12 July 2023
I've finished reading Heiser's The Unseen Realm and am now working my way through the companion materials on this website. He touches on something that really needs more exposure.
Feel free to do your own research, but what I'm about to tell you is not common knowledge among biblical scholars, neither Jew nor Christian. Rather, I learned it from broader research among the various, mostly secular scholars of ancient religions. I note with some bemusement that biblical Christian scholars seem to have no trouble using the work of secular scholars, but seem to ignore this one particular area.
I've said it before: Hebrew language is primarily focused on non-literal expression. It is not descriptive, but indicative. It is not meant to describe anything in clinical terms. The whole purpose of Hebrew is to suggest things that require your attention, giving far more weight to the moral questions than the facts. It's not that English cannot do that, but it is not typically used that way. Rather, English is normally used to delineate boundaries around ideas with facts, to convey data. Hebrew virtually never does that. It points out areas for exploration via moral contemplation.
The typical evangelical anti-contemplative stance happens to agree very nicely with the Pharisees. If you cannot grasp that the faith of Jesus Himself was contemplative, you really have no clue who He was.
Hebrew religion fits right in with the languages and literature of the Ancient Near East. Those great civilizations were not overly concerned with data. They were concerned with the moral importance of things. They felt uniformly burdened with the responsibility of conforming with the demands of the gods. Even in the mundane correspondence archaeology has discovered accounting for materials and transportation, they would use phrases with metaphorical meaning. The words themselves were not descriptive, but shaped for a dramatic impact. They might point to a fact but would not state it directly.
The whole gamut of scholarship in those ancient cultures was utterly certain that one could not understand with the mind all the factors that touched their lives. They generally believed in a spiritual realm with great power and authority over every little thing that happened here in this world. There was a distinct inability of the human mind to grasp what was going on there, and certainly no way to clinically describe it. Instead, they used all manner of metaphors and figures of speech to refer to things there in terms of effects here. So it was with Jesus' parables.
They humbly made no pretense to understanding divine affairs, only how those affairs turned out for us. Thus, there was no way to discuss those all-important divine concerns directly. Keep in mind, these people believed in a higher faculty that was symbolized by the heart, the seat of faith and commitment, the seat of convictions. Your convictions knew the truth of things you could not put into words.
This is the context in which we approach the job of understanding the Old Testament, and to some degree, the New. And when we bring up the subject of death and Hell and the afterlife, it gets complicated quickly. Here is the most important thing I can tell you: The use of the word sheol and related terms is not literal. They didn't know what they would experience there, only what it looked like from here. Thus, it was all sad and dark and dusty, rather like the tombs in which dead bodies were placed. It's what they knew from experience, but most importantly, they knew they didn't have a clue.
There were precious few revelations about the afterlife. What little we have in Scripture indicates that none of it can be taken as facts, only minor corrections of errors in what others might have thought or said. The point is that we cannot know because we cannot understand, and God isn't going to waste time talking about it. God typically uses the same figures of speech His people do, which they learned from the broad cultural expressions of the Mesopotamian and Egyptian civilizations they encountered.
All those nifty drawings of alleged "Hebrew cosmology" only tell you about Hebrew expressions, not what they actually held in their convictions. It's a good bet that the mythology of the pagans in the rest of the Ancient Near East is also totally non-literal, particularly in discussing the so-called underworld, as well as the gods and spiritual realms. Don't pretend you know that they actually believed just because you can read a good translation of their mythology.
In some ways, it's more challenging when you read the New Testament, because the writers used Greek terms they imagined were roughly equivalent to the non-literal terms in their native Hebrew minds. Here is the most clinical thing I can possibly say: The word sheol is roughly equivalent to a waiting place somewhere in God's heavenly courts. If your convictions don't tell you that you belong there, it's hard to imagine that your waiting there would be pleasant.
While I cannot cite anything specific, I sense that something in the work of Christ changed that situation in ways we cannot comprehend. From the Cross, He referred to meeting one of the thieves (a Jewish man) crucified with Him in "paradise" -- indicating a word borrowed from the ancient Persian tongue. The image is something better than this life, and was a long way from the native Hebrew image of sheol. Neither is meant to be literal.
Just read "the grave" when you see sheol and that will usually get you the right place. Make sure you carry a measure of salt for just about any English translation that shows up with words like "Hell".
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