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Wednesday, September 12, 2012

Numbers 16:32-33, The First Mention of the Underworld in the Bible

And the earth opened its mouth and swallowed them up, with their households and all the people who belonged to Korah and all their goods. So they and all that belonged to them went down alive into Sheol, and the earth closed over them, and they perished from the midst of the assembly. 

//Korah was a troublemaking rich Israelite who insisted everybody was equal. Especially him. He had as much right to be a priest as Aaron, God's appointed. So Moses said okay, let Korah and his 250 followers bring their fire pans before God, with the incense burning. We shall see whether God accepts them.

God doesn't. He opens up the mouth of the earth and swallows all 250 of them into Sheol, the Jewish underworld. Sheol was a place under the earth of shadowy subsistence where souls descended after they died. In early Jewish thought, the soul gradually wasted away there, but in the second century B.C., some Jews began to imagine the soul would return to the body in a physical resurrection (see the book of Daniel, written about 165 B.C.)

Koran, however, doesn't die! He and his followers fall alive into the realm of the dead. The first mention of Sheol, and the first living dead. It makes me wonder … with our Gothic fascination with the underworld, why have there been no movies written about this event?

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