Psalms 49:15
Psalms 49:1515But God will redeem my life from Sheol, for He will surely take me to Himself. Selah
The Watchtower reads "But God will redeem me from the power of the Grave" as the psalmist's confidence in resurrection from the unconscious state of death — "the Grave" representing the common grave of mankind, not a place of conscious post-mortem existence. The verse fits the JW framework of soul sleep: death is unconscious non-existence, and God's redemption from the Grave is the future resurrection.
Pair with v. 15 to see the psalm's full argument: no human can redeem himself or another (v. 7), but God can — and will — redeem the psalmist from the power of Sheol (v. 15). Sheol in Hebrew is more than the physical grave; it is the realm of the dead with relational and existential dimensions that the New Testament unfolds (, ). The psalm sets up the syllogism the New Testament completes: no human can pay the redemption price, God can, Jesus did, therefore Jesus is God. The "Grave" rendering flattens the Sheol dimension that the New Testament's intermediate-state testimony unfolds (, the rich man and Lazarus).
The NWT renders šeʾôl as "the Grave" (capitalised) rather than "Sheol." The systematic NWT pattern collapses the Hebrew Sheol and Greek Hadēs into a single category — physical burial — which serves the JW doctrine of soul sleep. Standard English translations transliterate "Sheol" precisely because the term names the realm of the dead with theological depth beyond mere burial: a place of conscious existence between death and resurrection ( in the rich man and Lazarus parable). The "Grave" rendering flattens that theological category and makes the soul-sleep reading appear textually mandated when the underlying Hebrew supports conscious-intermediate-state readings as well.