Where The Hell Did Hell Come From?

The Surprising History Behind Christianity’s Most Feared Doctrine

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Hell is one of the most influential ideas in human history.

It has inspired fear, obedience, missionary movements, theological debates, and countless sermons.

The strange thing is that if you go looking for it in the earliest parts of the Bible, you won’t find anything that looks much like the hell most Christians imagine today.

This article explores where the idea of hell came from. It does not attempt to answer whether the New Testament ultimately teaches hell as many Christians understand it today. That is a separate question.

Instead, it traces the questions and concepts that led to the point of the development of ideas that eventually gave us punishment in eternity or the afterlife in Jewish and Christian thought. Before we get there, we need to set a general picture.

The people who wrote the Bible lived in a very small country that was often invaded and plundered by larger surrounding nations (Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, etc.) on their way to skirmishes with one another.

When Israel was conquered, the prophets often came up with reasons why they had met this fate. They mostly reasoned that because the people had sin and angered or disobeyed God, then they had been punished with occupation, exile, etc.

After the Babylonians, during the Persian period and into the Greek period (this is all before the Romans), it got to the point where occupation became a given in the lives of people. The sad reality began to set in.

As a result, they could no longer argue that it was the sin of the Israelites that was causing this. Instead, you saw the development of apocalyptic thought in which it was acknowledged that the world was temporarily in the control of evil forces.

This was thought to be something that needed to happen only for a time, at which God would directly intervene in history and bring about an event that saw the transferring of power away from those evil forces.

This apocalyptic mindset is one to keep in mind as we talk about the foundation for this “big question” within Christianity. Before we get to the “big question”, we need to talk about another question from the wisdom books.

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The Question of the Wisdom Books

A fundamental question that pervades the wisdom books, especially Job and Ecclesiastes, is why bad things happen to good people. If people are righteous and they follow God, how come they still experience hardship?

The purpose of this article is not to talk about the answer to this question, but to start to trace how the question develops into something that is important for the purposes of where the idea of hell came from.

Once this question was thought through and developed, we see the emergence of a second question related to it in the wisdom books. That question is close to being the inverse of the first question.

The question is why awful and oppressive people are able to prosper in this life. There are a few reflections in these books about the fact that these people seem to get off scot-free for what they are doing.

Combine that with the idea of Ecclesiastes 9:1–3, for example:

“All this I laid to heart, examining it all, how the righteous and the wise and their deeds are in the hand of God; whether it is love or hate one does not know. Everything that confronts them is vanity, since the same fate comes to all, to the righteous and the wicked, to the good and the evil, to the clean and the unclean, to those who sacrifice and those who do not sacrifice. As are the good, so are the sinners; those who swear are like those who shun an oath. This is an evil in all that happens under the sun, that the same fate comes to everyone. Moreover, the hearts of humans are full of evil; madness is in their hearts while they live, and after that they go to the dead.”

This text suggests that everyone ends up with the same ultimate fate, i.e., they die and all end up in Sheol. If this is the case, then it is pretty hard for them to try and rally the morale of people living in an occupied country.

Apocalyptic literature starts to shift the way that they think about this question by introducing the idea that faithful, Torah observant Jews were rewarded with resurrection in some of the Jewish literature of the late Persian as well as the Greek period.

This eventually led to the idea that the enemies of God would be punished for what they did. That punishment was not present on earth, where they could prosper temporarily, but in the afterlife.

Daniel 12:1–2

“At that time Michael, the great prince, the protector of your people, shall arise. There shall be a time of anguish such as has never occurred since nations first came into existence. But at that time your people shall be delivered, everyone who is found written in the book. Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life and some to shame and everlasting contempt.” Daniel 12:1–2 NRSVue

We see this apocalyptic layer in the book of Daniel in which there is no longer one common fate for all people, but there are those who will wake up from their sleep (i.e. death) to everlasting life and some to shame and everlasting contempt.

It is worth noting that the original context of this verse is those who are willing to be martyred during the time of Antiochus IV rather than compromise their commitment to God and his commandments in the Torah.

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Isaiah 66:24

“And they shall go out and look at the dead bodies of the people who have rebelled against me, for their worm shall not die, their fire shall not be quenched, and they shall be an abhorrence to all flesh.” NRSVue

This is the last verse in the book of Isaiah. What a way to go out.

The best way that this verse can be described is that a worm eats and a fire burns people who have rebelled against God. Many have argued that this is an eternal form of torture for those who rebelled against God.

I think this probably goes beyond what the verse says. The worm can be said to be ever present as well as the fire, but it cannot be said that the persons are there eternally getting tortured. This turns out to be an important distinction.

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Second Temple Judaism

In the apocalyptic texts of second temple Judaism, we see the use of words that would later be translated “hell” in English when they are later used in the New Testament texts. These terms should be familiar to readers.

Τάρταρος (Tartarus) occurs in the book of 1 Enoch, amongst others, as a deep, dark abyss in which the Watchers are held. This is a rare word in the New Testament, but it is nonetheless important to keep in mind.

It is from second temple literature that we learn about places like Tophet, a place where Israelites had run their children through the fire, perhaps as child sacrifices. We also hear of the Valley of Hinnom. Each place is sometimes depicted as having a perpetual fire.

These ideas are formative to the way in which the word Γέεννα (Gehenna), which comes from the Greek translation of the Hebrew name of the aforementioned Valley of Hinnom, is used in the New Testament.

This all leads to a common misconception that there was a perpetual fire pit that was operating during the time of Jesus that comes from these ideas. There is no textual or archeological evidence for such a burning fire pit.

These texts all influence what we see later in the New Testament. What occurs in the New Testament, then, should be separated into three distinct categories. Scholars do this in order to think about the concept of post mortem divine punishment with appropriate nuance.

The Three Categories Scholars Use

These three categories will likely be pretty familiar to some readers, but I just want to make sure that we are on the same page when it comes to being able to categorize texts that occur in the New Testament.

The first category is annihilationism. Annihilationism is the idea that God will destroy his enemies so that those who are against God will be punished, but not with any form of torment. They will simply cease to exist at a certain point.

The second category is temporary conscious torment. In this category, those who are enemies of God will be subjected to some form of torment of torture for a short time and then they will be annihilated.

The third category is going to be the most familiar to most readers of this article. It is eternal conscious torment. This category is the one that most modern conservative evangelicals adhere to and might be called the traditional doctrine of hell.

Summary

This article traces the idea through apocalyptic texts and second temple Judaism, starting with the questions that are asked in Hebrew Bible books about the relationship between God and his people.

Taking it one question at a time, it is possible to think about the implications of such questions and to trace the development of thought on these things.

The difficult part is really that there are diverse strands of thinking on this topic, both in second temple Judaism and in the New Testament. This is necessary for us to begin to take on the “big question” that I mentioned in the title.

The “big question” is what the New Testament teaches on this topic. And it is quite a large question, one that needs its own article to answer in any way that would do it justice. But for now, the foundation can help us to think about the categories and questions that led to the idea of hell.