The Pit

The phrase "the pit" is used from time to time in the Old Testament in conjunction with words about death.  In American culture, shaped by generations of assumptions and fallacious, evangelicals might interpret this to speak of something like the miscellaneous torments of hell in the infamous written work Inferno by Dante Alighieri.  Anyone who thinks this would be making assumptions, and ones that are easily refuted.  They might think, like the idiot Bill Wiese (author of 23 Minutes in Hell), that the Bible teaches sinners immediately go to an afterlife of torment now before the eschatological judgment of Revelation 20, and that such torment is experienced eternally.  They might also think the pit is something departed spirits are trapped or tortured within inside hell.

Psalm 30:3 sees David say that God rescued him from Sheol and spared him from going "down into the pit."  The pit is mentioned alongside Sheol, the location/state of the dead, here and elsewhere.  In Psalm 88:3-4, the Psalmist says "my life draws near to the grave (Sheol).  I am counted among those who go down to the pit."  Verses 10-12 from the same chapter touch on how the dead do not praise God because they are in the "land of oblivion."  King Hezekiah says in Isaiah 38:18 says that the grave (Sheol) cannot praise God and that those who go down to the pit cannot hope for God's faithfulness.  Already in this same verse from Isaiah, Hezekiah acknowledges the easily discovered Biblical doctrine of soul sleep.  The dead do not praise God because the dead experience nothing until their resurrection.

Hezekiah adds in Isaiah 38:19 that it is the living humans and the living alone who praise God.  Psalm 6:5 teaches the same: "No one remembers you when he is dead.  Who praises you from the grave?"  The pit is not something remotely similar to a region of hell in Dante's Inferno.  It is an actual pit to hold a corpse or a figurative way of referencing a tomb or grave.  Not even the righteous praise or remember in death because they are not living.  The Biblical stance on the intermediate state is that no one is conscious whatsoever (Ecclesiastes 9:5-10).  The dead, righteous and wicked, perceive nothing and perform no mental or physical tasks in Sheol—and more will be addressed with this soon below.

In Psalm 49:12-14, people are said to perish like animals, and those who trust in themselves are declared to go to Sheol like sheep.  People, like sheep, go to Sheol.  Do sheep either suffer any sort of moralistic torment or experience pleasure in an afterlife according to the Bible?  If humans do, so would they, according to Psalm 49:14!  It is just that the Bible tells us over and over that Sheol is not a realm of consciousness for the dead.  It is the location of the body at burial or decay and it is the state of unconsciousness for the spirit/mind, as the dead think, perceive, and do nothing (Ecclesiastes 9:5, 10).  All the dead, whether they were rich or poor or righteous or wicked, sleep together without any awareness (Job 3:11-19).  This sleep continues until their resurrection to face a second and permanent death for their sins or eternal life for their righteousness/repentance (Daniel 12:2, John 5:24-29, Revelation 20:11-15).

Only Isaiah 14:9-10 (and perhaps Ezekiel 32:21) out of the entire Old Testament might seem, in total isolation from the rest of the Bible, to suggest that there are conscious spirits of the dead in Sheol.  However, the context of Isaiah 14 is about various categories of things rejoicing at the downfall of Babylon's king (14:3-8) so that even land and trees are singing and speaking.  Is the passage literal about these points?  If not, then it is not literal about the spirits of the dead reacting to the demise of Babylon's ruler.  The rest of the Bible contradicts a conscious intermediate afterlife anyway!  Other passages in the Old Testament are as unambiguous as language can be in conveying that Sheol is a place/state devoid of all thought, effort, joy, praise, pain, and dread, or it does not say enough to clarify this and still does not contradict how the Bible teaches unconscious soul sleep before resurrection.

The pit is just a cavity in the ground to hold a corpse or another way of referring to the grave, Sheol, which is for the body just the literal earth that contains human remains.  For the mind, Sheol is a realm where all human consciousness sleeps before awakening with the restoration of the body to either live forever with God or be killed once and for all among his enemies (Romans 6:23, Matthew 10:28, 1 Corinthians 15:26).  No one is in hell right now according to the Bible.  Those who will be there will ultimately face destruction (Matthew 7:13-14) and be eternally shut out from the gift of blissful life in New Jerusalem (2 Thessalonians 1:8-9).  In Sheol, where the Bible says we all go in the meantime, there is neither suffering nor pleasure.  There is a total lack of experience.