His assembly will overcome the grave, break through the gates of death, and return to life. Rabbi Yeshua says that those gates will not be able to withstand His assembly.

The gates of Sheol keep those inside them dead, so to speak. Therefore, when Yeshua says that those gates “will not overpower” his Assembly, we should understand the gates of Sheol more as prison gates which prevent the dead from crossing back over to life. In Isaiah 38, the term “gates of Sheol” appears as a metaphor for the passage between life and death. For example, consider Isaiah 38:10 where King Hezekiah begs God to spare his life as he laments, “In the middle of my life, am I to enter the gates of Sheol? Am I to be deprived of the rest of my years?”

In a Jewish reading of Matthew 16:18, She’ol means nothing more than the grave, a poetic way of speaking of the confines of death. Instead, the Bible uses She’ol as a term for the place of the dead, a synonym for the grave. The Hebrew She’ol does not have Satanic connotations at all. If we think of Hades or Hell as the capital city of Satan’s kingdom of darkness wherein his demon’s live and torture the souls of the deceased, we have accidentally borrowed some imagery from Greek mythology. “Hades” is a Greek term for a mythological underworld of the dead, but Jewish-Greek (like the Septuagint) used the word as a translation for the Hebrew term She’ol.

And why would the Assembly of Messiah attempt to get through the gates of Hades at all? Gates do not overcome anything rather they are overcome or not overcome. Some English translations say, “The gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” This is puzzling because gates are a defensive structure. Yeshua told Simon Peter, “You are Peter, and upon this rock I will build My Assembly and the gates of Hades will not overpower it” (Mathew 16:18).

Listen to gates of hades free