The Evolution of Hell

Every time you happen to be reading a Bible, and you come across the word ‘Hell’, I want you to immediately clear your mind of the fiery scary devil-Hell concept you’re probably used to. That’s because there are actually four different words in the original languages of the Bible that were later translated into the single English word ‘Hell’. ‘Hell’ as we think of it today simply wasn’t a popular concept when the Bible was written.

Let’s take a closer look at those four original words.

#1 — Sheol (Ancient Hebrew)

Any time you read the word ‘Hell’ in the Old Testament, ’Sheol’ is the original word. Sheol is an ancient Jewish concept, and described the place where they believed all people went after death. It didn’t matter if you were Hitler or Mother Theresa (the classic examples of good and bad people), you would end up in Sheol.

In some circumstances the dead in Sheol could be contacted by the living; there’s an Old Testament story where a witch brings back a dead prophet called Samuel so that the King can ask him for advice. (This story always confused me as a kid, because it seemed to go against what I had heard in church about Heaven and Hell, and even against other things I read in the Bible. Now I see it as another example of the way that cultures and belief systems shift and evolve over time, even within the pages of the Bible; which actually makes the Bible seem more interesting to me.)

Later in Jewish history (in the period between 500BC — 70AD) new ideas about the afterlife were developed, but at the point of the Old Testament writings, the idea was a single place for all the dead (who were known as ‘shades’, which is a pretty cool name). Hell as we think of it today did not exist in the writing of the Old Testament. This was a big revelation for me, and the complete opposite of what I’d always been taught in church.

To get a better idea of the concept of Sheol, you can compare it to the second word, which described a very similar idea:

#2 — Hades (Ancient Greek)

This was the Greek name for both the underworld where every person went after death, and the God who ruled over it. The word ‘Hades’ is translated as ‘Hell’ ten times in the New Testament.

Hades and Sheol are actually very close concepts, from two different cultures and languages. Again, in Hades there was no divide based on a person’s morality; it was simply the one place that everybody went after death.

#3 — Tartarus (Ancient Greek)

This word only appears once in the Bible, but it’s also interesting because it’s an example of a Biblical writer directly referring to Greek mythology. In the ancient stories, Tartarus was the deepest dungeon of Hades, used as a prison for the Titans and a place where the wicked were tortured.

So why is it so cool that Tartarus is in the Bible?

Because it’s a direct example of the cross-pollination of ideas between cultures. If you have a Bible nearby (check the top desk drawer if you’re currently in a hotel), you can see it for yourself in 2 Peter chapter 2, verse 4 (although it will likely be translated as ‘Hell’ or the ‘lower hell’… those damn cheeky translators).

If you’re not in a hotel room right now, here’s the verse with the original word still in there (from the Weymouth New Testament):

“For God did not spare angels when they had sinned, but hurling them down to Tartarus consigned them to caves of darkness, keeping them in readiness for judgement.”

This is a reference to another ancient piece of Hebrew writing, 1 Enoch, in which God is said to be the god of Tartarus, where he imprisons rebellious angels. This isn’t the kind of thing you hear many sermons about on a Sunday morning, but it’s right here in the New Testament: an author writing a letter to Christians, referencing an ancient Hebrew story that itself referenced a legend from Greek mythology. This is what happens when different cultures and people groups interact with each other: ideas are adopted, changed and placed in a new context.

While we’re on Greek mythology, it’s interesting to note that it was Plato, the ancient Greek philosopher and one of the most influential thinkers behind all Western culture, who introduced in 380BC the idea that moral people were rewarded after death, while immoral people were punished and tormented (see the ‘Myth of Er’ that concludes his Republic for more on this.) That single idea has influenced beliefs throughout the entire world, including Christianity, for centuries.

#4 — Gehenna (Ancient Greek)

‘Gehenna’ is the word most often translated as Hell in the New Testament (although it still only appears 12 times), and it also seems to cause the most disagreement, so we’ll need to go a bit more in-depth here.

Gehenna is real. I mean that it was the name of an actual, physical place outside of Jerusalem. ‘Gehenna’ is the Greek version of the Hebrew word ‘Ge Hinnom’, which literally means ‘Valley of Hinnom’.

Want to see what Gehenna looks like today?

Pretty nice! So if you’re travelling in Jerusalem and somebody tells you to ‘go to hell’, they probably just mean ‘have a nice day at the park’.

But what did the place look like back then? Well, Gehenna had kind of a dodgy history. And by dodgy, I mean ‘burning children alive as sacrifices to an evil god’. Pretty dark. Specifically it had a reputation as a place of child sacrifice to the god Molech.

There’s another theory that Gehenna was used as a kind of rubbish dump where all the trash of the city was burned, in a constantly blazing fire that was later used for cremation; but as interesting as this idea is, I couldn’t find much evidence to support it.

Either way, the point is that Gehenna would have been completely known and familiar to everyone who heard about it back then. It probably had dark and unpleasant connections in their minds, but it was still a real place that everyone was aware of. Later, a mystical tradition of Gehenna began to develop in Judaism, and it became a way of talking about a kind of purgatory, or after-life waiting room, where you are intensely aware of all the bad stuff you’ve done in your life. In this tradition, the longest a person can remain in Gehenna is 12 months, which is not even close to eternity.

So, while this word seems to be a possible starting point for the later development of Hell, it’s still a long way from the fires and eternal punishment and demons and massive red goat-man we have today.