Sheol

The oldest layers of the Hebrew Bible have no heaven for the dead and no hell for the wicked. There is Sheol, and everyone goes there. Jacob expects it, Job asks to be hidden in it, and the Psalms complain about it on the grounds that the dead are cut off from God and cannot praise him — which is a complaint about absence, not about torment.

It is described physically: down, dark, dusty, silent, a place of shades who are weakened rather than punished. The dead in Sheol are not being processed or sorted. There is no gate, no judge, no fire, and no indication that the wicked have a worse time of it than anybody else.

Hebrew poetry does personify it, and vividly — Sheol enlarges its appetite and opens its mouth without measure, and it is never satisfied. That is the same move English makes when the sea is cruel, and the entries here keep it as figure of speech rather than promoting it to a deity, which is the difference between Sheol and Hades.

The moral sorting arrives much later, in the Second Temple period, and it arrives from outside. When Greek-speaking Jews translated the Hebrew Bible they rendered Sheol as Hades, and a word for the grave acquired the furniture of a Greek underworld.