Revelation 1:18
Revelation 1:1818the Living One. I was dead, and behold, now I am alive forever and ever! And I hold the keys of Death and of Hades.
in the NWT reads "I have the keys of death and of the Grave." The "Grave" rendering preserves the Watchtower's soul-sleep doctrine: at death, the dead are simply in the grave, unconscious, awaiting resurrection. There is no intermediate state, no conscious afterlife, no Hades as a location of conscious existence.
The verse is part of the Alpha-and-Omega chain. The speaker identifies himself as "the First and the Last" (v17 — the Jehovah-only title from , 48:12), then says "I became dead, but look! I am living forever and ever." The one who holds the keys of death and Hades is the resurrected Christ — and the one who holds those keys has authority over death itself. Pair v17's Jehovah-title with v18's resurrection-and- death-authority claim: the same speaker is the First and the Last, conquered death, and now holds death's keys.
The NWT renders Greek Hadēs as "the Grave" rather than transliterating "Hades" (ESV/NASB/NIV) or rendering "hell" (KJV). The choice supports the Watchtower's soul-sleep doctrine — that the dead are unconscious in the grave with no intermediate conscious state — by collapsing the semantic field of Hades into the bodily burial site. Greek Hadēs covers a wider conceptual range (the unseen realm of the dead) that the rendering flattens.