When Jacob believes his son Joseph is dead, he refuses to be comforted: “I will go down to Sheol to my son, mourning” (Genesis 37:35). It is the first time the word appears in Scripture, and it sets the tone for nearly everything the Hebrew Bible says about death.
Sheol is the realm of the dead — rendered in older translations as “the grave,” “the pit,” or simply “hell,” though none of those is quite right. It is the place the dead go down to (Numbers 16:30): deep (Job 11:8), dark (Job 10:21), a land of silence where the living no longer praise God (Psalm 6:5). It is pictured with gates and bars, a destination from which, on its own terms, no one returns.
Not first of all a place of punishment
What surprises many modern readers is that Sheol is, at first, nearly universal. The righteous and the wicked alike descend to it — Jacob expects it, Job longs for it as relief, the Psalms both dread it and appeal against it. It is less a courtroom than a condition: the shadowed silence on the far side of life. Only gradually, across Israel's Scriptures and into the intertestamental period, does the language of the dead sharpen into distinctions of reward and judgment.
And yet even here hope leaks through. “You will not abandon my soul to Sheol,” sings Psalm 16:10 — a line the New Testament later reads as pointing beyond the grave altogether.
Why the confusion with “hell”
When the Hebrew Scriptures were translated into Greek, Sheol was rendered Hades — which is why the two words overlap so heavily, and why English Bibles have swung between “grave,” “hell,” and simply leaving the word untranslated. Keeping Sheol distinct from the later, sharper image of final judgment — Gehenna — clears up a good deal of the muddle. Its Greek counterpart, Hades, carries the idea forward into the New Testament.
Explore Sheol and its connections in the full interactive Bible glossary → a.fortt.com/glossary-app
How this is made · A Fortt Media project, created & edited by Jon Fortt. Grounded in a curated Scripture database and carefully drafted and audited with the help of AI — described plainly, and written to assume no particular denomination or doctrine. Read the full approach → · Report a correction →
