I remember when I was at an impressionable age coming across a catechism which, even then, must have been fairly old. It encouraged me, after my night prayers, to compose myself for sleep by reflecting on the "four last things". These, it helpfully explained, were "death, judgment, heaven and hell".

Had I taken this at all seriously, perhaps I would in due course have become a goth — black teeshirts, heavy metal records, really bad skin; the whole works. Fortunately this particular mode of lulling myself to sleep didn't appeal, and to this day I can say that I have never owned, or even listened to, a Black Sabbath album.

We're used to thinking of heaven and hell as complementary opposites — heaven up there, hell down there; heaven full of good people, hell full of bad; heaven pleasant; hell distinctly unpleasant. Two sides of the one coin almost, and the places or states which define salvation.

The reality is a bit more complex than that.

Genesis: In the beginning…

Heaven is much the older concept, and it didn't start out as the opposite of hell at all. Heaven, in fact, turns up in Genesis 1:1 — "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth". Not a word there about hell. In fact, you have to travel quite a way through the bible before you come across any reference to hell.

It's difficult to date Genesis, because the text we know is almost certainly a compilation, and probably a series of compilations, of earlier texts, which in turn embody oral traditions which had been handed on for many generations before ever being written down. But the passage which we now know as Genesis 1 may date, in its written form, from about a thousand years before Christ, so the thinking which it reflects is at least that old.

The heaven that appears in Genesis — and indeed in much of the Old Testament — has two things in common with our modern concept. One, it's up there in the sky (literally, in the Old Testament; figuratively for us moderns). Two, it's associated with God, though not necessarily as his dwelling-place. In Genesis 7, for instance, the heavens are the "rich storehouse" of the Lord; in Psalm 19 they are "telling the glory of God".

But there's one big difference: In the Old Testament, nobody goes to heaven when they die.

The Old Testament actually has surprisingly little to say about an afterlife. God's Covenant with the Jews did not include any kind of promise of eternal life, paradise or anything of the sort. God's part of the bargain was to deliver long life, large families, prosperity, wisdom, peace, good harvests, victory in battle and so forth — gifts which would be received and enjoyed in this life. And even the promise of things to come was a promise of a Messianic kingdom of peace, prosperity and justice — a future kingdom, but still very much a kingdom of this world.

The abode of the dead…

	Sheol — the abode of the dead. See later in this essay where Peregrinus discusses the passage from the Creed where we say Christ "descended into hell".

The Jews did develop a concept of the afterlife. For them, the abode of the dead was located below the earth's surface, in a shadowy realm of damp and darkness which they called Sheol. There are occasional references to it in the Old Testament; e.g. Numbers 16:30-33 . "Aha!", I hear you say. "The prototype for hell!" Not quite. Sheol was not a particularly pleasant place, and nobody looked forward to going there. It was bleak and dismal. It may in fact be seen as a metaphor for death, extinction, the grave, rather than an actual state of existence. But, literal or metaphorical, Sheol was the destiny of everyone when they died, without exception. Nobody was sent there as a punishment. It had no connection at all with Satan.

It took some time for the Jews to develop more detailed and nuanced ideas about eternal life. It began to occur to them that if God was just, there was something wrong with the idea that the good and the bad would both endure the same endless, shadowy existence in Sheol.

Ezekiel: the valley of dry bones…

By the time of the prophet Ezekiel, which is about the sixth century before Christ, we begin to see new ideas emerging in scripture, particularly in the dramatic "dry bones" passage in Ezekiel 37. The prophet has a vision of a valley filled with dry bones which, through the power of the Lord, are knit together, are enfleshed, and rise up as living people.

Now this, it must be understood, is apocalyptic literature. The prophet did not mean, and his audience did not understand, that these things would actually happen. Nevertheless the passage shows that Jews are now at least imagining an afterlife which is fuller and more real than the shadowy world of Sheol.

The life-after-death that is imagined by Ezekiel is still an earthly life, not a heavenly one. What the prophet describes is emphatically a physical, material event; the text describes the clicking, rattling sound made as the dry bones come together. And it takes place in a valley, i.e. low down, near the abode of the dead, and not high up, near heaven.

What we see here may be an early prefiguring of the idea of resurrection. Note, though, that there is still no suggestion that any of this is a reward for virtue, or fidelity, or anything else. Rather, the raising up of the dry bones is an illustration of the Lord's power.

Daniel: the flesh versus the spirit…

Changes in Jewish thinking can be partly attributed to ideas acquired from their encounters with Greek civilization. The Greeks saw humanity not so much as animated matter — the way we are depicted in Genesis, and in Ezekiel — but as enfleshed spirits. From this perspective, death does not extract the God-breathed life-force from the clay; it releases the spirit from its fleshly home. Once you have grasped this idea, it is easy to jump to the parallel idea that spirits can have a real and meaningful existence, even after death.

