SHEOL
AND THE POLEMIC AGAINST THE POWERS OF THE DEAD
The numerous references to Sheol
as aggressive and monstrous, a supernatural force perceived to be a risk to
break into the world of the living, seem enough to confirm that this was a
common view, and that Sheol was not merely seen as gloomy and dull. Nor was it
generally seen as a destination for all the dead, but only those who were
forgotten and uncared-for or, worse, who faced the wrath of God.
What, then, is one to make of the
not-uncommon assertions that Sheol is a place of silence and powerlessness?
Denial of the power of the dead
are most commonly found in Psalms. The Psalms say that the dead are forsaken
and cut off (88:6 [ET 88:5] ); silent (115:17) and sit in darkness (143:3).
This strand of rhetorical logic begins with assumption that God wants to be
praised. A text like Psalm 6:5 reveals the rhetoric in its purest form,
invoking Yhwh's own self-interest: "in death there is no remembrance of
you;/ in Sheol who can give you praise? " (One might also mention the
Psalm of Hezekiah in Isa 38:18-19: "Sheol does not give you thanks;/ Death
does not praise you. / . . . the living thank you,/ as I do today!"). Statements
like these are transparently exaggerations meant to motivate God to save the psalmist
so that he will receive praise.
It is probably true that the dead
were not thought to be able to offer cultic worship to God; rather, they had
shifted to the receiving side of the equation. But one should not conclude that
they or their home Sheol were thought to be powerless. As far as one can generalize,
they were subordinate to Yhwh, and like all divinities, they were perceived to need
care and offerings. But they were not powerless. Nor were Sheol and the dead
actually broadly thought to be cut off and inaccessible to God; the Psalms
themselves repeatedly contradict that idea (Ps 30:4 ET 3] ; 86:13; 139:8; Jon
2:2) as do a number of other texts (e.g., Amos 9: 2; Job 11: 8; 26:6; Prov
15:11) . As noted above, these texts assert that Yhwh was able to reach into
Sheol both to save and to punish.
The prophets were another major
source of condemnations of the dead and their powers. In this case too, the
motivations are apparent: necromancy was seen as a source of supernatural
knowledge that competed with the words of the prophets. Most centrally, necromancy
is forbidden in Deuteronomy 18:10- 11; and it appears an ongoing concern in
multiple strata of lsaiah. The prophet condemns those who seek the advice of the
dead in 8:19 - 20, and 57:9 points to ongoing necromantic activity in
the postexilic period, accusing its objects of whoring through heterodox
divination, including "descending to Sheol:' In none of these cases is it
asserted that necromancy is ineffective; it is only forbidden-just as the
worship of other gods is forbidden but their existence is not denied in
Deuteronomy 6:4-5. Indeed, in the one fully narrativized episode of necromancy in
the Hebrew (1 Sam 28), the dead man summoned is none other than Samuel, a
prophet of Y hwh-and he tells Saul the truth.
Finally, one should mention the
pessimistic wisdom texts that portray Sheol as a place of powerlessness and
forgetfulness, e.g., Eccl 9:10: "Whatever your hand finds to do, do with
your might; for there is no work or thought or knowledge or wisdom in Sheol, to
which you are going:' (See also Job 7:9: "As the cloud fades and
vanishes,/ so those who go down to Sheol do not come up:') No doubt such
pessimism had a certain currency in Judahite culture; after all, similar
statements about the state of the dead are found in pessimistic Egyptian and
Mesopotamian wisdom texts.
All these cultures in the ancient
Near East produced both positive and negative images of death and afterlife.
Furthermore, these contrasting portrayals were related to each other. Jan
Assmann has observed that one can understand ancient Egyptian fears about death
by turning the more common positive images inside out-or, one might say,
inverting them like a photographic negative. In the popular mind, Egyptians had
a sunny and positive view of the afterlife and, although the texts that detail
netherworld terrors in horrific detail are less well known, they are neither
rare nor unclear. The mummy, the monument, the offerings, and the mortuary
texts all served to counteract perceived risks:
[The happy afterlife] was the
distant goal of countless efforts, without which death would be an absolute
opposition: isolation, termination, end, disappearance, darkness, filth,
defectiveness, distance from the divine, decomposition, dismemberment, dissolution,
in short, all that constitutes the opposite of those radiant images of a
transfigured existence. The Egyptian experience of death was not, overall, much
different from that elsewhere in the world, except for the astonishing, and in
this respect probably unique, attitude that the Egyptians assumed toward this
experience, an attitude based on trust in the power of counterimages, or rather
in the power of speech, of representation, and of ritual acts, to be able to
make these counterimages real and to create a counterworld through the medium
of symbols.
The positive images of death in Egyptian
texts described an existence created by humankind by means of its power over
magic and the divine. To say that a happy afterlife was the natural state of
death to an Egyptian would be like saying that a rose garden is the natural
state of a field.
The situation is not so different
in other cultures, although the selection of mortuary texts and artifacts is
smaller. For example, the Gilgamesh Epic tells us that the Mesopotamian dead
could hope to feast, enthroned as demigods- with the right mortuary care from
the living. Without it, they were left
to drink dirty water and scavenge for crusts in a gutter.
There was a similar inverse
relationship of happy and horrible afterlives in the Bible. Some of the same
concerns from neighboring cultures have already been noted, such as the hope in
early psalms that the deceased's body will "rest secure:' that he will not
be given up to Sheol or the Pit, but rather receive offerings at the right hand
of Yhwh (Ps 16:9-11). Those hopes are alternatives to the desecration of the
corpse and starvation in the afterlife-where the unhappy dead are portrayed as
benighted, cast out, and hangry in Isaiah 8 : 21- 22.
In sum, the skeptical statements
about Sheol and afterlife in Ecclesiastes or Job would have been a
"minority report,,; there is little reason to think they expressed the
theological ideas of central religious elites or common people. Sheol can also
be used simply as a metonym for death (e.g., Ps 89:49) or mourning (Gen 37:35),
but neither the denials of Sheol’s power nor its use in non-mythological
ways should be understood to contradict the fact that it was commonly seen as
potentially powerful and monstrous. (Christopher B. Hays, “Sheol as a Monster,”
in The Oxford Handbook of Biblical Monsters, ed. Brandon R. Grafius and
John W. Morehead [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2025], 226-28)
Further Reading:
Response
to Douglas V. Pond on Biblical and LDS Anthropology and Eschatology
