on poetic parallelism (shields makes better sense as a poetic parallel than sins or iniquities).
Make of that what you will.
So do the dead nations lie with the ancient mighty or apart from them?
As should surprise no one who’s been with me for very long, my answer is both. I believe each tradition is telling the truth about something.
Now, understand that this is my interpretation based on my reading of the texts. None of this is explicit in the text.
The Hebrew is talking about honor. Even in Sheol there is rank. The ancient warriors went down with dignity, swords laid under their heads the way a soldier is laid to rest. The slaughtered armies of Egypt and Assyria get no such burial. They are shoved down “in the depth of the pit” (32:22, LES), apart from the honored dead. The Hebrew says: even down there, shame follows you.
The Greek is talking about company. These nations terrorized the living, and now they sleep beside the giants who terrorized the living before them, the ones who fell “from eternity,” back before the flood. The Greek says: you became what they were, so you lie where they lie.
Shame and company. Separation and solidarity. Two true things about one district of the dead.
Which brings us to the giants.
Shades, Giants, and Healers
If you followed the Genesis 14 series I did with Lawrence Campbell, then you’ve seen this section coming for a while now.
There is a Hebrew word for the inhabitants of Sheol that your English Bible almost certainly hides from you. רְפָאִים (rephaim). Most modern translations render it “shades,” a poetic word for the ghostly dead. The Alexandrian translators handled it three very different ways, and each one tells you something.
Sometimes they made it giants. We just watched that happen in Ezekiel. It is also how they rendered Isaiah 14, where the king of Babylon arrives among the dead. We glanced at this in Part 2; look again.
Isaiah 14:9-10 (NRSV)
Sheol beneath is stirred up to meet you when you come; it rouses the shades to greet you, all who were leaders of the earth; it raises from their thrones all who were kings of the nations. All of them will speak and say to you: “You too have become as weak as we! You have become like us!”
Isaiah 14:9-10 (LXX/LES)
Hades below was embittered after meeting you; all the giants who ruled the land, who roused all the kings of the nations from their thrones, rose together with you. All will answer and will say to you, “Even you were taken, just as we also were, and you were counted among us.”
The dead are talking again. And Isaiah defines his rephaim for us: “leaders of the earth,” “kings of the nations.” The Greek calls those dead kings giants.
The pattern repeats. In Job, “the shades below tremble” (26:5, NRSV) becomes “Are not giants brought forth from beneath the water...?” (LES). In Proverbs, the man who wanders from understanding “will rest in the assembly of the dead” (21:16, NRSV), while in the Greek he “will sleep in the congregation of the giants” (LES). The Hebrew says rest. The Greek says sleep. File that away.
But in two places the translators went somewhere else entirely. The consonants of rephaim (ר־פ־א) are the consonants of the verb רָפָא (rapha), “to heal.” Give the word different vowels and you get rophe’im: healers.
Isaiah 26:14 (NRSV)
The dead do not live; shades do not rise—because you have punished and destroyed them, and wiped out all memory of them.
Isaiah 26:14 (LXX/LES)
But the dead certainly will not see life, and healers will certainly not rise up. Because of this you have brought and destroyed, and you have taken away every male of theirs.
The Greek does the same thing in Psalm 88:10, where “Do the shades rise up to praise you?” (NRSV) becomes “Or will physicians rise up and give thanks to you?” (87:11, LES).
Physicians. ἰατροί (iatroi). Before you write it off as a slip, read it again. Will physicians rise up? Can the doctors raise anyone? It is a devastating question in its own right. Whatever the healers of this world can do, they cannot undo what Sheol does.
A little bit off topic, but a while back I wrote a series about the idiom of the Woman in Travail as a metaphor for the end times. In the second post I walked through Isaiah and part of that was chapter 26 where I discussed an interpretation that, as far as I’m aware, no one else has suggested anywhere in the scholarly, commentary, or exegesis space. If you’re interested, you can check that out HERE.
And there is a third option. When Rephaim names a people, the translators often just transliterated it: Ραφαϊν (Rhaphain). The Rephaim of Deuteronomy 2 and 3 are a nation, tall like the Anakim, and Og king of Bashan was the last “of the remnant of the Rephaim” (Deuteronomy 3:11). Joshua adds that Og ruled from Ashtaroth and Edrei, with territory running north to Mount Hermon (Joshua 12:4-5).
Remember Hermon. We will be back there shortly.
Where Do the Giants Go?
If you’ve read the Divine Council series, this raises a real problem, and I would be dodging if I did not face it.
