with sorrow to the netherworld (Gn 44:29); what he really seems to have been
502 The Literal Meaning of Genesis bodily but like bodily places, whether places of ease and rest or of punishment and pain.
63. However l have to admit that l have not yet found the name of netherworld given to the place where the souls of the just are at rest. We do indeed not improperly believe that even Christ's soul came to the places in which sinners are being racked, in order to release from their torments those whom he judged, by a justice hidden from us, to be due for release. I do not see how else we are to take the text: Whom God raised up, having loosed the pangs ofdeath, because he could not be held by them (Acts 2:24), unless we take it that he loosed the pangs of some of those in hell by the power which is his as Lord, to whom every knee must bow, in heaven, on earth and under the earth (Phil 2: 1 0), the power by which he was also unable to be held by the very pangs he loosed.
But then neither Abraham nor the poor man in his bosom, that is in the secluded place of his rest, were in pain, and between their place of rest and those torments of the netherworld we read of a great chasm being fixed; and of course they are not said to have been in hell. For it happened, it says, that the destitute man died and was taken away by angels into the bosom ofAbraham; now the rich man also died and was buried. And when in the netherworld he was in torment etc.(Lk 16: 19-26). Thus we see that no mention of the netherworld is made as regards the poor man's rest, but only as regards the rich man's punish ment.
64. Then there is what Jacob says to his sons: You will bring down my old age with sorrow to the netherworld (Gn 44:29); what he really seems to have been afraid of is that he would be so overwhelmed with excessive grief that he would go to the hell of sinners and not to the resting place of the blessed.60 Sorrow, you see, is no trifling evil of the soul, seeing that the apostle was so anxious about a certain man, lest he should be swallowed up by greater sorrow.61
So it is, as I said above, that l have not yet found—and I am still looking, so far without any luck—I have not found anywhere in the scriptures, at least the canonical ones, where the netherworld occurs in a good sense, while I cannot imagine anyone allowing that the bosom of Abraham and the restful ease to which the poor man was carried by angels could be understood in any but a good sense. And therefore l do not see how we could possibly believe that it is in the netherworld.
60. But no; what he was really afraid of was that his sons would cause him to die prematurely of grief, of being brought down to Sheol, the Hebrew equivalent of the Greek Hades and the Latin inferi—all of them the place of the dead. See note 59 above. 61. See 2 Cor 2:7.