Old Testament – Graves and Ghosts

Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife - Bart D. Ehrman

Ancient Israelites did not subscribe to the view of the immortality of the soul. Souls are not inherently deathless, destined for an eternal existence. In ancient Hebrew thought, there was no “soul” in the Greek sense.

The closest word they had for “soul” was “nephesh”, which means something like “life force” or “life” or even “breath.” It is not a substance that can leave a person and exist independently of the body. It is the thing that makes bodies live. When the body stops breathing, it becomes dead matter. In modern terms, when you stop breathing, your breath doesn’t go somewhere. It just stops. So too with the Hebrew nephesh. The person is then dead.

There is no place of eternal punishment in any passage of the entire Old Testament. In fact—and this comes as a surprise to many people—nowhere in the entire Hebrew Bible is there any discussion at all of heaven and hell as places of rewards and punishments for those who have died.

Sheol

 Instead of rhyming “sounds” at the end of lines, Hebrew poetry could be said to have rhymed “ideas.”

Whether Sheol was a place or, as seems more likely, simply in most instances the grave, the Hebrew poets say a good deal about it, and none of it very good.

Sheol was the realm of death, to be avoided as long as possible. It is not that it was boring; it was that it was a complete diminution of life, to the point of virtual nonexistence. And if one does not exist, one cannot enjoy the good things in life.

Thus the terms used to describe Sheol are bleak, not because there is any pain involved, but because there is nothing involved. It is a realm of “forgetfulness” (Psalm 88:12); “silence” (Psalm 115:17), and “darkness” (Job 17:13). God is not even present there and, since the deceased are dead, none of them can worship him: “The dead do not praise the LORD, / nor do any that go down in silence” (Psalm 115:17). 

Since in the grave one literally has no life, God does not even think about them or remember them anymore. His love is not found among those who have died (Psalm 88:11). That is because God is the god of the living, not those who reside in Sheol: “For in death there is no remembrance of you; / in Sheol who can give you praise?” (Psalm 6:5); “[T]hose who go down to the Pit cannot hope for your faithfulness” (Isaiah 38:18).

Some Bible Authors Believed We Cease to Exist at Death

It is not that they are hoping to go to heaven and avoid eternal flames: the Old Testament says no word about either eternal bliss for the righteous dead or everlasting punishment for the wicked. The poets praise God, instead, for allowing them to stay alive for a while longer, making it possible for them still to praise him.

Some Bible Authors Believed the Dead Could Still Be Spoken To

Not all authors of the Jewish scriptures held to the view that death was the end of the story. 

Obviously, dead persons cannot be consulted if they no longer exist. Thus, whatever the elite and educated authors of Job, Psalms, and Ecclesiastes may have thought, other ancient Israelites believed the dead still do exist in some form and can communicate, if illicitly, with the living.

When King Saul goes to the women medium of Endor, her potential client swears an oath that no harm will come to her, she obeys his request and holds a kind of séance, bringing Samuel up “out of the ground.” Or rather, the text says that it was an “Elohim” that came up. The term “Elohim” is the Hebrew word for God—used typically for the God of Israel himself, but also applicable to other divine beings. Either this text imagines that as God’s prophet, Samuel, is semi-divine, or it wants us to think that the dead, or just dead prophets, have somehow become divinized. It is his divine being that appears.

For this story, as for the Greek and Roman texts we have examined, the dead retain the appearance they had while living; in this case, the Samuel looks just as he did at the end of his life.

‘Why have you disturbed me by bringing me up?’ ” (1 Samuel 28:15). It is hard to interpret this reproach, but it appears that Samuel had been enjoying being dead.

But either way, his death was not awful, terrible, and something to escape. It was pleasant. What was awful was being brought back to life.

Apparently the dead—at least dead prophets—know the future.

Others thought the dead could advise the living, in part by predicting what would soon happen in their lives. That this view is not unique to the author of 1 Samuel is shown by the fact that we find laws that forbid the living from consulting the dead. You don’t make laws to forbid things no one ever does.

“There are not any notions of hell and heaven that we can identify in the Hebrew Bible, no obvious judgment and punishment for sinners nor beatific reward for the virtuous.”