Sheol and the World to Come in Judaism

For most of the Hebrew Bible, death leads to Sheol. The word appears dozens of times, usually for a place beneath the earth to which everyone descends, kings and slaves, righteous and wicked. Its inhabitants, sometimes called rephaim, ‘shades’, live a faint, shadowy existence. ‘For in death there is no remembrance of you; in Sheol who can give you praise?’ asks one psalm, and the Book of Ecclesiastes warns that there is no work or wisdom in Sheol, where all are going. Other names for the realm include the Pit and Abaddon, ‘destruction’.

Sheol is not a place of punishment. It is the common grave of humanity, and the biblical writers seldom describe what happens there. Scholars compare it with other ancient Near Eastern pictures of the dead, such as the Mesopotamian underworld or Ugaritic texts in which Mot, Death, swallows his victims, and note how sparingly the Bible speaks of it. Contact with the dead was forbidden, and the story of King Saul summoning the prophet Samuel through a medium at Endor is told as a sign of Saul’s downfall. The weight of biblical religion lay on life, the covenant and the survival of the people.

A few passages hint at something more. Enoch ‘walked with God, and he was not, for God took him’, and the prophet Elijah was carried up to heaven in a whirlwind. Some psalms express a hope that God will not abandon the faithful to Sheol, and Isaiah 26:19 promises that ‘your dead shall live’. Scholars debate how far such lines speak of personal life after death and how far they are poetry of rescue from danger or of national renewal. For the most part, the biblical writers looked for blessing in a long life, in children who carried on one’s name and in burial with one’s ancestors, the meaning of the phrase ‘gathered to his people’.

In the last centuries BCE a new hope came to the fore. The Book of Daniel, written around 165 BCE during the persecution under the Seleucid king Antiochus IV, declares that ‘many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt’. Earlier images, such as Ezekiel’s valley of dry bones coming back to life, had spoken of the restoration of the nation; now they were read as promises to individuals. Scholars link the change to the problem of martyrdom: if the faithful died for the law, justice seemed to require a life beyond death. Books such as 2 Maccabees tell of martyrs who expected God to restore their bodies.

By the first century CE, belief in resurrection divided Jewish parties. Josephus and the New Testament both report that the Pharisees affirmed reward, punishment and resurrection, while the Sadducees denied them. The rabbis, heirs of the Pharisees, made resurrection a central teaching. The Mishnah declares that ‘all Israel have a share in the world to come’ and lists among those who lose it anyone who says that resurrection is not taught in the Torah. The second blessing of the Amidah, recited every day, praises God ‘who revives the dead’.

The phrase Olam Ha-Ba, ‘the world to come’, was left open in rabbinic literature. It could mean the messianic age, the renewed world after the resurrection, or the realm to which souls go after death. Medieval thinkers argued over it. Maimonides counted resurrection as the thirteenth of his principles of faith, but taught that the highest reward was the bodiless life of the soul in knowledge of God, and was accused of downplaying the body. In 1191 he wrote a treatise defending his belief in resurrection. Nahmanides answered that the world to come begins only after the dead are raised in body and soul.

The rabbis described two destinations for the soul after death. Gan Eden, the ‘Garden of Eden’, became the name of a heavenly realm where the righteous rest, often pictured as studying Torah in God’s presence. Gehinnom took its name from the Valley of Hinnom just south of Jerusalem, which the prophet Jeremiah condemned as a place where children had been sacrificed. By rabbinic times the name stood for a place where the wicked are judged after death.

For most people, Gehinnom was understood as temporary. The Mishnah gives twelve months as the term of the judgement of the wicked, and later tradition saw it as a refining fire that cleanses the soul before it enters Gan Eden. This is the reason mourners say the Kaddish for a parent for eleven months rather than twelve: to avoid suggesting that the parent needed the full term of purification. A few texts speak of longer punishment for the very wicked, but eternal torment never became the dominant picture. The diagram on this page is schematic: Jewish sources do not set these realms in one fixed vertical order, and the idea of Sheol comes from an earlier stage than the others.

Jewish mysticism added further layers. The Zohar and the later kabbalists of Safed, above all the circle of Isaac Luria in the sixteenth century, taught that souls may return in new lives, gilgul, to complete their task in the world, and they described heavenly halls through which the soul ascends. Folk practice developed its own customs around death, from lighting a candle on the yahrzeit, the anniversary of a death, to the Yizkor memorial prayers on major festivals.

Modern Jews hold a wide range of views. Orthodox Judaism affirms the resurrection of the dead as taught in the prayers and principles of faith. In 1885 the Pittsburgh Platform of American Reform Judaism rejected bodily resurrection and literal heaven and hell while affirming the immortality of the soul, and Reform prayer books long changed the wording of the Amidah’s second blessing; some recent editions offer both forms. Conservative and Reconstructionist thinkers have read the traditional language in varied ways. Across these differences, many Jews would agree that what matters most is how one lives, and that the dead are honoured by remembering them and doing good in their name.