As for them that sit in darkness and the shadow of death.
Fettered with beggary and iron.
They cried unto the Lord in their affliction.
And out of their distresses He saved them.
And He brought them out of darkness and the shadow of death.
For He shattered the gates of brass.
And brake the bars of iron.
And He delivered them from their corruption.
And their bonds He brake asunder.
To hear the groaning of them that be in fetters.
To loose the sons of the slain.
“He brought them out of darkness and the shadow of death.” All these Old Testament verses refer to our Savior, “the fierce Man of war” spoken of in the Wisdom of Solomon, who “leaped out of Heaven” into a “land of destruction” to redeem mankind and lead the captive souls in Hades “out of darkness and the shadow of death.”
In the Book of Job, God speaks to Job out of a whirlwind and asks him:
Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? tell me now, if thou hast knowledge, who set the measures of it, if thou knowest? Or who stretched a line upon it? Or did I order the morning light in thy time?Or didst thou take clay of the earth, and form a living creature, and set it with the power of speech upon theearth? And do the gates of death open to thee for fear; and did the gate-keepers of Hades quake when they saw thee? (Job 38:4-16)
The text is vivid and striking. But there is a problem here: this last portion of the quotation from the Book of Job is quite different in the Protestant text. In the Revised Standard Version, for example, it reads as follows: “Have the gates of death been revealed to you, or have you seen the gates of deep darkness?” Very different indeed, and not much of a “prophecy” of the actual event. One might say that, as a prophecy of our Saviour’s descent into and destruction of Sheol, it has all the vigor and verve of an overcooked noodle.
Even within the books that we share in common with the non-Orthodox, the texts are different, as we can see, for example, in the above mentioned quotation from the Book of Job. One of the major reasons for these differences is that the Orthodox Church uses the Septuagint text of the Old Testament, which was also the text used by the holy Apostles in the time of our Saviour.
The subject of the Descent into Hades–the “neutralization of the Netherworld”–is of vital importance. The implications of that event in Christ’s work of salvation has been sorely underestimated in the West; but that is a subject that will require yet another article.
A Footnote
What many people do not realize is that, as long as we can determine, there have been variants in the Scriptural texts as they have come down to us. Our readers will note that we have pointed out that the texts of the Old Testament that the Protestants and Roman Catholics use today are different from the Septuagint text that the Orthodox Church has used since the time of our Savior. Why?
Some history may be useful here. By royal decree, the Septuagint text was prepared in the third century before Christ in Alexandria Egypt by the best Jewish scholars of the day. At the time, Alexandria was the greatest center of learning in the known world, and its library was famous for its completeness and the valuable manuscripts it contained.
The Septuagint translation was an occasion of great celebration, and a special day was set aside to commemorate this event in the Jewish community, which, for the most part, no longer spoke Hebrew, especially in the diaspora. (In Palestine the Jews spoke only Aramaic.) Now, with the Septuagint translation, the rabbis could instruct their people again easily in a language most of them spoke (Greek), but, in addition, they could make their faith more readily accessible to the pagan world around them. Consequently, the Septuagint was held in great esteem, and in the time of our Saviour, it was in wide use in the Jewish community (as the many quotations from it in the New Testament testify). What is also noteworthy is that Philo, one of the greatest Jewish scholars of antiquity, was also one of the foremost apologists for the Jewish religion among the pagans. Through the many tracts he wrote (all of them based on the Septuagint text), he led many thousands of pagans to convert to the Jewish faith. Yet, Philo, a contemporary of our Saviour, could not speak Hebrew. He knew only Greek.
