are a few references to the realm of the dead, as in Psalm 16: “My body also will rest secure, because you will not abandon me to the realm of the dead,” but as far as meanings go, that’s the extent of what we find in the Hebrew scriptures.
So what do we learn?
First, we consistently find affirmations of the power of God over all of life and death, as in 1 Samuel 2: “The Lord brings death and makes alive; he brings down to the grave and raises up”; and Deuteronomy 32: “There is no god besides me. I put to death and I bring to life.”
We do find several affirmations of God’s presence and involvement in whatever it is that happens after a person dies, although it’s fairly ambiguous at best as to just what exactly that looks like.
In one of the stories about Moses, God is identified as the God of “Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” Those three—Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—were dead by the time this story about Moses takes place. Where exactly Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were at that time isn’t mentioned, but Moses is told that God is still their God (Exod. 3).
Once again, it’s an affirmation of God’s enduring and sustaining power over life and death, and yet very little is given in the way of actual details regarding individual destinies.
Second, the Hebrews often used the words “life” and “death” in a different sense than we do. We’re used to people speaking of life and death as fixed states or destinations, as in you’re either alive or you’re dead. What we find in the scriptures is a more nuanced understanding that sees life and death as two ways of being alive. When Moses in Deuteronomy 30 calls the Hebrews to choose life over death, he’s not forcing them to decide whether they will be killed on the spot; he’s confronting them with their choice of the kind of life they’re going to keep on living. The one kind of life is in vital connection with the living God, in which they experience more and more peace and wholeness. The other kind of life is less and less connected with God and contains more and more despair and destruction.
Third, it’s important here to remember that the Israelites, who wrote the Hebrew scriptures, had been oppressed and enslaved by their neighbors the Egyptians, who built pyramids and ornate coffins and buried themselves in rooms filled with gold, because of their beliefs about life after death. Those beliefs appear to have been a turnoff for the Jews, who were far more interested in the ethics of and ways of living this life.
There is a story about the death of King David’s child, in which David says that if he can’t bring the child back, he would go to where the child is (2 Sam. 12). There are several mentions in the book of Job about lying down, descending, and being buried in the dust—all references to death.
But, simply put, the Hebrew commentary on what happens after a person dies isn’t very articulated or defined. Sheol, death, and the grave in the consciousness of the Hebrew writers are all a bit vague and “underworldly.” For whatever reasons, the precise details of who goes where, when, how, with what, and for how long simply aren’t things the Hebrew writers were terribly concerned with.
Next, then, the New Testament. The actual word “hell” is used roughly twelve times in the New Testament, almost exclusively by Jesus himself. The Greek word that gets translated as “hell” in English is the word “Gehenna.” Ge means “valley,” and henna means “Hinnom.” Gehenna, the Valley of Hinnom, was an actual valley on the south and west side of the city of Jerusalem.
Gehenna, in Jesus’s day, was the city dump.
People tossed their garbage and waste into this valley. There was a fire there, burning constantly to consume the trash. Wild animals fought over scraps of food along the edges of the heap. When they fought, their teeth would make a gnashing sound. Gehenna was the place with the gnashing of teeth, where the fire never went out.
Gehenna was an actual place that Jesus’s listeners would have been familiar with. So the next time someone asks you if you believe in an actual hell, you can always say, “Yes, I do believe that my garbage goes somewhere . . .”
James uses the word “Gehenna” once in his letter to refer to the power of the tongue (chap. 3), but otherwise all of the mentions are from Jesus.
Jesus says in Matthew 5, “Anyone who says, ‘You fool!’ will be in danger of the fire of hell,” and “It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell.” In Matthew 10 and Luke 12 he says, “Be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell,” and in Matthew 18 and Mark 9 he says, “It is better for you to enter life with one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into the fire of hell.” In Matthew 23 he tells very committed religious leaders that they win converts and make them “twice as much a child of hell” as they are, and then he asks them, “How will you escape being condemned to hell?”
Gehenna,
the town garbage pile.
And that’s it.
Those are all of the mentions of “hell” in the Bible.
There are two other words that occasionally mean something similar to hell. One is the word “Tartarus,” which we find once in chapter 2 of Peter’s second letter. It’s a term Peter borrowed from Greek mythology, referring to the underworld, the place where the Greek demigods were judged in the “abyss.”
The other Greek word is “Hades.”
Obscure, dark, murky—Hades is essentially the Greek version of the Hebrew word “Sheol.” We find the word “Hades” in Revelation 1, 6, and 20 and in Acts 2, which is a quote from Psalm 16. Jesus uses the word in Matthew 11 and Luke 10: “You will go down to Hades”; in Matthew 16: “The gates of Hades will not overcome it”; and in the parable of the rich man and the beggar Lazarus in Luke 16.
And that’s it.
Anything you have ever heard people say about the actual word “hell” in the Bible they got from those verses you just read.
For many in the modern world, the idea of hell is a holdover from primitive, mythic religion that uses fear and punishment to control people for all sorts of devious reasons. And so the logical conclusion is that we’ve evolved beyond all of that outdated belief, right?
I get that. I understand that aversion, and I as well have a hard time believing that somewhere down below the earth’s crust is a really crafty figure in red tights holding a three-pointed spear, playing Pink Floyd records backward, and enjoying the hidden messages.
So how should we think,
or not think,
about hell?
___________________
I remember arriving in Kigali, Rwanda, in December 2002 and driving from the airport to our hotel. Soon after leaving the airport I saw a kid, probably ten or eleven, with a missing hand standing by the side of the road. Then I saw another kid, just down the street, missing a leg. Then another in a wheelchair. Hands, arms, legs—I must have seen fifty or more teenagers with missing limbs in just those first several miles. My guide explained that during the genocide one of the ways to most degrade and humiliate your enemy was to remove an arm or a leg of his young child with a machete, so that years later he would have to live with the reminder of what you did to him.
Do I believe in a literal hell?
Of
