Q.
90
Hell, Sheol, Hades, Gehenna, and Tartarus are
all labeled as “hell” by most Christians. Are
they really the same? Are they all places of
fiery torment? Are such things to be taken
literally, metaphorically, or as myth?
David J. Lose
A.
These places aren’t all the same, but they’re similar enough that
you can understand why people lump them together. In brief,
“Sheol” and “Hades” represent the realm of the dead, the place
where both good and bad people go after death. “Gehenna” and “Tartarus,”
on the other hand, are reserved for wicked people and are places of punish-
ment. Hell, a word that comes from Old English, has become a catch-all phrase
for the others, but for the last two especially.
On the whole, the Bible doesn’t talk a whole lot about any of these places
and so I’m a little leery of giving them much signifi cance in our own theology.
I get downright suspicious of folks that seem to like talking about eternal pun-
ishment, as that seems out of sync with Jesus’ emphasis on God’s love.
Too often in the church’s history, hell has been used to scare people into
doing what the church wants them to. For this reason, some people think
we’ve outgrown the usefulness of concepts like hell and damnation. Others,
however, would argue that we wouldn’t appreciate heaven without the threat
of hell.
Insofar as hell depicts ultimate separation from God, I tend to think that
whether it’s an actual physical place or a metaphor, it’s a good place to avoid.
On that score, I take hope from the apostle Paul’s declaration that “neither
death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come,
nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able
to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 8:38–39).
Sounds good to me.Gary Peluso-Verdend
A.
No, the meaning of these words is not the same. Rather, we have
different symbols from different symbol systems.
“Sheol” is a Hebrew word, found in the pre-sixth-century-
B.C.E. portions of the Old Testament. Ancient Judaism did not conceive of
human beings as part body and part soul. Rather, human beings were under-
stood as fl esh animated by the breath of God. Whatever existence a person had