Q.
Are such things to be taken literally?
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Do we take the idea of a burning hell literally? Jesus certainly spoke as
if it were a real place. But keep in mind that the idea of a dualistic afterlife—
a hell for sinners and heaven for the righteous—was a relatively new idea to
Judaism, possibly due to the infl uence of Zoroastrianism during the Babylo-
nian exile. It was a theological departure from the ancient faith of the Jewish
patriarchs.Craig Detweiler
A.
While death is a certain fact, it is also prompts an air of mystery.
What happens when our hearts stop beating? Is there something
on the other side of life? Descriptions of hell (and heaven) are all
rather speculative, more poetic than precise.
The Hebrew word “Sheol” describes the grave that awaits us all. It is a
shadowy place, something we’ve all glimpsed at a funeral but never experi-
enced from the inside. Our bodies are all bound for Sheol, irrespective of our
beliefs or practices. None escape physical death.
When the Hebrew scriptures were translated into the Greek language, the
word “Hades” was chosen to describe the ground or pit our bodies are bound
for. The Greek notion of Hades was more of a shady, mythological place than a
physical grave.
Within Greek mythology, Tartarus is a place of judgment and torment, a
pit much farther down than the more benign Hades. Only once does the word
Tartarus appear in scripture. In 2 Peter 2:4, God punishes sinful angels by
throwing them into Tartarus, a dark pit reserved for judgment.
When the Bible was translated into English, Hades and Sheol were
translated as hell. Unfortunately, such a reference comes across as much more
loaded than “the grave.” It had eternal associations rather than a tangible,
temporal, or physical meaning.
The associations of hell with a fi re, torment, and eternal anonymity start
coming into play with a term like “Gehenna.” It is a destination we would
all want to avoid. It is a place where people who lack family, resources, and
signifi cance are discarded. No one wants to feel so unloved, unacknowledged,
or unnoticed.Scriptural References
Genesis 37:35; Deuteronomy; 32:22 (Sheol); Psalm 6:5; Romans 8:38–39;
Matthew 5:22 (Gehenna) and 16:18 (Hades); 2 Peter 2:4 (Tartarus); 1 John
4:7; Revelation 20:10