In that series I argued, following 1 Enoch 15, that the spirits of the Nephilim, the offspring of the Watchers and human women, belong to neither realm. Not human, so they do not go where humans go. Not angels, so they have no place in heaven. They were left to wander the earth as disembodied spirits, and those are the beings the New Testament calls demons.
In the same series I read the rephaim who “do not rise” in Isaiah 26:14 as those spirits.
But the Greek Bible puts giants in Hades. Isaiah 14:9. Job 26:5. Proverbs 21:16. Ezekiel 32:21 and 27.
How can giants be wandering the earth and lying in Sheol at the same time?
This is how I put all this together, and I want to be completely clear because this is important:
This is my interpretation based on how I read the texts. No verse or passage says this explicitly. This is how I’ve made sense of texts that some have looked at and seen contradiction. This is my view of the passages that allows every verse to keep its voice.
The first generation of the Nephilim, the actual children of the Watchers, and perhaps their nearer descendants, were something genuinely new in creation, neither human nor angel. Those are the spirits 1 Enoch describes as wandering. Those are the ones who do not rise.
But the Rephaim of Canaan lived many generations later. Og of Bashan. The Anakim of Hebron. The descendants of the giants in Gath who fell to David’s men (2 Samuel 21:15-22). Whatever angelic inheritance reached them had been thinned by generation after generation of intermarriage with ordinary humanity. They were men. Huge, violent men, but men. And men, when they die, go down to Sheol.
That would explain why the Greek translators had no trouble seating giants among the dead kings of the earth. The giants in Hades are the later clans. The wandering spirits are the first, or possibly first several, generations.
One name, two very different fates.
I hold that with an open hand. But it is the only reading I have found that lets the Greek Bible and 1 Enoch both say what they say.
A Mountain in the West
Now we come to the most detailed ancient description of Sheol’s interior we have, and it is not in the Hebrew Bible or the Septuagint. It is in 1 Enoch.
Last time I explained how I treat books outside the traditional canons, and in particular how I hold the Book of the Watchers, 1 Enoch 1-36, the section Jude quotes by name. Chapter 22 sits right in the middle of it. There is one verse in this chapter I set aside, and I will tell you which one, and why, when we get there.
Enoch is being guided through the hidden places of the world by the archangel Raphael.
1 Enoch 22:1-4 (LES)
From there I traveled to another place, and he showed to me another great and high mountain of stiff rock in the west. There were four hollow places in it having depth and exceeding smoothness, three of them dark and one shining with a spring of water coming between it. And I said, “How smooth are these hollows, great depths and dark places in the vision!” Then Raphael, who is one of the holy angels who was with me, answered and said to me, “These places are hollow in order to gather together the spirits of the dead souls. For this very thing they were judged, to gather together here all the souls of humans. And these places for their reception were made until the day of their judgment, until the division and limitation of time, in which the great judgment will be with them.”
Three things leap off the page.
All of them. “All the souls of humans.” Not just the wicked. Not just the righteous. Everyone who dies is gathered here.
Temporary. “Until the day of their judgment.” These hollows are nobody’s final destination. They are a waiting place. That one clause is the whole doctrine of the intermediate state, written down well over a century before the Gospels.
Spirits. “The spirits of the dead souls.” Part 3 readers will catch this one. The soul, the whole living person, has died. What remains, what waits inside the mountain, is the spirit.
Then Enoch hears something.
1 Enoch 22:5-7 (LES)
I looked on the dead humans who were petitioning, and their voice went up to heaven pleading. Then I asked Raphael, the angel who was with me, saying to him, “This petitioning spirit, from whose voice does it go up to heaven, petitioning in this way?” And he replied to me, saying, “This spirit comes from Abel, whom his brother Cain murdered. Abel petitions him until Cain’s seed is destroyed from the face of the earth and his seed is removed from the seed of humans.”
Abel. The first human being who ever died, and he is still crying out.
You know where that comes from. “Listen; your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground!” (Genesis 4:10). Hebrews says that Abel, though he died, still speaks (Hebrews 11:4), and that the blood of Jesus speaks a better word than the blood of Abel (Hebrews 12:24). Enoch’s vision gives that cry an address. It is coming from inside the mountain. And it is nearly the same cry John will hear from the souls under the altar: “how long will it be before you judge and avenge our blood?” (Revelation 6:10).
That is not a picture of the dead as switched off. Abel is aware enough to plead.
Then Enoch asks why the hollows are kept apart.