Skip forward another couple of centuries, to the book of Daniel, which was written two to three centuries before the time of Christ. Again, it's apocalyptic literature, and in it we find this passage, prophesying the end of the age (Daniel 12:2-3):

"Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt. Those who are wise shall shine as the brightness of the expanse; and those who turn many to righteousness as the stars forever and ever."

Here, for the first time, we have a hint of something like judgment, and of different life-after-death experiences for different people. The passage envisages that we will "sleep in the dust of the earth" (i.e. in Sheol) until the end of the age, at which point many (interestingly, not all) will awake to some kind of judgment. Those who are rewarded will "shine as the brightness of the expanses [and] as the stars". This seems to offer us an image of a fairly ethereal, spiritual afterlife, rather than something earthy and material. It is also the first link of any kind between the afterlife and the heavens and, even then, it's only a simile or comparison. There is no suggestion that the righteous will actually be in heaven.

At last, the four last things…

We take one more jump forward, to the Second Book of Maccabees, written a bit over a hundred years before the time of Christ. It's historical, not apocalyptic, so it aims to describe people who actually lived and events which actually happened. And in 2 Macc 12 we have an account of the aftermath of a battle, in which the Jewish leader takes up a collection from his troops and sends it to Jerusalem, as a sin-offering for those who have fallen in the battle.

"In doing this, he acted very well and honourably, taking account of the resurrection. For if he were not expecting that those who had fallen would rise again, it would have been superfluous and foolish to pray for the dead. But if he was looking to the splendid reward for those who fall asleep in godliness, it was a holy and pious thought. Therefore he made atonement for the dead, so that they might be delivered from their sin"

Here we have a fully developed idea of the afterlife. We die, we are judged for our sins, we are rewarded or punished. Death, judgment, heaven and hell, in the words of my old catechism.

Jewish perspectives at the time of Jesus…

So the Jews did have concepts of eternal life, judgment, reward, punishment and resurrection. But it took them at least a thousand years to develop those concepts, and in the time of Jesus they were still quite new.

Nor, it has to be said, were they universally accepted in his time. Jewish thought was in fact sharply divided.

• Saducees rejected out of hand the idea of any kind of afterlife.
• Pharisees did believe in life after death, and in resurrection, but they put surprisingly little emphasis on it. God's real gift to his people was expected to be the Messiah, who would reign as a king in this life, and in this world.
• Hellenized Jews — mostly living outside Palestine — were the ones most inclined to believe in the immortality of the soul and the continuation of human existence after death in some kind of idealized setting.

In other respects Jesus is close to the Pharisees, but to judge from the gospels he had a very clear concept of an afterlife, and he put a great deal of emphasis on it. It forms a major part of his message, especially as presented in the Gospel of John. The righteous will not only live eternally, but they will live in union with the loving Father — a promise which is completely absent from the Old Testament. And this existence will not be as a disembodied spirit, but as a complete, resurrected human being — mind, body and spirit, involving a physical resurrection.

Hell in the gospels…

Where does hell fit into this? Well, Jesus does talk about hell, but not usually as a contrast or alternative to eternal life with the Father. Of all the gospels, John, who has the most to say about eternal life, has the least to say about hell.

The Valley of Gehena today From the website of Studium Biblicum Franciscanum, Jerusalem

The other gospels mention hell more often, and probably Matthew most of all, with such cheery quotes as "You serpents, brood of vipers, how can you escape being condemned to hell?" Interestingly, though, the word translated here as "hell" is not Sheol, but Gehenna.

Gehenna is an actual place, a deep, narrow valley near Jerusalem in which, the Jews believed, their Canaanite predecessors had sacrificed children to their god, Moloch. The Jews themselves used Gehenna both for executions, and for dumping the bodies of those executed elsewhere. More prosaically, they used it to dump the rubbish of Jerusalem, and by the time of Christ this was its principal use. The dumps at Gehenna could be smelt from miles away, and smouldering fires burned there constantly as a way of reducing the volume of rubbish. (Nowadays it's a public park, apparently.)

What human sacrifice to false gods, the execution of criminals and the burning of waste have in common is not so much punishment as destruction or extinction. Gehenna, therefore, may not in fact stand for a place of eternal punishment, but rather a place of destruction or annihilation. Consider Matthew 10:28: "Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; fear him rather who can destroy both body and soul in [Gehenna]."

In the gospel of John, Jesus repeatedly promises eternal life to those who follow him. This seems to imply that those who reject him will not enjoy eternal life but will die. There is no suggestion that they will undergo a different, painful, punitive sort of eternal life.

