The Hebrew word Sheol is found 66 times in the Old Testament. While the Old Testament consistently refers to the body as going to the grave, it always refers to the soul or spirit of man as going to Sheol.... Brown, Driver and Briggs (1906, p. 982) define Sheol as: "the underworld... whither man descends at death". They trace the origin of Sheol to either sha-al, which means the spirit world to which mediums directed their questions to the departed, or sha-al, which refers to the hollow place in the earth where the souls of men went at death. The following things are stated about Sheol... [and its inhabitants]: First, Sheol is said to have 'gates' by which one enters and 'bars' which keep one in (Job 17:16; Isa 38:10). Such figurative language conveys the idea that Sheol is a realm from which no escape is possible. …show more content…
This word forms a linguistic bridge which takes us from the Old Testament view of death to the New Testament position. The importance of a proper interpretation of this word cannot be overstressed. In the Septuagint, Hades is found 71 times. It is the Greek equivalent for Sheol 64 times. The other seven times it is found in the Septuagint, it is the translation of other Hebrew words, some of which shed significant light on what Hades meant to the translators of the Septuagint. In Job 33:22, Hades is the translation of the Hebrew word memeteim, or 'destroying angels [KJV] ... the angels who are commissioned by God to slay the man.' In this sense it refers to disincarnate spirit creatures. It is also used in Job 38:17 as the translation of the Hebrew, 'the realm of ghosts or shades' (KJV). It is used for 'the shades of the underworld' in Prov 2:18. This refers to the spirits of the departed in Sheol who are viewed as 'the dwellers in the Kingdom of the dead as in Homer and Virgil and like the Latin word Inferi, it stands for the realm of disembodied