World of the Dead in the Old Testament

In the Old Testament, the world of the dead is the place underneath the earth where the dead are. Returning from the underworld is not possible, although raising someone from the dead is not out of the question in the Bible.

Biblical Depictions

The realm of the dead (sheol in Hebrew) is also referred to as “the pit”. The realm of the dead is under the earth, in the “water below the earth”. At the entrance to the realm of the dead are solid gates that are bolted to prevent the dead from escaping.
The descriptions of the realm of the dead are not very concrete: it is dark (Job 17:13), dusty (Job 17:16, ESV) and quiet (Psalm 94:17; Psalm 115:17).
Isaiah 14:9-11 paints a picture of the underworld as a place where powerless ghosts live. The situation the dead find themselves in is not a happy one, “You lie on a bed of maggots and are covered with a blanket of worms.”

Depictions outside of the Bible

The description of the realm of the dead in the Bible is similar to the depiction of the underworld in ancient Mesopotamia. In a passage from the Epic of Gilgamesh, the realm of the dead is described as “the house which those who enter cannot leave, on the road where travelling is one way only. The house where those who stay are deprived of light, where dust is their food, and clay their bread. They are clothed, like birds, with feathers, and they see no light, and they dwell in darkness. Over the door and the bolt, dust has settled”.

Stephanie Dalley, Myths from Mesopotamia. Creation, The Flood, Gilgamesh, and Others (Oxford University Press, Oxford, Revised Edition 2000), p. 89.

The Greek concept of an underground kingdom of shadows (hades in Greek) also does not differ much from the ancient Israelite descriptions.

The Fate of the Dead

Ecclesiastes 9:4 illustrates quite how terrible the fate of the dead is, “a live dog is better off than a dead lion”. The dead are cut off from the world of the living. They do not even have contact with God anymore. But that does not mean that God cannot see the underworld. According to Amos 9:2, God can find the godless there, too.
Return from the realm of the dead is not possible according to the Old Testament, although resurrection from the dead is not regarded as impossible (Psalm 30:3; Isaiah 26:19; Ezekiel 37:12).
The expectation of a universal resurrection from the dead at the end of time only occurs in Daniel 12:2, which states,