The “Place” Called Sheol in the Hebrew Scriptures, and Called Hades in the Greek Scriptures

Is Sheol a place of immateriality, a place for departed souls where soul is, contrary to the Bible, thought by many religionists to be defined as the immaterial essence of personhood that allegedly survives the death of a person’s body? No, it is not a spiritual realm. It is actually mankind’s common, earthen grave; it is gravedom, or we may write it as “the Grave.” It has no particular geography or literal boundaries, though it may be distinguished from the sea that has received beneath its waves countless dead persons. So, when we read Revelation 20:13, we are no more to think of the dead in Hades (Sheol) as being alive than would we as respects those dead in the sea; the condition of the dead in Hades is no different than it is for the dead in the sea. We must not allow ourselves to be duped by certain religionists whose arguments they unwittingly let devolve to the point where we can only say that they would make the Bible to contradict itself. They do, in fact, themselves contradict the Bible’s statement in Ecclesiastes 9:10 that ‘the dead are unconscious; the dead do not think.’ Moreover, even though those religionists do not appreciate their error, it amounts to the doctrine that planet Earth has two immaterial realms, one somewhere below the surface of the ground, and another one somewhere beneath the waves of the sea. They should agree that such a doctrine is part and parcel of their errors, or they should admit that they are using two different definitions for the two uses of the phrase “the dead” at Revelation 20:13.

What things are in Sheol (Hades)? Dead bodies are, generally speaking, though there was an occasion (see Numbers 16:26-35) where living persons – not dead persons – went down into Sheol; yes, they went down alive into Sheol, they and all their possessions when the ground opened up beneath them and their tents. Men, women, children and all that was theirs went down into Sheol; they had not become dead persons before going down into Sheol, but they soon enough became the kind of persons we normally associate with Sheol; they became dead persons in Sheol when the earth closed back over the top of them. How far down need they to have fallen in order that we may say that they were in Sheol? Did they have to fall miles and miles deep below the surface of the ground? No! They needed to have fallen no more deeply than what should allow the fissure to become shut back over the top of them, so that they should not be seen by others, and that they should be either crushed or suffocated to death. When it happened, then that shut fissure had become a grave for the rebels, and had become part of that wider collection of graves that we normally, by abstraction, present to our mind’s eye when we say “Sheol,” or "the land down below" (Ezekiel 31:14, 18, 32:18, 24). We have here no picture of an immaterial realm under the label “Sheol.” Nor do we have it anywhere else in the Bible as respects actual persons who have died.

True, Sheol was, in the book of Ezekiel, spoken about in a context involving a figurative reference to slain, uncircumcised warriors whose corpses had, unsurprisingly, come to be buried in the earth; hence, we may also say that they had come to share a “place” in Sheol with their weapons of war alongside them, with swords under the heads of the many slain ones who were buried in the earth with their weaponry. We read nothing unusual in just those words that discuss Sheol; Sheol is not presented as the abode of departed, immaterial souls. (See Ezekiel 32:27.) What is unusual, however, is that Sheol is figuratively presented as the scene where the slain, uncircumcised corpses of warriors ‘are speaking from the depths of Sheol’ (see Ezekiel 32:21). It is macabre theater; it is not description of any event that has ever literally (actually) taken place in a grave, no, nor between two graves, nor among any number of the graves that we see collectively referenced in the Bible as Sheol. Accordingly, then, we see Ezekiel's convenient employment of a figurative (fictitious, non-literal) geography for Sheol such that it was pictured as having also a certain collection or arrangement of the graves of the nations' slain, uncircumcised warrior-rulers, where such graves were conveniently pictured as being in such close proximity to one another that the corpses of the slain, warrior-rulers could, from their graves, figuratively "speak to [Pharaoh] and his helpers"; see Ezekiel 32:21ff.). Hades is, in the New Testament, the Greek language word that is equivalent to Sheol; both words refer to mankind's common earthen grave. We may translate Sheol and Hades into English with the phrase “the Grave.”