1 Enoch 22:8-12 (LES)
Then I asked about the whole circumference, why the one is separated from the other. And he answered me, saying, “These three were made to separate the spirits of the dead; and so it is separated for the spirits of the righteous, where the spring of water is shining in it; and so it was created by the sinners, when they die and are buried in the earth, and judgment has not happened to them in their life, their spirits are separated here for this great torture until the great day of judgment, by whips and tortures of the accursed; it was a recompense of the spirits until eternity; he will bind them there until eternity. In this way there is a separation for the spirits of those petitioning, any who are revealed concerning the destruction, when they were murdered in the days of the sinners.”
One realm, divided. The righteous in a bright hollow beside a spring of shining water. Sinners who escaped judgment in this life, held in torment until the great day. The murdered, set apart with their petition.
You may have noticed the count wobble. Verse 2 describes four hollows, three dark and one bright. Verse 9 says “these three.” Scholars have puzzled over it for a long time.
For myself, I read the three as referring to the place of sinners, apart from the fourth. The majority of mainstream scholars agree with this position, but you should know that it is not unanimous. There is still disagreement about this in the scholarly community, with some seeing it as evidence of corruption of scribal editing.
But either way, whether it’s three or four, the shape does not change. It is one place, partitioned by destiny.
The Psalms had already hinted at that partition. “Like sheep they were placed in Hades,” says the Greek of Psalm 49, “... and the upright ones have dominion over them in the morning... But God will redeem my soul from the hand of Hades when he receives me” (48:15-16, LES). One realm. Two destinies. A morning coming.
And mark that spring of water. When we reach Luke 16, a rich man is going to beg, from the wrong side of a great chasm, for a single drop of it.
Two more notes before we leave the mountain.
The phrase “until eternity” in verse 11 raises the question of whether those torments are temporary or permanent. Verse 4 said the hollows last only until the judgment; verse 11 sounds like something longer. However, in the original Greek this naturally reads as lasting until the beginning of the Eternal State (ie: the final judgement).
And then verse 13, which is the one I’m setting aside.
It says that one group of sinners “will not be punished in the day of judgment, nor will they rise from there.”
Scripture says otherwise, and says it plainly. Paul told Felix that “there will be a resurrection of both the righteous and the unrighteous” (Acts 24:15).
Jesus said that “all who are in their graves will hear his voice and will come out” (John 5:28-29).
John watched Death and Hades give up the dead in them (Revelation 20:13).
Everyone rises.
So, by the standard I explained last time, verse 13 does not pass, just as I set aside the impossible giant heights of 1 Enoch 7:2.
Is Sheol Somewhere?
What about that “mountain in the west”? Is Enoch telling us where Sheol physically is?
I do not think so. Verse 2 tells us outright that he is seeing all this “in the vision.” The ancient world almost always put the land of the dead in the west, where the sun goes down; the Egyptians even called their dead “the westerners.” Enoch’s vision speaks the visual language of his world, the way John is carried to “a great, high mountain” to be shown the holy city (Revelation 21:10). It is visionary geography, not a coordinate.
Scripture’s own physical clue is simpler: down. When Korah rebelled against Moses, the ground itself opened.
Numbers 16:32-33 (LXX/LES)
And the earth opened and swallowed them and their households and all the people who were with Korah, as well as their livestock. And they themselves and whatever was theirs went down alive into Hades, and the earth enveloped them, and they perished out of the midst of the congregation.
There is one more place that comes up whenever people ask whether the Bible ties the underworld to a spot on the map, and since I have mentioned it myself over the last year, I want to handle it with care.
Matthew tells us that when Jesus asked His disciples who people said He was, they were in “the district of Caesarea Philippi” (Matthew 16:13). There, after Peter’s confession, Jesus promised that the gates of Hades would not prevail against His church.
Caesarea Philippi sat at the foot of Mount Hermon, beside a great cave sacred to the Greek god Pan, where one of the springs of the Jordan rises. Josephus describes the cavern as “abrupt, and prodigiously deep, and full of a still water” (Antiquities 15.364, Whiston).
Many modern teachers suggest Jesus chose that backdrop on purpose, a pagan shrine at the mouth of a bottomless cave, to say what He said about the gates of Hades. And the setting is remarkable on its own terms. Hermon is the mountain where, according to 1 Enoch 6:6, the Watchers came down. It is the northern edge of the kingdom of Og, the last of the Rephaim.
But let’s be precise. The Gospels never call that cave the gate of Hades. Matthew simply tells us what district they were standing in. The identification is a reading of the setting, and I think it’s a good one that comes from solid instincts. But we need to be clear that this is not something the text says.
The Gates Will Not Prevail
Step back and look at the whole map.
A realm beneath the earth, with gates and bars and a throat stretched wide. Nations lying in their districts, still carrying their shame. Giants among the dead kings. Hollows in a mountain where every human spirit waits, the righteous beside a shining spring and the rest in the dark, all of them waiting for the day of judgment. And all of the dead are there, from Abel down to David, the best of God’s people lying in the same realm as the worst.
