CHAPTER 3 HEAVEN AND HELL

What do you think hell is like? How comfortable are you with the concept of an all loving God punishing people for an eternity because the messed up for some portion of about 70 years?

A Gallop poll shows that 70% of Americans want to go and think they are going to heaven. They say that the entrance requirement is being a good person. Do you believe that being a good person is sufficient keep you out of hell? Exactly what is a good person?

The problem with the word “hell” in the Bible is that different Greek and Hebrew words that all translate as hell. We have the Greek word Hades which is the same as the Hebrew word Sheol. We have Tartarus which is only used by Paul. We have Gehenna which except for one occasion is only used by Jesus.

Let’s look at the evolution of the term hell from the time of Jesus to today. We’ll concentrate on just Hades and Gehenna since Tartarus is only used once in the New Testament and that’s by Paul and the Hebrew word Sheol is essentially the same as the Greek word Hades.

Before Christ, pretty much everyone went to Hades. Read Job 3:13-19 All the dead go down to Hades, and there they lie in sleep together — whether good or evil, rich or poor, slave or free. They await the resurrection of the dead.

Punishments in Hades typically are spoken of in terms of a physical punishment, so how would a soul be punished? Basically Hades is a kind of "nothingness," an existence that is barely existence at all, in which a "shadow" or "shade" of the former self survives. Nothing is mentioned of torment. We have the soul, not the body in hell where they sleep not being punished.

Read 1 Peter 3:18-20; 4:6 So Jesus goes to Hades and takes those souls who believe in Him to heaven. So now the holding place for the souls of believers is heaven while the holding place for unbelievers is Hades. But we still hear nothing about punishment at this point.

So where does this idea of eternal punishment come from if we see hell as just a holding place? Quote John 3:16 John 3:16 gives to options, eternal life or perish, it says nothing about punishment.

There is another word that is translated as hell in the New Testament. The Greek word is Gehenna which is a translation of the Hebrew Ge Hinnom, literally "Valley of Hinnom” Hinnom is a valley outside Jerusalem.

Hinnom Valley

In the Hebrew Bible, the site was initially where apostate Israelites and followers of various Caananite gods, including Moloch sacrificed their children by fire. Read 2 Chronicles 28:1-3 Read Jeremiah 7:30-31

In Jesus day, the Sadducees rejected the concept of a resurrection and afterlife. The Pharisees believed in the resurrection of the dead. There were to major schools of thought in Jesus day, the School of Hillel and the School of Shammai.

Ge Hinnom was used by the Rabbis of Jesus' day to reference the afterlife of sinners. Shammai and Hillel both used Ge Hinnom to speak metaphorically of a place of purification of the soul for those who were not righteous enough to directly enter Ga Eden which was a metaphor for heaven. Shammai believed that only the extremely righteous went to Ga Eden when they died; everyone else went to Ge Hinnom. Most would rise to Ga Eden after being purified, having their sins burnt up - similar to the Catholic concept of Purgatory.

Hillel taught that only the wicked went to Gehenna. Both Shammai and Hillel taught that the longest most people would stay in Gehenna was 11 months, and only the most wicked evil person would stay longer, possibly as much as 12 months. Nothing is said of eternal punishment.

When Jesus talks about hell, He uses Gehenna which is translated as hell and is confusing to us. He uses the term 11 times. Gehenna is a completely different concept than the neutral hell of Hades. Read Mark 9:43

So how do you explain the two different hells, the waiting place of Hades and the punishment place of Gehenna? Did hell just change?

Read Matthew 10:28 No where in the Bible does it say that the soul is immortal and here we see that the soul can be destroyed. The Jews of Jesus day would have understood what he meant by Gehenna and fire and burning bodies,

Read Revelation 20:10-15 Here we see, among other things, Hades destroyed in the fire. This lake of fire sounds a lot like what Jesus was calling Gehenna. The fire burns eternally, but things thrown in there are destroyed.

The Gospels were written in Greek so the words Gehenna and Hades would have been used and that’s what early Christians would have been familiar with. They would have understood about the term Gehenna and its origin. In the late 4 th century when the Latin vulgate translation was written the two terms were there also.

When the first major English translation of the Bible, Wycliffe Bible, appeared in the late 1300’s the two words Hades and Gehenna both appeared as hell. Remember that this translation is written almost 100 years after Dante’s Inferno (Inferno is Italian for hell) is written. Dante’s inferno was representative of the medieval concept of hell and consisted of a lot of suffering. So this begins the meshing of two concepts of hell, Hades and Gehenna, into a single concept of hell with suffering.

The 16 th century Tyndale translation and the 17 th century King James translation both follow the trend of translating Hades and Gehenna as Hell. New 20 th century translations such as the NIV and Living Bible only use hell for Gehenna and go back to using the word Hades. This is a complete switch from the way hell was understood in the days of Christ.