Page:Primitive Culture Vol 2.djvu/96

82 mighty fallen of the uncircumcised, lie there. The great king of Babylon must go down: —

'Sheol from beneath is moved because of thee, to meet thee at thy coming: He rouseth for thee the mighty dead, all the great chiefs of the earth; He maketh to rise up from their thrones, all the kings of the nations. All of them shall accost thee, and shall say unto thee: Art thou, even thou too, became weak as we? Art thou made like unto us?'

To the Greek Septuagint, Sheol was Hades, and for this the Coptic translators had their long-inherited Egyptian name of Amenti, while the Vulgate renders it as Infernus, the lower regions. The Gothic Ulfilas, translating the Hades of the New Testament, could use Halja in its old German sense of the dim shadowy home of the dead below the earth; and the corresponding word Hell, if this its earlier sense be borne in mind, fairly translates Sheol and Hades in the English version of the Old and New Testament, though the word has become misleading to uneducated ears by being used also in the sense of Gehenna, the place of torment. The early Hebrew historians and prophets, holding out neither the hope of everlasting glory nor the fear of everlasting agony as guiding motives for man's present life, lay down little direct doctrine of a future state, yet their incidental mentions justify the translators who regard Sheol as Hades. Sheol is a special locality where dead men go to their dead ancestors: 'And Isaac gave up the ghost, and died, and was gathered unto his people ... and his sons Esau and Jacob buried him.' Abraham, though not even buried in the land of his forefathers, is thus 'gathered unto his people;' and Jacob has no thought of his body being laid with Joseph's body, torn by wild beasts in the wilderness, when he says, 'I shall go down to my son mourning to Sheol' ('' in the LXX., 'èpesēt èàmenti' in the Coptic, 'in infernum' in the Vulgate). The rephaim, the 'shades' of the dead, who dwell in Sheol, love not to be disturbed from their rest by the