Sheol synonyms

The most vivid portraiture of Sheol is to be found in the exilian passage Isa.

Paradise was sometimes regarded as the division of Sheol to which the righteous passed after death, but at others it was conceived as the heavenly abode of Moses, Enoch and Elijah, to which other saints would pass after the last judgment.

Irenaeus regards as heretical the opinion that the souls of the departed pass immediately into glory; Tertullian, Cyprian, the Acts of St Perpetua, Clement of Alexandria, Cyril of Jerusalem, Basil, Gregory of Nyassa, Ambrose, Chrysostom and Jerome, all speak of prayer for the dead and seem to imply belief in a purgatory, but their view seems to have been affected by the pre-Christian doctrine of Hades or Sheol.

The seers of Israel were content to dismiss their dead to a land of silence and darkness, the vast hollow gloom of the subterranean Sheol.'

It is used in the Old Testament to translate the Hebrew Sheol, and in the New Testament the Greek On g, Hades, and y€EVva, Hebrew Gehenna (see Eschatology) .