Word: sheol
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...from too much conversation about heaven can point out that detailed description of its charms has hardly been the historical rule. The two ancient peoples who probably contributed most to the heavenly notion both started out imagining a gray, undifferentiated afterlife, called Hades by the Greco-Roman culture and Sheol by the Jews. By 600 B.C., bodily resurrection had been incorporated into Judaism: the book of Ezekiel describes a field of dry bones, which at God's bidding "came together, bone to bone" and lived again. The motif recurred in the later books of the Hebrew Bible, sometimes in combination...
...ENGLISH BIBLE (Oxford and Cambridge University presses; $19.95; $21.95 with Apocrypha). What? Another Bible? This mostly felicitous British rendition updates the New English Bible of 1970, shedding thees and thous and many male nouns and pronouns. More important, some quirky Old Testament ! readings from the 1970s have gone to Sheol now that the traditional Hebrew text is back in scholarly fashion...
Consumer Satisfaction. Though the concept of an afterlife is universal among religions. Scriptural scholars note that the Bible has relatively little to say about it. The Old Testament contains no explicit description of heaven; the closest that ancient Biblical seers got to the idea of hell was sheol-a vague limbo after death. Although much of Judaism accepts the notion of an afterlife. Jews have never unduly concerned themselves with it. According to Reform Rabbi Richard Lehrman of Atlanta, "you make it or break it right here...
Gradually, the idea of flames became associated with the life of the wicked in their part of Sheol. Jesus, says Life and Death, used this as a figure of speech in the parable of Dives and Lazarus, and he was not threatening his hearers with fearful torment so much as reminding them that life is set within a divine order in which man reaps the harvest of his deeds. "We have no right," says the committee, "on the basis of this parable, to go further than this and interpret Hell as the place of everlasting fiery torment...
...popular language Hell is the place of dreadful punishment . . . Is this how we should think of Hell?" Not at all, says Life and Death. The Bible uses the word Hell to translate the Hebrew Sheol and the Greek Hades, which were underworld places where all the dead lived shadowy, unsubstantial, joyless lives; at least at first, Sheol or Hades was not considered a place of punishment or torment. Gradually, the idea developed that there was a difference between the life of the righteous and the life of the wicked in Sheol. The part where the wicked dwelt was called Gehenna...