Joseph's Coat Identified

Jacob had become a patriarch, the father of twelve sons, the younger two of whom were Joseph and Benjamin. The elder ten kept the flocks. Joseph went to them as his father's messenger to learn of their welfare, and to take them delicacies. His brethren hated him through jealousy, sold him into slavery in Egypt, and took his elegant coat of many colors, bedraggled it in the blood of a kid and the dust and brought it to their father. Jacob identified it as Joseph's; and heart-broken he cried bitterly, "I will mourn for my son Joseph until I join him in Sheol." (Genesis 37:35.) Sheol is the Hebrew word for tomb.

This is the first use of the word Sheol in the Bible. Sheol is the only word translated hell in the Old Testament, Common Version. All scholars now admit it really signifies the tomb, the death-state. Jacob did not think of his beloved son as having gone to a Sheol of eternal torture, nor did he have the thought of joining him there. Jacob knew of no such place as Dante and others describe.

The explanation is simple. In old English literature the words "hell," "grave" and "pit" were used interchangeably, as in the translation of the Old Testament. Sheol is translated grave and pit more times than it is translated hell in our Common Version. Its equivalent in New Testament Greek is Hades, also signifying the tomb, the grave, as all scholars agree. Jesus was in Hades, Sheol, but was raised the third day by Divine Power, from the tomb, the death condition.

The translators of the Revised Version Bible refused to translate these words, Sheol and Hades, by our English word Hell, because the gradual change of language has attached a totally different meaning from what it originally had--the grave. See marginal readings of Psalms 55:15; 86:13.

The learned translators, however, could not agree to render these words grave and tomb, and left them untranslated. Compare versions and margin of Isaiah 14:9,11.