You are only helping people who want to deny it to do so by interpreting it that way.
The correct way to interpret Sheol is that it is hell.
Now we know that there used to be a place called Abraham's bosom in Sheol and that it was not a place of torment. But when Jesus led captivity captive, He took the righteous to heaven out of Sheol. So now all that is left of that place is hell; because the righteous compartment has been emptied out. And also, since Christ came, to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord, for believers.
That Psalm is being sung by a
believer. That
believer is saying that God will be wherever he is. When believers were in Sheol before Christ "took captivity captive," God was there with them.
If you study the words translated as "hell" in the KJV New Testament, you find that there are actually three different words:
Hades, Gehenna, and
Tartarus. They refer, respectively, to "the grave," "final condemnation," and "the abyss."
More modern translations equate
Gehenna to "hellfire." When you place it into scriptural context, wherever the word
Gehenna is used, it clearly means eternal damnation.
Hades is a Greek term that the Greeks already understood to be a shadowy place where the dead resided as though in prison, and the New Testament writers co-opted the word as a temporary state of the dead prior to resurrection. Wherever
Hades is used, it clearly means the temporary period before the final judgment.
The term
Tartarus is used only once. The Greeks already knew of
Tartarus as a special place prepared to imprison spiritual beings, and that is how it's used in the New Testament.
