Shades of Sheol

Shades of Sheol explores one of the Hebrew Bible's most haunting and least settled questions: what happens when life ends?Philip Johnston guides readers through the shadowed world of Sheol - the underworld of the dead - where biblical writers wrestle with grief, burial, ritual impurity, ancestral memory, necromancy, and the silence of the grave. Drawing on biblical poetry, law, prophecy, archaeology, and the literature of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Ugarit, this study reveals that ancient Israel's views of death were neither simple nor uniform.Why were the dead cut off from praise of God? Did Israelites honour their ancestors, consult spirits, or fear the power of the departed? How did a bleak vision of the underworld gradually give way to hopes of divine rescue, resurrection, and judgment?Rigorous yet richly engaging, Shades of Sheol uncovers a faith centered on the God of the living - even while it stared unflinchingly into death's deepest shadows.