NOTES for Psa 146
Unlike the religious traditions of neighboring peoples, especially the Egyptians, Yahwism never had a developed doctrine of the immortality of the soul. In fact, it had no distinctive teaching about the afterlife at all. Everything said about Sheol in the Book of Psalms and other biblical books is, in essence, not something purely Yahwist, but is borrowed from common Semitic beliefs, which in this respect differed little from the corresponding beliefs of other peoples. Sheol was a world of shadows, the realm of the dead, where everyone arrived in their turn and where all without exception ended their earthly journey, regardless of the life they had led in the world of the living. Yahwism knows nothing of recompense after death, at least judging by the biblical books.
This is why hope placed in human beings proves vain: while a pagan could sometimes count on special sacrifices and purification rites to ease their fate after death, a worshiper of Yahweh could hope for nothing of the kind. When breath leaves a person and they depart from the world of the living, no human being can do anything more to help them. Only one hope remained: in the God of Abraham and Moses, in God being stronger than death. The image of Yahweh in the psalm is that of a God for whom nothing is impossible. With such a God, even death holds no terror. Although it was generally thought that God was not present in Sheol itself, the world was ultimately created by Him: it is His world, in which nothing will finally remain outside His power.
If so, Sheol must sooner or later come to an end and disappear, and death must give way to something else; otherwise, the world will not be God's Kingdom fully, completely, and truly. And if Sheol disappears, all who have been faithful to God will come out of it: those faithful to Yahweh cannot disappear along with the world of shadows. Thus, within Yahwism, the spiritual foundation emerges on which belief in the universal resurrection rests—the day of Yahweh's final triumph and the establishment of His Kingdom on earth. This hope took the place, for worshipers of Yahweh, of belief in the immortality of the soul, especially since what was at stake was not preserving some small portion of former life, but receiving it anew in all its fullness.