The Great Below

The Mesopotamian netherworld

One of the burning questions in the minds of humans since the beginning of the time has been, “Where do I go when I die?” The pagans and Jews of the ancient Near East had definite ideas on the subject, although they’re scattered through the Bible and across a multitude of texts recovered by archaeologists over the last two hundred years. By piecing together the evidence, we can assemble a rough idea of what they believed about the layout of the netherworld.

In ancient Mesopotamia, the underworld was a dismal place—damp, gloomy, and generally unpleasant. As we noted earlier, the quality of one’s afterlife depended on the faithfulness of his or her descendants and how well they performed the monthly kispum rite. Abraham’s distress at not having an heir was that he and Sarah would have to depend on a servant, Eliezer, to be the “son of the cup,” the “pourer of water,” to ensure their well-being in the netherworld. This tradition was so deeply ingrained in the cultures of the ancient world, from Babylon to Rome, that early Roman Christians built churches in cemeteries, including St. Peter’s Basilica, and installed libation tubes in sarcophagi.

But what about the physical layout of the underworld? Were there actual gates? How about the landscape—were there hills, cliffs, pits, and other physical features described in pagan myth?

While the Bible tells us more about the netherworld than we’ve probably been taught, it leaves a lot to the imagination. In the Old Testament, the term for the land of the dead is Sheol. There is no consensus on the origin of the Hebrew word.^[i] Unlike Greek myths of Hades, Sheol was not personified by the ancient Hebrews, although there are metaphorical references, such as the proverb that describes Sheol as “never satisfied”^[ii] and Isaiah’s warning that “Sheol has enlarged its appetite and opened its mouth without measure,”^[iii] which is strikingly similar to the voracious hunger of the Canaanite death-god, Mot.

One of the most famous pagan myths of the patriarchal era, The Descent of Inanna, tells the story of the aftermath of one of the episodes of the Epic of Gilgamesh. In that story, the heroic king of Uruk spurned the sexual advances of the Queen of Heaven, rudely (but truthfully) pointing out that the men in Inanna’s life usually came to an unhappy end. (Remember the story of Inanna’s husband, Dumuzi, who was dragged down to the netherworld so she could escape the Great Below. Inanna, better known to us as Ishtar (Astarte in the Bible), didn’t handle rejection well. The old saying, “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned,” applies double when the woman has godlike power. Imagine a spoiled, supernatural fourteen-year-old, and you have an idea of the character of Inanna: Raging hormones, violent temper, and virtually no restrictions on her abilities.

In a rage, Inanna flew up to heaven and demanded that the sky-god, Anu, release the Bull of Heaven to destroy Gilgamesh and his city. The king and his friend Enkidu finally managed to kill the bull, but not before it killed hundreds of innocent civilians. Enkidu then added insult to the goddess’ injury by tearing off the bull’s right thigh and throwing it in Inanna’s face. (Interestingly, the right thigh of sacrificed bulls was given to the Temple priests, according to the Law of Moses.)^[iv]

Here’s the thing: The Bull of Heaven was Gugalanna, consort of the Queen of the Great Below, Ereshkigal.^[v] This adds dramatic tension to the plot of The Descent of Inanna: The Queen of Heaven claimed that she’d arrived at the gates of the underworld for the funeral rites of Ereshkigal’s husband—whose death was Inanna’s fault. No wonder Ereshkigal “slapped her thigh and bit her lip.”^[vi] What gall!

This is an excerpt from our 2019 book Veneration. If you want to own a copy, it’s available in paperback, as a Kindle e-book, and as an audiobook at Amazon and Audible.

