Hell

Scriptural discussion of Hell What does the Bible reveal about Hell? A wonderful, thorough survey of all Scripture says about this place of the dead, dispelling myth and revealing the love and goodness of God towards men.
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What the Bible really says about HELL

Our Purpose

Our objective in this study was to find out what the Bible really says about the abode of the dead so that we can separate fact from fiction. No tradition, no belief, no opinion was immune from critical examination in the light of what we would find in the Bible.

To ancient people, including those of the Bible, the abode of the dead seems not to have been quite the place that modern men imagine it to be. For example, in our culture, a visit from a ghost is generally held to be a "spooky" experience. In the literature available from the ancient world, however, we do not typically find that to be the case. The ghost (or "shade") of a dead person returning to the land of the living was not necessarily frightful; it was merely a visit from a person who dwelt in another realm and in a different form. The reason the witch of En-dor screamed when she saw the deceased prophet Samuel coming toward her was not that she was afraid of ghosts. She screamed because the appearing of Samuel revealed the identity of King Saul who was there with her, and who had decreed that all such witches be put to death (1Sam. 28:9). It was a fear of the living, not the dead, that made her scream.

Additionally, it seems obvious that although most ancient people did not understand Hell to be a fiery place of torment, they still did not view life in Hell as preferable to life on earth. In Homer's Odyssey, when the Greek hero Odysseus made his famous visit to Hades, his former comrade-in-arms, Achilles, told him, "I'd rather be a day-laborer on earth working for a man of little property, than lord of all the hosts of the dead" (Od. 11:489-491).1

Achilles had that attitude not because he was being tormented in eternal flames of damnation; he simply preferred to be among the living rather than among the dead. For Abraham, no mythological character but a man who had been in Hell over a thousand years when Homer composed the Odyssey, the words of Jesus in John 8:56 show that Achilles' attitude toward life in Hell was a fairly accurate reflection of Abraham's. It should be added here that in the Old Testament, the only word translated as "Hell" is the Hebrew word Sheol. So, in this booklet, every reference to "Hell" is from the word Sheol if our quote is from an Old Testament book. For the most part, I will use Sheol instead of "Hell" when quoting those verses.

There are verses in the Old Testament which associate God's fiery wrath with punishment in Hell, so we cannot say that righteous men and women had no clues as to what lay beyond the grave. But all those verses lack the "plainness of speech" that we find in Jesus' parable of the evil rich man in Luke 16. Still, even with that lack of clear information, no person in the ancient world, Jew or Gentile, desired to go to the place of the dead, for it was believed by all to be an unhappy place. The Psalmist is typical in his feeling about it: "The sorrows of death compassed me, and the pains of Sheol got hold upon me" (Ps. 116:3; cp. 2Sam. 22:6 and Ps. 86:13).

Of course, there were exceptions. One exception to the rule of ancient characters not desiring to go to Hell was Job, who begged God to send him to Sheol so that he could escape his earthly agonies (Job 14:13). How horrible must Job's suffering have been for him to plead with God to send him to the place to which almost all the living dreaded to go!

The attitudes of godly men and women toward the place of the dead serve as a beacon for all who are pursuing the truth about life after death. We followed the light of that beacon wherever it took us, and where it eventually took us was to a better understanding of much more than Hell, for we gained in our journey a far deeper appreciation for both the love and the fear of our God.

There are several Old Testament words translated, with varying frequency, as "the Pit" when referring to the place of the dead. We will examine those words carefully. In the New Testament books, there are three different words translated (or mistranslated) as "Hell", and we will discuss all three of those words in depth as well.

Finally, I want to mention that in the book of Acts, the author, Luke, tells us that during Peter's famous sermon in chapter 2, that apostle quoted David, from Psalm 16:10. Now, Peter would not have even thought to speak Greek to this multitude of Jews in Jerusalem. Both Peter and David, and not least of all the multitude gathered in Jerusalem from many nations, spoke a common language - Hebrew. Therefore, when Peter quoted David's Psalm, he used the same Hebrew word for Hell that David and those thousands of Jews gathered for Pentecost used: Sheol. But Luke translated Peter's Hebrew into a language his readers could understand; that is, Greek. And when translating Peter and David's Sheol, Luke used the Greek word Hades.

Luke's choice of Hades in translation reveals that the sophisticated physician Luke understood the Hades of the Greeks to be equivalent to the Sheol of the Hebrews. This knowledge was crucial for us when we studied the words of Jesus concerning the places of the dead.