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THE BEST PLACE to see the importance of Sheol in Hebrew thought is in the book of Psalms. Unfortunately, Psalms is a composite work that does not easily yield up the date of each individual poem. Psalm 115 gives a short and very articulate view of the cosmos of the Hebrews:

The heavens are the Lord’s heavens, but the earth he has

given to human beings.

The dead do not praise the Lord, nor do any that go down

into silence.

But we will bless the Lord from this time on and

forevermore. Praise the Lord! (Ps 115:16-18)

Sheol is the abode of the dead. The dead are not remembered and they are cut off both from the living and the presence of God:

For Sheol cannot thank you,

death cannot praise you;

those who go down to the Pit cannot hope

for your faithfulness.

The living, the living, they thank you,

as I do this day;

fathers make known to children

your faithfulness. (Isa 38:18-19)

This theme is repeated in Psalms 88 and 115:17 “The dead do not give praise to the LORD, nor do any who go down into silence.” And this idea continues right into the Greek period. Sirach 17:27 also reflects this belief in the virtual nonexistence of the dead.

Who will sing praises to the Most High in Hades,

as those who are alive and give thanks?

From the dead, as from one who does not exist,

thanksgiving has ceased.

Were this a Canaanite document, one could easily assume that the kingdom of the grave is not part of one god’s purview, being ceded to another power. Here one sees a similar thought expressed. But it is not openly stated; no opposing god could have any role under the watchful eye of the editor. In this touching petition, the Hebrew Bible recoils from discussing the kingdom of the dead.

Hidden Scriptural Evidence of the Polemic?

AS THE TEXTS from Ugarit have become more and more understandable and available, more and more possibilities for the relationship between cultures have emerged. The highwater mark was probably Mitchell Dahood’s Psalms for the Anchor Bible series, which has been characterized with some justification as “parallelomania.”24 In it an enormous number of parallels between Ugarit and Israelite psalms were adduced.

Virtually every occurence of the word “land” in the Hebrew Bible has been claimed as a reference to the Canaanite underworld. Some claims have proved intriguing and others seem unlikely.25 In like fashion, several interesting cruxes of Biblical statements that have heretofore been considered innocent are of interest to our inquiry into the Bible’s notions of the afterlife.

Even the commandment to honor “your mother and father” that “your”26 days may be long in the land may originally refer to ancestor worship, honoring parents after they have died, instead of through acts of filial piety while they are alive, as we interpret it today.27 The insistence on “monotheism” in our parlance is therefore a philosophical shorthand way of expressing a much more complicated religious struggle. The prohibition against recognizing the ancestor gods as anyone else than YHWH, to practice or perform the cults of the Canaanites, yields the phenomenon we first noticed, the Bible’s reticence to spell out notions of life after death. But, in spite of the reticence, there is no doubt that such practices were known to Hebrew culture, a notion that the editors of the Bible relied on but otherwise thought too dangerous (idolatrous) to include in their writings.

There are other places in the Bible where Sheol is depicted as not beyond the power of God (Job 26:6; Ps 139:8; Amos 9:12). Many of these passages again underline the constant Biblical refrain that God is the only God. They contradict the notion that Sheol contains no presence of God. It is hard to know whether this represents an evolutionary step in the development of monotheism or merely an alternative poetic trope which the psalmists and prophets could use. In any case, we should note that both statements occur in Biblical tradition. In many passages of the Bible, YHWH is God of the living and the dead, of this world and the next. These