Where Is Sheol? - Does the Bible Teach a 3-Tier Cosmology?

Numbers 16:31-35 shares a story of the earth swallowing up people alive and taking them to the realm of the dead. How does this fit into a biblical understanding of cosmology?

QUESTIONER: I was just wondering if you had any thoughts around Sheol and how that fits into the picture because I came across a bit of a weird verse in Numbers 16:31 where the ground opens up and it swallows people down and it says they “went alive down into Sheol” which makes it sound a lot like there's this literal place beneath the Earth – that the ground split and they fall down into it and then it closes up over them. I don't know if that features in or if you've got any thoughts around that.

DR. CRAIG: This relates to what I was saying about the three-decker cosmos where heaven is “up there.” Certainly they did talk about heaven and God “looking down” from heaven. Or in the Tower of Babel story, God says, “Let us go down and see what this tower is they're building.” So there are certainly these descriptions in the Bible and into the New Testament as well with this sort of three-decker cosmos. But whether or not this was taken literally by everybody I think is anybody's guess. Perhaps some people did take it literally in that way, but I don't think that we can know that that's the case. If they did, I would say that it represents a presupposition and not a teaching of Scripture; that they didn't teach a three-decker cosmos even if they presupposed it. And I would say something similar for geocentrism. I imagine the biblical authors naturally believed that the sun goes around the earth; that that was their sort of unreflective view, but I don't think that the Bible teaches geocentrism. So I do think there's a valid distinction to be made between what they presupposed and what they taught. But having said that, I would not say that they did presuppose that the sky was this dome over the Earth. In that case I feel very confident that those descriptions of the sky, the heavens, the firmament, are figurative and metaphorical on the basis of the evidence that I've adduced from the primary sources.