Hell part 2

We are going to look at the Old Testament passages where Sheol is translated into "hell" in the King James version. We are doing that because Strong's concordance was created based on the King James. We will compare that to how the NIV scholars translated those passages. My NIV study bible has no references for hell in the Old Testament in its concordance. The words "death" or "grave" in the NIV  replace the word hell from the KJV. The Hebrew is sheol for each of these.

1- Deut. 32:22, sheol is translated to "realm of death below" in the NIV. There is a fire from god's wrath.
2- 2 Sam. 22:6 talks of the cords of the grave.
3- Job 11:8 says the mysteries of god are deeper than the depths of the grave
4- Job 26:6 "death is naked before god"
5- Psalm 9:17 "the wicked return to the grave"
6- Psalm 16:10 "you will not abandon me to the grave"
7- Psalm 18:5 "the cords of the grave entangled me" This is very similar to the verse in 2 Samuel.
8- Psalm 55:15 "let them go down alive to the grave"
9- Psalm 86:13 "you have delivered me from the depths of the grave"
10- Psalm 116:3 "anguish of the grave came upon me"
11-Psalm139:8 "if I make my bed in the depths (sheol) you are there" this is talking about god.
12- Prov. 5:5 "her feet go down to death" talking about the "adulterous woman."
13- Prov. 7:27 "her house is a highway to the grave"
14- Prov 9:18 "her guests are in the depths of the grave"
15- Prov. 15:11 "death and destruction lie open before the lord"
16- Prov. 15:24 "The path of life leads upward.....to keep him from going down to the grave."
17- Prov. 23:14 "punish him with the rod and save his soul from death"
18- Prov. 27:20 "death and destruction are never satisfied."
19- Is. 14:15 "you are brought down to the realm of the dead to the depths of the pit"
20- Is. 28:15 "with the realm of the dead we have made an agreement"
21- Is. 28:18 "your agreement with the realm of the dead will not stand"
22- Is. 57:9 "you descended to the very realm of the dead"
23- Eze. 31:16 "I brought it down to the realm of the dead"
24- Eze. 31:17 "they too had gone down to the realm of the dead"
25- Eze. 32:21 "from within the realm of the dead, the mighty leaders will say"
26- Eze. 32:27 "who went down to the realm of the dead"
27- Amos 9:2 "though they dig down to the depths below"
28-Jonah 2:2 "from deep in the realm of the dead"
29- Hab. 2:5 "he is as greedy as the grave"

Again, these are all the NIV versions of the passages where sheol is translated into "hell" in the KJV Old Testament. We see from these that NIV scholars determined they should be translated as death, the grave, the depths, and the realm of the dead.
I also looked up "death" in the Strong's concordance and found no instances where the KJV translators used death for sheol.The Hebrew word translated as death was an entirely different word. However, when I looked up "grave" in the Strong's concordance, I found 30 instances where sheol had been translated as "the grave" instead of hell. So, even the KJV scholars were not consistly translating sheol into hell. I also found 3 instances where sheol had been translated into "the pit" in the KJV. As far as I could tell grave, hell, and pit are the only English words that the KJV uses for sheol.

I searched the text of the NIV for the word hell here: (link). As far as I can see, there is no hell in the Old Testament of the NIV, at all. Very interesting. In fact, the Old Testament scriptures  of these translations also do not contain the word hell: ASV, RSV, ISV, NET, WEB, YLT, ISV, EST, NASB, The Easy To Read Version, and the Good News Bible. The ones that do contain hell in the Old Testament are the various versions of the KJV, and surprisingly enough, The Living Bible and The Message. That last one shocked me, considering it is often used by non-fundamentalist, progressive christians. I wonder if the word hell occurring in the KJV is one of the reasons that version is preferred by fundamentalists.