Psalm 16:10
Thou Wilt Not Leave My Soul
Where the Greek went wrongA Hebrew grave became a Greek underworld, and your Bible calls it hell.
Side by Side
The Hebrew
The source text
For thou wilt not leave my soul in Sheol; neither wilt thou suffer thine Holy One to see corruption. (Sheol: the grave.)
The Greek
Septuagint, where it went wrong
Because thou wilt not leave my soul in Hades, neither wilt thou suffer thine Holy One to see corruption. (Hades: the Greek god of the dead and his underworld.)
Your KJV reads: the Hebrew text, but it renders Sheol “hell,” the same word it uses for Hades in Acts 2:27, where Peter quotes this verse.
See what changed and why ↓What Your Bible Says
For thou wilt not leave my soul in hell; neither wilt thou suffer thine Holy One to see corruption.
Psalm 16:10 KJV
Read with the modern picture of hell, the verse sounds as if Messiah’s soul went down to a place of fire, or to a waiting room full of living spirits.
What the Hebrew Says
The Hebrew word is Sheol. It is the grave, the place of the dead. Jacob expected to go there mourning for Joseph: “For I will go down into the grave unto my son mourning” (Genesis 37:35). That “grave” is Sheol.
The King James itself translates Sheol “grave” as often as it translates it “hell.”
What the Greek Says
The Greek put Hades. In Greek religion Hades was the god of the dead and the name of his realm under the earth, where the shades of the dead went on with a ghostly life. Brenton’s English Septuagint of 1851 prints “hell” here. The panel above shows the Greek word itself, Hades.
What Changed
A plain Hebrew word for the grave was carried into Greek under the name of a pagan realm. With the name came the picture: conscious souls living on below the earth.
The Hebrew letters did not change. What changed was the world the reader stepped into.
Peter Read It as the Grave
Men and brethren, let me freely speak unto you of the patriarch David, that he is both dead and buried, and his sepulchre is with us unto this day.
Acts 2:29 KJV
Peter sets the verse beside a tomb. David’s body is still in its grave, so the psalm must speak of another, whose “soul was not left in hell, neither his flesh did see corruption” (Acts 2:31). And he adds, “David is not ascended into the heavens” (Acts 2:34). No underworld. A grave that could not hold Messiah.
Purpose of the Change
The effect is to plant the Greek underworld in the reader’s Bible. Once Sheol became Hades, the grave became a place of living souls, ready-made for the teaching of an immortal soul that never truly dies.
The Bottom Line
Sheol is the grave. The Greek gave it a pagan name, but Messiah lay in a tomb, not an underworld.
Messiah now holds “the keys of hell and of death” (Revelation 1:18), and at the end “death and hell were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death” (Revelation 20:14). The grave ends. It was never a kingdom.
Dig Deeper The evidence, for anyone who wants it
Sheol by the Numbers
Sheol appears 65 times in the Hebrew. The King James renders it “hell” 31 times, “grave” 31 times, and “pit” 3 times. The Greek uses Hades for it almost every time. The same Hebrew word, in the same kind of verse, became a place of torment or a hole in the ground depending on the translator’s choice.
What the Dead Know
For there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest.
Ecclesiastes 9:10 KJV
That “grave” is Sheol. “The dead know not any thing” (Ecclesiastes 9:5). The Greek Hades, full of thinking shades, is not the Hebrew Sheol.
The Grave Gives Up Its Dead
In Revelation, “death and hell delivered up the dead which were in them” (Revelation 20:13). Hades returns the dead for the resurrection, the way a grave would. It is a holding place for bodies, emptied at the resurrection.
Words Your Bible Borrowed
Hades is one of several Greek words that brought pagan meaning with them. The site page “Words Your Bible Borrowed” traces others.
An Honest Note
Peter’s words in Acts 2:27 use the Greek word too, because the apostles wrote in Greek and Hades was the common Greek word for the realm of the dead. The problem is not that a Greek word was used. The problem is what the word brought with it, and how later teachers filled it. Scripture defines Sheol by Scripture, and Scripture calls it the grave.