Soul & Afterlife

Jehovah's Witnesses deny the immortality of the soul, teaching that the Hebrew word nephesh and the Greek word psyche—traditionally translated 'soul'—refer to the whole living person, not to an immortal inner entity. When a person dies, they cease to exist entirely: there is no conscious existence, no spirit floating to heaven or hell, and no sensation of any kind. Ecclesiastes 9:5 ('the dead know nothing at all') is central to this teaching. Death is compared in Scripture to sleep, and the dead are 'unconscious' (Ecclesiastes 9:10).

This position is sometimes described by critics as 'soul sleep,' but Jehovah's Witnesses prefer to say the soul itself dies rather than sleeps. The hope for the dead is resurrection—the restoration to life by Jehovah's power—not the survival of a disembodied soul. The doctrine of an immortal soul going to heaven, purgatory, or hell at death is rejected as a pagan philosophical concept (identified with Plato's doctrine of the soul's immortality) that entered Christianity through Greek influence, not from the Hebrew Bible or the teachings of Jesus.