saying, “I called out to the LORD, out of my distress, and he answered me; out of the belly of Sheol I cried, and you heard my voice.
(Jonah 2:2) ESV
Sheol, it turns out, is a lot of things. There’s a midst of sheol, a belly of sheol and a lowest sheol. The Hebrew word is modified in logical groupings that correspond to the regions of the interior of the Earth.
If the belly or midst of hell is a chamber in the lower mantle from which Abraham and Lazarus had their infamous conversation with the rich man, shouldn’t there be evidence for the existence of such a place? We’re going to go with, YES there is evidence, and point to something called the Lehmann discontinuity.
The Lehmann discontinuity is an abrupt increase of P-wave and S-wave velocities at the depth of 220±30 km, discovered by seismologist Inge Lehmann. It appears beneath continents, but not usually beneath oceans, and does not readily appear in globally averaged studies. Several explanations have been proposed: a lower limit to the pliable asthenosphere, a phase transition, and most plausibly, depth variation in the shear wave anisotropy.
– Lehmann Discontinuity, definition (Wikipedia)
We euphemistically call this chamber in the lower mantle, or realm under all of the continents of the Earth, Abraham’s bosom. The take-home lesson: Hell is real. Everything we have makes this perfectly clear.
