Christian Views On Hell - Jewish Background

Jewish Background

In ancient Jewish belief, the dead were consigned to Sheol or the grave, to which all were sent indiscriminately (cf. Genesis 37:35; Numbers 16:30-33; Psalm 86:13; Ecclesiastes 9:10). Sheol was thought of as a place situated below the ground (cf. Ezek. 31:15), a place of darkness, silence and forgetfulness (cf. Job 10:21). By the third to second century BC, the idea had grown to encompass separate divisions in sheol for the righteous and wicked (cf. the Book of Enoch), and by the time of Jesus, some Jews had come to believe that those in Sheol awaited the Resurrection of the dead either in comfort (in the bosom of Abraham) or in torment.

By at least the late rabbinical period, Gehenna was viewed as the place of ultimate punishment, exemplified by the rabbinical statement "the best of physicians are destined to Gehenna." (M. Kiddushin 4:14); also described in Assumption of Moses and 2 Esdras. The term is derived from ge-hinnom, a valley near Jerusalem originally used as a location for human sacrifices to the idol Moloch:

"And he defiled the Tophet, which is in the valley of Ben-hinnom, that no man might make his son or his daughter pass through the fire to Molech."2 Kings 23:10,
"And they built the high places of the Ba‘al, which are in the valley of Ben-hinnom, to cause their sons and their daughters to pass through the fire to Molech; which I did not command them, nor did it come into my mind that they should do this abomination, to cause Judah to sin." Jeremiah 32:35

In the Greek Septuagint the Hebrew word Sheol was translated as Hades, the name for the underworld and abode of the dead in Greek mythology. The realm of eternal punishment in Hellenistic mythology was in fact Tartarus, Hades was a form of limbo where the unjudged dead dwelled.