Philip Johnston explores what God’s people believed about life after death during the time of the Old Testament

‘. . . death, the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns . . .’

This was Hamlet’s description of death in his famous ‘To be, or not to be’ soliloquy, in Act 3 of Shakespeare’s play. It is still the way many people feel about death today. It was certainly the way many ancient Israelites thought about death. But what else did they think? Were they dying to meet anyone? And how did their ideas about death develop later on?

Who was dying?

The Old Testament story from the patriarchs to the post-exile nation covers well over a thousand years, during which time many thousands of people lived and died. We know the stories of a very few from the narratives of the patriarchs, the exodus generation, the judges, the four centuries of monarchy, and the further periods of exile and restoration. But we know nothing of the hundreds of thousands of others, except that they all died on earth. Or very nearly all.

Two exceptions are mentioned: Genesis 5:24 has the cryptic comment, ‘Enoch walked with God, and he was not, for God took him’, while 2 Kings 2:11 relates that ‘Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven’. Nevertheless, a striking feature of these exceptions is that they had no impact whatsoever on mainstream Israelite faith. They remained unexplained, marginal phenomena: no psalmist, prophet, king, or wisdom writer ever asked to be spared death like these two men.

Three other individuals were revived by physical contact with Elijah (1 Kings 17:22) or Elisha (2 Kings 4:34), or with Elisha’s bones (2 Kings 13:21). But these people were restored to their previous state of life, and the biblical writers show no interest in their death experiences. Apart from these extremely rare and undeveloped exceptions, then, everyone died.

What did they think would happen when they died?

We have very little information about this. Like most ancient peoples, the Israelites thought that, on death, one went to the underworld—a dreary, shadowy place of virtual non-existence, deep below the earth.

Only two Old Testament texts give any description of it. The first, Isaiah 14:9-11, predicts the entry there of the once-mighty king of Babylon, to be greeted by the shades with the news that he has become as weak as them. The second, Ezekiel 32:20-30, envisages a vast underground cavern of corpses, with various armies, each in their own area.

The main feature of the underworld in the biblical texts is that it was cut off from Israel’s God, as summarised in Psalm 6:5: ‘In death there is no remembrance of you; in Sheol who can give you praise?’ All this stands in marked contrast with the two centres of ancient civilisation—Egypt, which was fascinated with death, and Mesopotamia, where many tales of the gods involved the underworld.

The main Hebrew term for this underworld is Sheol, which occurs 66 times. Other references use earthly terms like ‘pit’ or abstract ones like ‘destruction’, often in parallel with Sheol. These bring the total up to around a hundred. But this remains strikingly few compared to other references to death. For instance, the main Hebrew stem for death (mavet/mot) occurs a thousand times.

There is also a striking imbalance in the way the biblical writers use Sheol. Apart from a few uses of the term cosmologically (i.e. in opposition to the highest heavens) or figuratively (i.e. death as a threatening enemy), it is used mainly of human fate. And with only a few possible exceptions, it indicates the fate of the ungodly—one from which the righteous want to be rescued.

At the same time, it is never depicted as a place of punishment, and there is no alternative fate spelled out for the righteous. The picture remains tantalisingly incomplete.

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