Sheol (pronounced “Sheh-ol”), in Hebrew שְׁאוֹל (She’ol), is the “grave”, or “pit” or “abyss”.

In Judaism She'ol is the earliest conception of the afterlife in the Jewish scriptures: a place of darkness to which all dead go, regardless of the moral choices made in life, and where they are "removed from the light of God" (the Book of Job). She'ol is a concept that predates the Christian and Muslim ideas of judgement after death and also predates, and is different from, Heaven and Hell. It is unclear whether Sheol was to be considered a real place or a way of describing the unknown status of a person's conscious being.

The word hades (“underworld”) was substituted for “sheol” when the Hebrew scriptures were translated into Greek (see Septuagint) in ancient Alexandria around 200 BCE.

In the tanakh, sheol is the common destination of both the righteous and the unrighteous (recounted in Ecclesiastes and Job). The New Testament (written in Greek) also uses “Hades” to refer to the abode of the dead. (Revelation 20:13) The belief that those in Sheol awaited the resurrection either in comfort (in the bosom of Abraham) or in torment may be reflected in the story of the New Testament of Lazarus and Dives. English translations of the Hebrew scriptures have variously rendered the word Sheol as “Hell” or “the grave”.