Watery Grave?
This watery anarchy represented in the ancient Near East as the chaos sea monster links the sea with the underworld. I know that this is a really hard concept for us modern 21st century church goers to comprehend.
Our perception that we have learned through the teachings of Jesus about the underworld and Hell are vastly different than Old Testament authors view of Death, Sheol/ The Underworld.
It is only in the second temple period literature that a fiery underworld is introduce. Jesus gives us more information about this fiery underworld by expanding on the second temple period literature of His day.
We do not want to read the New Testaments ideas back into the text of the Old Testament but we should use the Old Testaments cosmology to influence that which we read in the New Testament.
The Underworld/ Sheol
The place of the dead in the Old Testament was called Sheol. Though they share common elements we want to be careful not import what we believe about Hell into what the ancient Near Eastern biblical authors believed about Sheol.
Here is an another quote from our sources:
“The term Sheol is used in parallel with death (see note on Job 17:13) in the OT to indicate the grave or the underworld… The word Sheol is unique to the Hebrew Bible, but the concept of the grave or underworld is well known in the ancient Near East. In Mesopotamian mythology, the underworld is a very inhospitable place from which no one returns: there is no light there, and the inhabitants eat clay or mud and drink unclean water.”
The NIV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible: In the Article on Death and Sheol pg 833
From the picture above you can see the correlation in the ancient Near Eastern cosmology to the sea and the underworld/ Sheol.
We hope you enjoyed this Theology Lesson in 60 seconds.
If you are interested in this subject continue this study in our longer post here
Citations:
Faithlife Study Bible. J. D. Barry et al. Bellingham, WA: Logos Bible Software, 2012.
NIV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible Grand Rapids, Michigan USA Zondervan 2016
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