O LORD, thou hast brought up my soul from the grave: thou hast kept me alive, that I should not go down to the pit.
(Psalms 30:3) KJV
You can come back from the grave but you can’t come back from the pit? That makes sense if the grave is the mantle and the pit is the core. Sheol includes the pit, but the pit is a part of sheol that you can’t come back from.
The Psalmist’s soul was in the grave, otherwise he could not have been brought up from it. However, he didn’t go down to the pit. The grave in this passage is sheol, elsewhere translated as hell.
The pit is bowr, always translated as the pit. So what are the sides of the pit? The pit refers to the molten core of the Earth, it’s below the great gulf and can be seen from the lower mantle. This being the case the sides of the pit refers to the mantle and it’s included in our list of functional synonyms for the mantle.
This gives us the premise for our hypothesis.
Predictive Testable Hypothesis 28
- IF the grave refers to the region of the earth’s mantle,
- AND the pit refers to the molten core,
- THEN you may be brought up from the grave, but not the pit.