What the Hell?
Jan 7th, 2009 by ljkim
It often surprises people that Hell in the Bible is not what they thought it was. I’m not sure why people think of pointy tails and pitchforks; we don’t normally take what we see in cartoons literally, but when it comes to this, what the hell?
There are a couple of different words commonly translated “hell” in the Bible: [1] the Hebrew word Sheol, [2] the Greek equivalent Hades, and [3] Jesus’ favored term, Gehenna. Sheol and Hades came first chronologically, and both present the idea of hell as the opposite of life. Most of the time you can substitute the word “death” and come up with the same meaning. Most of the Old Testament doesn’t deal with the idea of an after-life, but instead talks about God not abandoning His people to Sheol. You can read that as referring purely to this life (i.e., someone can say “God won’t let us die today”), but it logically leads to something more…if His love saves us from Sheol this once, then what about later? Anyway the oldest believers had more down to earth things to worry about.
Hades was the Greek equivalent and direct translation for Sheol. In Homer, Hades was not a place of torment per se, but a place of non-living or sub-living that awaits all mortals…it sucked being human in a world of gods. Both Sheol and Hades had overtones of rotting and waste and a depth or distance that would make it impossible for most to ever go in and come back out.
Jesus mainly used the word Gehenna. What’s interesting about that is that Gehenna is an actual place outside Jerusalem. More specifically it was the place where the city dumped its garbage, and where garbage was burned around the clock. In the end there are only two choices… Either to be in the city, the Kingdom, in which God reigns; or to be outside the city, in Gehenna… Or as John Milton put it, to reign in Hell or serve in Heaven.
The interesting thing about the garbage dump metaphor is that it runs deep into the problem of humanity. Examine a modern garbage dump and you will see that it is filled with the objects of human desire. All the junk we spend our time pursuing eventually winds up there. Ultimately, it is what people tend to leave behind (I’m not saying we can’t do anything good). God grows things, and we trash them. So in Jesus’ economy the gift of eternal life brings us to a fork in the road. An eternity in Gehenna where we may do as we please, or a radical change of heart that makes us willing citizens of a different Kingdom.
[About the photo: A small statue of Orpheus and Eurydice...by Rodin, I think, at the Met... In the story Eurydice died in a pit of snakes, and Orpheus convinced the gods to let him bring her back from Hades. The only catch was he couldn't look at her until they were completely out of Hades... It's just how the story goes...]
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