It is a sobering map. It is meant to be. The saints of the Old Testament looked at it honestly, and it frightened them.
But notice what Scripture never says about it. It never says Sheol is beyond God’s reach. “Hades is naked before him.” “If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.” The realm of the dead is ordered, watched, and held. Nothing that goes down there goes out of His sight. No one there is forgotten by Him, even after the living have forgotten them.
And it has gates. Gates are made to be shut. Gates can also be opened.
That is why it matters where Jesus was standing when He made His promise. Whether or not He chose the cave behind Him on purpose, He spoke at the foot of the mountain where the Watchers came down, on the edge of the old kingdom of the last of the Rephaim, and He said the gates of Hades would not prevail.
Seven weeks after His resurrection, Peter stood in Jerusalem, a short walk from David’s tomb, and told the city why. The Holy One had gone down into that realm, and He had not been abandoned there.
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 is so much more relevant today than we’ve always been taught.
Dig Deeper
If you want to explore the realm of the dead through Scripture yourself, here are more places to look, grouped by the word underneath.
Going down to Sheol (Hebrew): Genesis 37:35. Genesis 42:38. Genesis 44:29, 31. Numbers 16:30, 33. 1 Samuel 2:6. Job 7:9. Psalm 55:15. Isaiah 14:11, 15. Ezekiel 31:15-17. Ezekiel 32:27.
“Lay down / slept with his ancestors” (Hebrew): Genesis 47:30. Deuteronomy 31:16. 1 Kings 2:10. 1 Kings 11:43. 1 Kings 14:20. 1 Kings 22:40. 2 Kings 21:18. 2 Chronicles 26:23.
The rephaim as the dead (Hebrew): Job 26:5. Psalm 88:10. Proverbs 2:18. Proverbs 9:18. Proverbs 21:16. Isaiah 14:9. Isaiah 26:14. Isaiah 26:19.
The Rephaim as a people (Hebrew): Genesis 14:5. Genesis 15:20. Deuteronomy 2:11, 20. Deuteronomy 3:11, 13. Joshua 12:4. Joshua 13:12. Joshua 17:15.
The gates and bars of the underworld: Job 17:16. Job 38:17. Psalm 9:13. Psalm 107:18. Isaiah 38:10. Jonah 2:6. Matthew 16:18. Outside the canon, for comparison: Wisdom of Solomon 16:13.
Remember the numbering offsets when you look these up in a Septuagint translation. Most of the Psalms will be one number lower, and Jonah 2:6 will be Jonah 2:7.
Questions for Reflection
Peter preached the church’s first sermon a short walk from a tomb and said plainly that even David had not gone up. Why do you think so many Christians today find that hard to hear? What would the church gain if it spoke about death as plainly as Peter did?
In Enoch’s vision, Abel’s blood is still crying out for justice. Hebrews says the blood of Jesus speaks “a better word than the blood of Abel” (12:24). What is that better word? And what should it change about the way Christians cry out for justice today?
The Greek translators asked, “Will physicians rise up?” Where do modern people, Christians included, place a hope in medicine that it was never meant to carry? Where is the line between gratitude for medicine and trust in it? Where should that line be?
Ezekiel pictures the nations lying in Sheol grouped by the terror they spread while they lived. What does it suggest about God’s view of national power that the violence of empires follows them into the grave? How should that shape the way Christians speak about the nations they live in today?
In Psalm 16, the Hebrew and the Greek each preserved part of a picture Peter needed whole. If God preserved His word in more than one stream, how should that change what we do when two translations on our own shelf disagree?
What This Sets Up
Today we drew the map. Down, gated, barred, dark, sorted by nation and by destiny. Every human being gathered there to wait, the righteous and the wicked in one realm, kept apart inside it.
Next time we find out what it is like to be on that map.
There is one night in the Old Testament when a dead man comes back up and speaks. A frightened king, a forbidden medium, and a prophet who complains about being woken. We will hear what he says, and why it matters so much that the Hebrew and the Greek tell the ending two different ways. Then we will face the verses that seem to say the dead know nothing at all, take up the word Scripture keeps reaching for when it speaks of death, meet the few people Scripture says never went down, and follow Jesus into the heart of the earth.
Until then, I pray the Lord blesses you with grace and peace.
~Kevin
You can find the next post in the series HERE
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Do you think the resurrection argument depends on the Septuagint translating shachat as diaphthora (decay), or can his argument also be made from the Hebrew? Just starting a conversation 😀