The consequence of sin, on this view, is not so much eternal punishment as the loss of eternal life — in short, annihilation.

On the other hand, there are gospel passages which do indeed point to hell as a place of everlasting torment — e.g. Matthew 25:41; "Then he will say to those on his left hand, 'Go away from me, with your curse upon you, to the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.'" But even this doesn't necessarily mean that sinners will suffer for ever; the fire may be eternal, but the sinners consigned to it could still be consumed.

I think the bottom line is that the idea of eternal life as a reward was a relatively late arrival in the Jewish understanding of relations between God and humanity, and the idea of eternal punishment was an even later arrival (if indeed it arrived at all). At the time of Jesus hell was still a new and fluid idea, which is perhaps why we see contrasting images and ideas manifested in the gospels. I think it is telling that when the gospel authors want to talk about hell, the only words they have are Gehenna, which is an actual place, and Hades, a borrowing from pagan Greek cosmology. Quite simply, hell was such a new concept that there was no word for it, either in Hebrew or in Greek.

Our own contribution…

So keen are we to have a clear picture of hell, we fill the gaps that revelation has left.

The "fire and brimstone" passages from the Revelation of St John are often taken as a description of hell and have helped to shape our ideas about it. But the whole point of apocalyptic literature is that it is neither a literal nor a coded description of anything; it is metaphorical and symbolic. Thus to treat Revelations as a description of hell (or of anything else) is to misunderstand it.

	An artist's diagramatic depiction of Dante's Inferno. Click on the image to see the original source at full size.

Artists have had a significant influence on how we conceive of hell, but we are selective about what we take from artists' depictions and what we leave behind.

• More people have heard of Dante's Inferno that have actually read it. The hell he depicts is in many respects quite different from modern stereotypes. (For one thing, it gets progressively colder as the protagonist approaches the inner circle, and at its centre is a perpetually frozen lake of ice.)
• On the other hand we have enthusiastically embraced the artistic vision of Hieronymus Bosch, who depicted hell as a place filled with deformed monsters practicing a variety of inventive tortures on miserable sinners.

The bottom line…

Much of what we think about hell is taken either from art and literature, or is the result of scriptural misreadings. Hell is a late addition to the Judeo-Christian understanding of the world. If we confine ourselves to authoritative scriptural and teaching sources, we're not actually taught very much about it and what we are taught is not entirely consistent. (Is hell a condition of suffering? Is hell annihilation?)

This vagueness, I suggest, is intentional. We are not to be terrified into obeying God. We are called to love God, and love cannot be obtained by threats. Hell is not delineated for us in gruesome detail nor presented by Jesus as a major feature of his teaching because, I suggest, it isn't a major feature of his teaching.

"So why have hell at all?", I hear you cry. Well, because we are free. We are free to make choices, to respond to God or to ignore him, to accept him or to reject him. And our freedom is illusory if the choices we make have no consequences.

Our freedom is real, and so our choices do have consequences. Not consequences 'bolted on' like arbitrary penalties by a vengeful, judgmental God, but natural and intrinsic consequences. "Hell" is simply the condition of being separated from God — a condition in which we will find ourselves only if we choose to separate ourselves from him.

Remember that puzzling line in the Apostle's Creed — that Jesus Christ was crucified, died, was buried and "descended into hell"? Even before I found that dodgy catechism as a child, this line puzzled me. Why would Jesus, of all people, go to hell when he died? Hell was where mortal sinners went!

The answer, of course, is that the descent into Hell illustrates the universal significance of the sacrifice of Jesus. Since "hell" is the condition of being separated from God, then those separated from God by their unredeemed fallen nature were in "hell". And the "descent into hell" shows us Jesus bridging that separating gap — he crosses it, ending the separation between God and humanity.

Hell, then, is not lakes of fire and sulphur, and demons with pitchforks, and deformed monsters. We have added all these things because we have decided that, for whatever reason, we need a clear picture of hell.

But that is a modern obsession. The Jews got along perfectly well for several millennia with only the haziest notion of hell (or, for that matter, of heaven) and even Jesus didn't appear to have very well-thought out ideas on the subject — or, at any rate, if he did, he didn't make them a feature of his message. The Gospel of John has about fifty references to "life", nearly all of them to eternal life, but only twelve references to "death" — and most of these are references to the death of Jesus, or to the death of Lazarus; only three of them are to death as the fate of sinners.

My gut feeling is that, the less time we spend thinking about hell, the more time we have for thinking about the message of Jesus!

What are your thoughts on this commentary? You can contribute to the discussion in our forum.

Peregrinus can be contacted at: Peregrinus <peregrinus@catholica.com.au>

©2007 Peregrinus

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