The relevant point is that the realm of the dead was depicted as a place below the earth behind seven gates that could not be passed without the permission of the sovereign of the underworld. This is similar to the Egyptian concept of the passage to the land of the dead. Similar to The Descent of Inanna, two of the spells in the Egyptian Book of the Dead describe a series of seven doorways in “the house of Osiris in the west,” guarded by triads of demonic creatures—a “doorkeeper,” a “herald,” and a “watcher.”^[vii] These entities were often referred to by the Egyptian word ntr, which, as we noted in an earlier chapter, is probably the term borrowed by Isaiah for his description of the rebel in Eden—the word meaning “dead god,” but awkwardly translated “branch” in Isaiah 14:19 on the assumption that the prophet used the Hebrew word netser.^[viii]

You obviously noticed that the Egyptians, like the Hebrews, were familiar with the concept of Watchers, although their role in Egyptian religion as door-guardians of the underworld was much more specific than that of their counterparts in Jewish and Mesopotamian cosmology (where they were called apkallu).^[ix]

Like the Mesopotamian myths and the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the Bible describes Sheol as a place below the earth^[x] where the dead are prevented from returning by some type of physical barrier.

As the cloud fades and vanishes,
so he who goes down to Sheol does not come up.
— Job 7:9, ESV

Will it go down to the bars of Sheol?
Shall we descend together into the dust?
— Job 17:16, ESV

I said, In the middle of my days
I must depart;
I am consigned to the gates of Sheol\
for the rest of my years.
— Isaiah 38:10, ESV

So, during the era of the patriarchs and prophets, Hebrews saw Sheol as a place occupied by the dead where “bars” and “gates” kept them from returning to the living (in physical form, anyway). However, even then there was hope that the righteous would someday be raised from that dreary plane of existence.

The LORD kills and brings to life;
He brings down to Sheol and raises up.
— 1 Samuel 2:6, ESV

For I know that my Redeemer lives,
and at the last he will stand upon the earth.

And after my skin has been thus destroyed,
yet in my flesh I shall see God,
whom I shall see for myself,
and my eyes shall behold, and not another.

My heart faints within me!
— Job 19:25–27, ESV

There was a category of malevolent dead known to occupy the netherworld, a group we’ve already met, who are mentioned in Isaiah 14:

Sheol beneath is stirred up
to meet you when you come;
it rouses the shades [Rephaim] to greet you,
all who were leaders of the earth;
it raises from their thrones
all who were kings of the nations.
— Isaiah 14:9, ESV

While Isaiah mocked the Rephaim spirits as “weak,” sleeping on beds of maggots with worms for covers, it’s clear from the text that these were once men of power. This is consistent with their depiction in the texts from Ugarit, where these “warriors of Baal” were summoned through necromancy rituals to the tabernacle of El (i.e., Mount Hermon).^[xi]

The prophet Ezekiel, writing about 125 years or so after Isaiah, suggested that there is a hierarchy in the underworld and that the spirits of the “mighty men who were of old” occupy a place of primacy.

We'll get that in our next article.

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[i]. H. M. Barstad, “Sheol.” In K. van der Toorn, B. Becking, & P. W. van der Horst (Eds.), Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible (2nd extensively rev. ed.). (Leiden; Boston; Köln; Grand Rapids, MI; Cambridge: Brill; Eerdmans, 1999), pg. 768.

[ii]. Proverbs 27:20.

[iii]. Isaiah 5:14.

[iv]. Leviticus 7:30–34.

[v]. Louise M. Pryke, Ishtar (New York and London: Routledge, 2017), p. 205.

[vi]. Wolkstein and Kramer, op. cit., p. 56.

[vii]. Rita Lucarelli, “The Guardian-demons of the Book of the Dead.” British Museum Studies in Ancient Egypt and Sudan 15 (2010), p. 87.

[viii]. Ibid., p. 86.

[ix]. Amar Annus, “On the Origin of Watchers: A Comparative Study of the Antediluvian Wisdom in Mesopotamian and Jewish Traditions,” Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha vol. 19:4 (2010), pp. 277–320.

[x]. Genesis 37:35; Numbers 16:30–33; 1 Samuel 2:6; Job 7:9 and 17:16, etc.

[xi]. Ugaritic texts KTU 1.20–1.22, the Rephaim Texts.